Saturday, March 27, 2010

Media Coverage of HIV/AIDS

There is a strong relationship between HIV/AIDS prevalence in a country and coverage of the disease in its media, according to this recent study (abstract only, sorry).

It's interesting.  The researchers used Google News archives to find news articles in 168 countries.  What makes this interesting is a bit of methodological geekiness -- it's unclear how well, or complete, or   comprehensive, Google News truly is as a way to find articles for content analysis.  There's a study for someone right there -- probably in information science -- whether web-based aggregators make for methodologically sound samplers of news content.  I suspect yes, given how Google scours the world of the web, but it's one that still needs to be done.  Be interesting to compare Google News with Nexis or others to see what gets missed, if anything.

No comments: