Culture and Health Reporting: A Comparative Content Analysis of Newspapers in the United States and China

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Health reporting has the potential to educate the public and promote health behaviors. Culture influences the style of such communication. Following the theorization of national cultures by Hofstede and Hofstede (2005 Hofstede, G. & Hofstede, G. J. (2005). Culture and organizations: Software of the mind: Intercultural cooperation and its importance for survival. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. [Google Scholar]) and Wilber (2000 Wilber, K. (2000). Integral psychology. Boston, MA: Shambhala. [Google Scholar]), this study compares health reporting in the United States and China through a content analysis of leading newspapers. The authors discover significant differences in health reporting in terms of controllability attribution, temporal orientation, citation of authority sources, and use of statistics. As one of the first comparative content analysis studies of health reporting in Eastern and Western cultures, this study provides a unique cultural lens for health communication scholars to better understand health information in the news media.