Stereotyping and Stigmatising Disability: A Content Analysis of Canadian Print News Media About Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), a complex and controversial neurodevelopmental disability caused by alcohol exposure in the womb, report experiences of stigma in different parts of their lives. The media, sometimes central to how a public understands and constructs marginalized identities, have a notable history of poorly representing people with disabilities like FASD (including in Canada), which could increase their stigmatisation. Additionally, given its cause, women who drink while pregnant can also face stigmatisation – with some public discourses evoking narratives that promote blame and shame. To gain insight into the kinds of information presented to Canadians about FASD, alcohol, and pregnancy, we conducted a media content analysis of 286 articles retrieved from ten of the top Canadian newspapers (2002-2015). In this article, we report key themes we identified, most common being ‘crime associated with FASD’. We explore connections between this coverage, common disability stereotypes (i.e., criminal behaviour and ‘the villain’), FASD stigma, and expectations of motherhood.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".