Victims, villains, and cheats: A thematic analysis of disability representation in Albertan newspapers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Media coverage of disability is dominated by stereotypes and disempowering narratives. These narratives negatively impact disabled people’s self-perception, and how others treat them. Disability representations in news media influence how the public defines issues disabled people face. In turn, these beliefs influence proposed policy solutions, healthcare interventions, and funding decisions. Health-related risks, and risks to funding and quality of life that disabled people faced during COVID-19 made the impact of these beliefs even more oppressive. This study explored representations of disability in Albertan newspaper during the COVID-19 pandemic. This aim was met through four objectives: to identify disability terminology used, to identify representation of disabled people in interviews, to identify themes, and to identify frames used to present information. This study used a qualitative design. The Factiva database was systematically searched for news articles that contained two disability search terms and were published in Alberta during the first 18 months of the pandemic. A sample of 56 articles met the inclusion criteria and content, thematic, and framing analyses were conducted. Person-first terminology was used in most articles followed by identity-first language, severely handicapped, and special needs. Less than a third of interviewees were disabled and only one was labelled as being developmentally disabled. Thematic analysis resulted in five themes: (1) Dehumanization, (2) Erasure, (3) Unworthy Diseases, (4) Empowerment- A Contradictory Promise, and (5) Dis/armed. Framing analysis found nine dominant frames, including disability is medical and disability is a burden, and two counter frames, including disability rights are human rights. The findings of this study indicate that disabled people in Alberta face numerous human rights issues, and the medical and social pathology models of disability are dominant in news media. Future research should explore disability language in Alberta’s policies and explore disability representation on social media.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".