The sociocultural context of pediatric pain: an examination of the portrayal of pain in children's popular media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Pain (eg, needle injections, injuries, and chronic pain) is highly prevalent in childhood and occurs in social contexts. Nevertheless, broader sociocultural influences on pediatric pain, such as popular media, have not been empirically examined. This study examined how pain is portrayed and gendered in children's popular media. A cross-section of children's media targeted towards 4- to 6-year-old children was selected based on popularity, including 10 movies and the first season of 6 television shows. Pain instances were extracted and coded using 2 established observational coding systems assessing sufferer pain characteristics and observer responses (eg, empathic responses). Findings identified 454 instances of pain across the selected media. Violent pain (ie, intentionally inflicted) and injuries were most commonly represented, whereas everyday, chronic-type, and procedural pains were infrequently portrayed. Pain instances were more commonly experienced by boy characters, who also expressed greater distress; yet, observers were more responsive (eg, expressed greater concern) towards girl characters' pain. Overall, observer responses to pain were infrequent, with observers witnessing but not responding to nearly half of pain instances. Observers who did respond expressed an overall lack of empathy towards sufferers. These findings reveal a very narrow depiction of pain presented in children's popular media, with an overall underrepresentation of pain, numerous maladaptive portrayals of pain, and gender differences in both sufferer and observer responses. This study underscores the need for further research to inform how children's popular media is perceived by parents and children and how media may be transformed and harnessed for effective pain education in childhood.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".