Team members: Caitlin Amorin, Camila Beiner, James Crissman, Alanna Garcia, Karime Harfush, Haiting Hu, Mingkun Huang, and Remi Jiang
Project mentor: Chawannuch Chaikulngamdee
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Abstract
Framing refers to the way an issue is defined, packaged, and presented in a message. This study examines the dominant frames that leading hospitals and news organizations have used to report hospital efforts in combating the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the United States. This study adds to the quantitative body of research about health communication and framing on social media by investigating: (1) how news media frame the U.S. leading hospitals’ Covid-related efforts and (2) how hospitals frame their own Covid-related efforts on Twitter. These questions are highly relevant as the news media have been framing COVID-19 in different ways to shape public discourse about the pandemic, which has influenced societal behaviors and mitigated the number of deaths attributed to the virus. The study also examines the effectiveness of strategic frames that leading hospitals used to communicate pandemic information to the public, which can inform future health communication strategies of marketing teams. A quantitative content analysis of news articles and tweets was conducted. Comparing the use of frames in hospital tweets and news articles, the study reveals a significant difference with hospitals mainly utilizing the “call to action” and “hope” frames in their tweets, while news articles use “politicization” and “human interest” frames.
Keywords
media frames; strategic frames; Covid-19; health communication; content analysis; Twitter
Client Bio
In 1980, three of Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospitals merged to form Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). An academic and teaching hospital, BWH is part of Brigham Health that includes 1,200 doctors working across 150 outpatient practices. It is also part of Mass General Brigham, an integrated health care system that encompasses a range of healthcare organizations, including academic medical centers, specialty and community hospitals, and a rehabilitation network. Known around the world for their work in complex medical cases, the hospital ranks 12th overall in the United States amongst other hospitals and has also consistently been rated one of the top 20 hospitals in the nation by U.S News and World. The media team at BWH is interested in how hospitals contribute information through social media during the pandemic and how they are covered by various national and local news outlets.
Team Bio
Our team is comprised of eight master’s students from the division of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University led by our Ph.D. mentor, Chawannuch Chaikulngamdee. We are very excited to have been able to work on a project that allows us to make useful contributions to the fields of medicine and journalism amidst the current pandemic through insights drawn from our research. Our team has come together from Thailand, Mexico, Puerto Rico, China, and the United States. We have combined our various interests in academic research, journalism, public relations, and marketing, as well as design to produce a project that displays the range of interests of students here at Emerging Media Studies.