The Case of the Missing Person: Alzheimer's Disease in Mass Print Magazines 1991-2001
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alzheimer's disease is growing in incidence and prevalence in the developed world. Rates have been increasing as populations have been aging. There are still many unknowns regarding prevention, causes, and treatments. The purpose of this article is to analyze the portrayal of Alzheimer's in the highest-circulation mass print English-language magazines published in the United States and Canada over a period of a decade, specifically those for 1991, 1996, and 2001. This research investigates the portrayal of persons with Alzheimer's, the disease itself, caregivers and experts, and the dominant frames or discourses within which Alzheimer's is described. Twenty-five articles from the highest-circulation mass print magazines available in Canada were studied through qualitative and inductive research of both manifest and latent content. One of the most notable findings is the absence of the person with the disease as a person with a voice, with needs and desires. When the disease itself is described it is characterized as fearsome, relentless, and aggressive. Both the unquestioned duty of the individual caregiver and his or her (usually the caregiver is a woman) suffering are emphasized. The disease, its diagnosis, and potential treatments are framed almost exclusively within a medical rather than a political-economy or lifestyle frame. Minimal attention is paid to prevention, early stages of the disease, social support, options for care, or other alternative understandings of issues related to Alzheimer's. The theoretical and practical significance of these findings is considered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".