Automated Methods for the Media Analysis of Health News Coverage

描述(申请人提供)：媒体分析研究员的角色是研究和描述新闻报道的内容和质量。不幸的是，媒体分析研究人员通常使用耗时、主观的方法，并产生难以复制的数据。这些限制往往限制了可以在有限的时间跨度内对广泛主题进行研究的范围。这意味着，各种专题，特别是影响健康差距人群(如西班牙裔和非裔美国人)的卫生专题往往不被研究。统计语言建模和概率内容建模等信息学方法可以通过自动执行某些必需的任务来促进媒体分析。在这项研究中，将使用统计语言建模和概率内容建模来开发用于媒体分析研究的自动化方法。通过这些方法，研究人员将更快、更有效地发现媒体对健康主题的报道中的任何不足之处，特别是影响健康差距人群的主题。然后，可以提供这些知识，以便公众可以更了解健康新闻消费者，媒体可以获得纠正其健康新闻报道中存在的问题所需的信息，医疗保健社区可以预见公众对健康问题的感知和知识的差距。用来研究和确定媒体对健康的报道的不足之处的方法通常是非常手工的、主观的和耗时的。在这项研究中，将开发和评估自动媒体分析方法。如果研究人员配备了改进的、更自动化的方法，那么就可以获得关于健康问题的新闻报道质量的更及时的信息，特别是对健康差距较大的社区非常重要的健康主题，并与记者、医疗保健专业人员和公众分享。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The role of the media analysis researcher is to study and describe the content and quality of news coverage. Unfortunately media analysis researchers typically use methods that are time consuming, subjective and produce data that is hard to replicate. These limitations often restrict the scope of the research that can be pursued to broad topics over limited spans of time. This means that a variety of topics, in particular health topics that impact populations with health disparities (e.g. Hispanics and African-Americans) are often not studied. Informatics methods like statistical language modeling and probabilistic content modeling can facilitate media analysis by automating certain required tasks. In this research statistical language modeling and probabilistic content modeling will be used to develop automated methods for use in media analysis studies. With these methods researchers will more quickly and efficiently identify any shortcomings in the media's coverage of health topics, in particular topics that impact populations with health disparities. This knowledge can then be made available so that the public can be more informed health news consumers, the media can have the information needed to correct problems that exist in their coverage of health news and the healthcare community can anticipate gaps in the public's perception and knowledge of health issues. The methods used to study and identify shortcomings in the media's coverage of health are typically very manual, subjective and time consuming. In this research automated media analysis methods will be developed and evaluated. If researchers are equipped with improved, more automated methods, then more timely information on the quality of news coverage of health issues, particularly health topics that are important to communities with health disparities can be acquired and shared with the journalists, healthcare professionals and the public.