Television and the perceptions and attitudes about medicine and health

Abstract

The research questions of the study are: “How much are medicine and health represented on television?” and “What is the impact of these images on perception of the viewers?”. More specifically this research studies the frequency and types of television programmes in which the images concerning medical roles illness and death are shown by using a quantitative content analysis. Using the results of this content analysis several cultivation variables are constructed based on images that are shown disproportionally on television. These cultivation variables are used in a longitudinal panelstudy on 2500 Flemish adolescents in order to investigate the impact of television viewing on the students’ perceptions on health and medicine. The results of the cultivation analysis that studies the impact show that watching television has a significant influence on the perceptions of the viewers. In a second part of the study the impact of watching television on two important attitudes concerning health and medicine (fear of illness and trust in medicine) is being studied. However the resulting models suggest that the exposure to images of medical roles and illness and death has no or just a slight impact on the respondents’ attitudes. Furthermore the data show that there is also no significant relation between the perceptions and the attitudes.