Self-responsibility, fatality, and heroism: a discourse analysis of ovarian cancer in women’s magazines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ovarian cancer affects many women globally, having numerous physical and psychosocial implications. However, misconceptions abound, symptoms are often overlooked, and diagnosis frequently occurs in advanced stages. As one step to addressing these issues, this research explores the social construction of ovarian cancer in women's magazines to identify the ideas and discourses surrounding this illness and interpret their explicit and implicit meanings. A constructivist discourse analytic approach guided analysis of 62 print and online articles from 8 women's magazines available in Canada over a 20-year period. Analysis resulted in identification of three discourses pertaining to: self-responsibility for health, ovarian cancer as uncertain and inevitably fatal, and ovarian cancer as a heroic endeavour. Critical interpretation highlights misinformation, contradictory beliefs, and unrealistic expectations surrounding this illness, which have implications for healthy and affected women. The findings emphasise the importance of identifying and challenging these discursive constructions to expose inconsistencies, minimise harm to women's well-being, and promote authentic portrayals of ovarian cancer.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".