Social Psychology and Media: Critical Considerations

Nursing in media-saturated societies: implications for cultural safety in nursing practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

This educational piece seeks to apprise nurses and other health professionals of mass media news practices that distort social and health policy development. It focuses on two media discourses evident in White settler societies, primarily Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, drawing out implications of these media practices for those committed to social justice and health equity. The first discourse masks the dominant culture, ensuring it is not readily recognised as a culture, naturalising the dominant values, practices and institutions, and rendering their cultural foundations invisible. The second discourse represents indigenous peoples and minority ethnic groups as ‘raced’ – portrayed in ways that marginalise their culture and disparage them as peoples. Grounded in media research from different societies, the paper focuses on the implications for New Zealand nurses and their ability to practise in a culturally safe manner as an exemplary case. It is imperative that these findings are elaborated for New Zealand and that nurses and other health professionals extend the work in relation to practice in their own society.

Nutritional health, subjectivity and resistance: Women’s accounts of dietary practices

Food is related to health, both directly and symbolically, in complex ways. Also, social practices around food are highly gendered, and, in the context of family life, fall largely to mothers. This study examines mothers’ talk about nutritional health, and food, health and dietary practices in the context of everyday life, using a discursive analysis of the talk from focus group discussions. Findings show that discourses surrounding nutritional health offer women a variety of conflictual subjectivities. If they do not engage in ‘correct’ dietary practices, women are positioned as immoral, both as individuals and as mothers. Further, their ability to determine which foods are ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ is undermined through a distrust of ‘facts’ and scientific evidence, and they are rendered susceptible to exploitation through claims made for food as health promoting. Together, these areas of conflict perpetuate subjectivities of anxiety around dietary practices.The women seek to re-position themselves and overcome these contradictions by offering a variety of legitimations for their dietary practices. In doing so, they resist nutritional health messages and reveal how such messages can have unintended effects.

Representations of voluntary childlessness in the UK press, 1990-2008

Representations of voluntary childlessness--the declaration by an individual that he or she does not wish to bear or raise children--were studied in 116 articles published in British national newspapers in the period 1990-2008. Media framing analysis was used to examine broad patterns of framing of the topic, identifying four frames: voluntary childlessness as an individual rights issue, as a form of resistance, as a social trend, and as a personal decision. These frames, it is argued, may act as potential 'scripts' for newspaper readers who are debating the decision to start a family.

Questioning `Black Humour': Racial Exploitation, Media and Health

This commentary explores the relevance of media racism to health psychology. While supporting Dr Estacio's call for health psychologists to get involved in promoting social justice via the media, we propose that health psychologists should not overstate the negative influence of the media on racism in society. Media content is complex and contradictory. It contains both racist and anti-racist representations. Challenging racism requires a conceptualization of links between the representational spaces provided by the media and the everyday geographic places within which inter-personal interactions and exploitation occur.