Representation of Pain and Injury in Children's Picture Books—A Content Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Pain and injury experiences are common throughout childhood (e.g., minor injuries, vaccine injections) and provide important and frequent opportunities for children to learn about pain. Sociocultural contexts, such as reading picture books, may also provide critical opportunities for children to learn about pain/injury. This study aimed to investigate the representation of pain and injury in children's literature. METHODS: We systematically screened for pain/injury representations in children's picture books, freely available from public libraries in South Australia. A content analysis of pain/injury representations was conducted on all included books. RESULTS: Two hundred and fifty-four picture books were screened until 50 books with pain/injury representations were identified. There were 63 pain (i.e., subjective experience) and 43 injury (i.e., associated with tissue damage) representations. 'Minor' pains/injuries were frequently represented (n = 69; 86%), whereas 'procedural' (e.g., vaccine injections) (n = 1; 1%) and 'chronic' pain (n = 2; 3%) were not. Gender differences were observed where boy characters experienced more pain/injury incidents (n = 42; 53%) than girl characters (n = 23; 28.8%). Behavioural responses to pain/injury also differed, with girl characters being portrayed to experience more emotional responses (e.g., crying; n = 7; 77.8%) than boy characters (n = 2; 22.2%). Other characters present during pain/injury experiences were more likely to be passive bystanders (i.e., did not respond; n = 109; 59.6%) than active responders (n = 51; 27.6%) to characters experiencing pain. CONCLUSIONS: While the type of pain/injury representations in picture books seem consistent with young children's everyday pain/injury experiences (i.e., 'minor' pains/injuries), gendered stereotypes and dominant societal perspectives around pain and injury appear to be reinforced. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Shared reading of children's picture books provides an important sociocultural context for children to learn about pain and injury. In this study, we investigated how pain and injury are represented in children's picture books. We found that pain/injury incidents were consistent with young children's common pain/injury experiences; however, observing characters often lacked prosocial behaviours (e.g., helping, providing comfort) and gendered stereotypes were common. These findings have similarities to pain representations in children's popular TV/movies, speaking to the pervasiveness of these messages across children's media.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".