clinical practical

• aim

  to investigate whether male and female celebrities have different attitudes towards their MH and how this is presented in news articles
• sampling

  articles chosen on an opportunity basis (opportunity sampling)

  • one 'mens health' article about eddie hall
  • one 'the independent' article by selena gomez
• procedure

  using content analysis, a set of codes were devised about positive ways MH was mentioned by the celebrity (growth) & negative ways MH was mentioned (challenges)

  • e.g: growth - going to therapy
  • e.g: challenge - depression

  a tally was completed for each code in each article and a total was calculated for mens and women
• findings

  • tally for mens positive = 7 & negative = 3
  • tally for womens positive = 3 & negative = 3
• statistical test

  utilised a chi square test as it is useful for nominal data & independent groups designs between positive and negative language
• findings - statistical test

  as my calculated value of 2.28 was less than my critical value, with a significance value of 0.05, is 2.71, there is no significance between different attitudes towards MH between men and women articles
• conclusion

  male and female do have different attitudes towards their own MH which are evident in the way they write about MH in magazines
• strength (reliability)

  • useful to have content analysis to investigate attitudes towards MH as it is easy to ensure inter-rater reliability
  • more than 1 researcher conducted content analysis to determine how many positive & negative codes were in each article (mens vs women) and coding results were cross checked to prevent subjective interpretation of 1 researcher and very little differences found
  • therefore findings that there are no significant differences in positive and negative attitudes towards MH in mens and womens is both reliable and accurate
• weakness (validity)

  • content analysis in practical - i only used articles from 2 sources and 2 celebrities
  • this means a limited sample to draw conclusions around whether there are differences in attitudes towards MH between males and female celebrities
  • therefore if i was to repeat, i would need to use a wider range of sources for a more valid conclusion
• weakness

  • generalisability
  • small sample, so not representative of all articles
• improvements

  1. use more varied codes in content analysis e.g: codes on stigmatisation or treatment to better understand celebrities attitudes to MH issues
  2. use a larger range of sources in content analysis to include articles in magazines aimed at different age groups and including online sources to ensure data on attitudes to Mh is more valid