Practical Investigation - CLINICAL (inc. Content Analysis)

Question 1

what was the rationale behind the content analysis in our clinical practical?

Answer 1

to figure out how far mental health was stigmatised in the media, using news articles from a time period as defined by the group

Question 2

what was the time period defined by the group for the news articles for the clinical practical?

Answer 2

2000-2002; 2019-2021

Question 3

what did we expect to find in our results of our clinical practical?

Answer 3

more negatively stigmatising words and references in those articles within an earlier time frame

Question 4

why did we think the news articles with an earlier time frame would be more stigmatising?

Answer 4

our group consensus was that they were the ones to have less accurate information regarding mental health and so would use stereotypes and generalisation to produce more negative views on mental health

Question 5

how did our literature review support our thinking process behind stigmatising news articles?

Answer 5

one produced in the earlier time frame had near to non-existent positive connotations of mental health although this may be due to our analysing criteria which only took into account individualised words and not phrases, and so could turn a positive statement about mental health negative

Question 6

what was the research question for our clinical practical?

Answer 6

How far was mental health stigmatised between the early 2000s and the past few years (2019-2021)?

Question 7

What was the comparison variable for the clinical practical?

Answer 7

different words used within articles, chosen as part of our sample to see how they referenced mental health - negatively or positively

Question 8

How did you control all other variables within the clinical practical?

Answer 8

analysis criteria through searching for our sample using a standardised procedure in Google Advanced Search

Question 9

Why did you eventually choose tabloids over newspapers for your clinical practical?

Answer 9

newspapers would leave us with too much choice and since there were more tabloids available online, this was more practically viable

Question 10

Where did you find your sample for the clinical practical?

Answer 10

articles found on Google through their Advanced Search Function, within the aforementioned time frames.

Question 11

what search terms were used to find our sample of tabloids?

Answer 11

Depression / Anxiety / Schizophrenia / OCD / Obsessive - Compulsive Disorder / Eating Disorders / Mental Disorder / Mental Illness” as well as the year each individual researcher was accumulating. These search terms were used in reference to the most common mental illnesses that were diagnosed.

Question 12

What was a weakness of some of our inclusion criteria in the clinical practical?

Answer 12

it could alter some of the meaning of the articles by altering or excluding characters - we weren’t able to get the full picture of what the article was trying to say

Question 13

What was our inclusion criteria in terms of our clinical practical?

Answer 13

the headline, subtitle and first paragraph of an article as we thought we could allow more room to analyse a wider variety of articles

Question 14

How did the literature review for Thornicroft help us develop categories and keywords for our clinical practical?

Answer 14

used T’s example to check how we’d attempt our coding and categories which were decided as a group with several takes to ensure we got the most information from our sample

Question 15

Why did we have to take into account synonyms in our literature review for our clinical practical?

Answer 15

they had similar connotations to the words we were already planning to use - we decided to accept nothing other than what was already included in our categories tables as synonyms may have required interpretation or bias on behalf of certain researchers

Question 16

How did we ‘code’ our tabloid articles for our clinical practical?

Answer 16

We included words or phrases from either a negative or positive categories, before thoroughly reading our articles and re-reading them approximately twice before highlighting the appropriate words we’d determined beforehand and tallied the categories in terms of positive and negative connotations. Once we had finished the tallying, we added all of our quantitative data onto a shared Google Sheets spreadsheet for analysis.

Question 17

What do the results show about our literature review for our clinical practical?

Answer 17

The data tells us that mental health is represented positively mostly in the earlier time frame (2000 - 2002) than in the later time frame (2019 - 2021) in tabloids. Although Thornicroft found an increase in anti-stigmatising language between 2008 and 2011, we found the opposite - leading to the question as to whether these results may have anomalies amongst them.

Question 18

What statistical test was used for our clinical practical and why?

Answer 18

Chi-Squared as this was ordinal level data with a rank score

Question 19

Did we accept or reject the null hypothesis for our clinical practical?

Answer 19

The critical value at df=1 at p<0.05 is 3.84. This is lower than the calculated value of 11.573 and hence we reject the null hypothesis.

Question 20

Were the results for the clinical practical predicted?

Answer 20

Our results were not predicted, as we believed that the early time frame would produce more stereotypical views on mental health however, in fact, the opposite was the case.

Question 21

What was a strength of the clinical practical?

Answer 21

One strength of our investigation was our replicability and reliability as people are able to cross-reference our articles in order to verify our results. Our interrater reliability is also quite high as we completed the chi-squared test and compared it to a computer, in order to cross-reference our answers. The reliability of our tabloid newspapers analysis was using specific words and not synonyms, allowing us higher reliability as other researchers could also use our articles and categories and come to the same conclusions.

Question 22

Why was generalizability a weakness of our clinical practical?

Answer 22

One weakness of our practical is our generalizability as some of the words we used within our sample were not classed as relevant as others were. Further to this, Some articles, chosen based on our search criteria, didn’t have any of the inclusion criteria as some words were unaccounted for. To rectify this, we could have a wider inclusion criteria, with phrases as well as individual words in order to get the full message that the article is trying to portray.

Question 23

Why was sampling validity a weakness for our clinical practical?

Answer 23

we accumulated only 6 articles of the relevant timeframes (due to the time constraints placed upon the original experiment). This meant that this lacked validity as we had too small a sample size to figure or nullify any anomalies which may have been present in our first sample size. In further studies, I suggest a wider sample size and no time frame constraints in order to get the best data out of this practical.