From Message Received (GUMG ed. Greg Philo, Longman, 1999)
Media and Mental Illness (Greg Philo)
This chapter reports on new research by the Glasgow Media Group on press and television treatment of mental health issues. It looks at the negative impact that such coverage can have on popular understanding, and examines possible strategies for achieving a more positive response from media in this area. The research included a content analysis of press and television output, plus a series of focus group interviews to analyse the processes by which audiences received and understood messages in this area (for a more detailed account of the sample and methods seePhilo, 1996). The results show clearly that ill-informed beliefs on, for example, the association of schizophrenia with violence can be traced directly to media accounts.
Audience Responses to Suicide in a Television Drama (Greg Philo and Lesley Henderson)
This chapter examines audience responses to a paracetamol overdose in a story from the BBC’s drama programme Casualty. Focus groups were used to understand the conditions under which such stories are likely to have an impact on audience beliefs and behaviour. Research was undertaken as part of a major study of television impacts on health issues.
Why Go to Casualty? Health Fears and Fictional Television (Greg Philo and Lesley Henderson)
Philo and Henderson examine attitudes to accidental injury and decisions made to attend A&E departments. This was part of our programme of research on health issues and on whether audience attitudes were affected by watching television. In practice we found that beliefs about casualty department in hospital where most likely to be influenced by direct experience rather than television images. This provides an interesting point of contrast with images of mental health. In that case television and other fiction images were so alarming to audiences that they apparently had the power to overwhelm knowledge drawn from direct experience.
From Getting the Message (GUMG ed. John Eldridge, Routledge, 1995)
Negotiating HIV/AIDS Information: Agendas, Media Strategies and the News (David Miller and Kevin Williams)
In this chapter Miller and Williams show that processes of media construction are an arena of contest and negotiation in which official sources cannot always take it for granted that they can set the agenda.
Getting the Message (GUMG ed. John Eldridge, Routledge, 1995)
AIDS and the British Press (Peter Beharrell)
This chapter examines the range of responses to AIDS in the British press. It shows how mainstream media reporting of AIDS was not uniform but instead drew upon a number of competing perspectives.