Sensemaking processes and social representations of COVID-19 in multi-voiced public discourse: Illustrative examples of institutional and media communication in ten countries (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
The role of communication in a pandemic emergency is crucial because it contributes to the spread of collective interpretations of the crisis that drive community responses. Based on the social representations' theory approach, and specifically relying on the notions of collective symbolic coping and polemical social representations, the study presents 10 country-based case studies of public communication with the aim of exploring the social representations of COVID-19 during the first wave of the outbreak. Multiple communication sources from 10 countries in 5 geo-cultural contexts (Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa) were selected and analyzed: institutional websites; international/national/local newspapers and news channels; national/international press agencies; and social media platforms. Results highlighted the prevalence of multivocality and polemical social representations, along with outgroup blaming and stigmatization processes, the use of military and naturalistic metaphors, antinomies, and discourse polarization. Implications for effective public communication in crisis management are discussed.
Papers on Social Representations, 2020
This special issue of PSR focuses on the social representations of SARS or Covid- 19. The first study analyzes the prevalence of social representations about the Covid-19 pandemic in 17 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia, their association with perceived risk and their anchoring in sociopolitical beliefs, such as RWA and SDO. The second and third articles comment on the social communication processes around Covid-19 in Brazil and France (Apostolidis, Santos, & Kalampalikis, 2020; Justo, Bousfield, Giacomozzi, & Camargo, 2020), the fourth in Italy and a last one in South Africa (de Rosa & Mannarini, 2020; Sitto & Lubinga, 2020). Three studies (fifth, sixth and seventh) examines the structure of social representations related to Covid-19 using questionnaires, the free-association technique and inductive terms like Coronavirus (Colì, Norcia & Bruzzone, 2020; Fasanelli, Piscitelli & Galli, 2020) and the new normality (Emiliani et al., 2020), analyzed by different techniques like automatic lexical analysis (IRaMuTeQ). Finally, Denise Jodelet makes a final comment and closes this issue with a reflection on Covid-19 “a separate epidemic”. In this introduction, rather than summarizing the articles, we will develop the themes and the questions they raise. Keywords: social representations, covid-19; anchorage, propaganda, conspiracy, cognitive polyphasia
Special Issue Papers on Social Representations on Covid19: intro and papers
Papers on Social Representations , 2020
This special issue of PSR focuses on the social representations of SARS or Covid- 19. The first study by Pizarro and colleagues analyzes the prevalence of social representations about the Covid-19 pandemic in 17 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia, their association with perceived risk and their anchoring in sociopolitical beliefs, such as RWA and SDO. The second and third articles comment on the social communication processes around Covid-19 in Brazil and France (Apostolidis, Santos, & Kalampalikis, this issue; Justo, Bousfield, Giacomozzi, & Camargo, this issue), the fourth in Italy and a last one in South Africa (de Rosa & Mannarini, this issue; Sitto & Lubinga, this issue). Three studies (fifth, sixth and seventh) examines the structure of social representations related to Covid-19 using questionnaires, the free-association technique and inductive terms like Coronavirus (Colì, Norcia & Bruzzone, this issue; Fasanelli, Piscitelli & Galli, this issue) and the new normality (Emiliani et al., this issue), analyzed by different techniques like automatic lexical analysis (IRaMuTeQ). Finally, Denise Jodelet makes a final comment and closes this issue with a reflection on Covid-19 “a separate epidemic”. In this introduction, rather than summarizing the articles, we will develop the themes and the questions they raise. Keywords: social representations, covid-19; anchorage, propaganda, conspiracy, cognitive polyphasia
Communication strategies and media discourses in the age of COVID-19: an urgent need for action
Health Promotion International
Summary Identified in December 2019 in China, the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Pandemics share features that increase fear. While some fear can stimulate preventive health behaviors, extreme fear can lead to adverse psychological and behavioral response. The media play a major role shaping these responses. When dealing with a PHEIC, the authorities’ communication strategies are embedded in a multilevel governance and a highly hierarchal system, which adds another layer of complexity. Carrying out more ‘real-world research’ is crucial to generate evidence relating to the psychosocial and behavioral aspects involved during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it is shaped by authorities and media discourses. Interdisciplinary research and international collaborations could contribute to improve our understanding and management of risk information. Emerging from a socio-ecological perspective, future research must in...
Communicating health crisis: a content analysis of global media framing of COVID-19
Health Promotion Perspectives
Background: This study examines the global media framing of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to understand the dominant frames and how choice of words compares in the media. Periods of health crisis such as the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic add to the enormous burden of the media in keeping people constantly informed. Extant literature suggests that when a message is released through the media, what matters most is not what is said but how it is said. As such, the media could either mitigate or accentuate the crisis depending on the major frames adopted for the coverage.Methods: The study utilises content analysis. Data were sourced from LexisNexis database and two websites that yielded 6145 items used for the analysis. Nine predetermined frames were used for the coding.Results: Human Interest and fear/scaremongering frames dominated the global media coverage of the pandemic. We align our finding with the constructionist frame perspective which assumes that the media as inform...
A pandemic of hate: Social representations of COVID-19 in the media
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2022
Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, Asians, particularly those in Chinese communities, have faced increased discrimination and overt racism in addition to the virus itself. In this study, the authors examined social representations of COVID-19 in mainstream newspapers. We evaluated 451 articles from three major publications representing three countries: China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. A qualitative thematic analysis, conducted through the lens of social representations theory (SRT) and its concept of cognitive polyphasia, revealed four major themes: (a) the virus' portrayal as a threat; (b) the racialization of COVID-19 as a multi-faceted threat; (c) calls for collectivization to curb the racialization of the virus; and (d) speculative solutions to end discrimination against Asians. Our results suggest that print media emphasize the idea that global efforts must be made to change how people think about, talk about, and understand the COVID-19 pandemic.
We investigate dynamics of public perceptions of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic to understand changing patterns of sense-making and blame regarding the outbreak of emerging infectious diseases. We draw on social representation theory combined with a dramaturgical perspective to identify changes in how various collectives are depicted over the course of the pandemic, according to three roles: heroes, villains and victims. Quantitative results based on content analysis of three cross-sectional waves of interviews show a shift from mentions of distant collectives (e.g., far-flung countries) at Wave 1 to local collectives (e.g., risk groups) as the pandemic became of more immediate concern (Wave 2) and declined (Wave 3). Semi-automated content analysis of media coverage shows similar results. Thematic analyses of the discourse associated with collectives revealed that many were consistently perceived as heroes, villains and victims.
COVID-19 AS A MEDIA-CUM-LANGUAGE EVENT: COGNITIVE, COMMUNICATIVE, AND CROSS-CULTURAL ASPECTS
Lege artis. Language yesterday, today, tomorrow V(2), 2020
The authors study the ways the COVID-19 pandemic represented in the media in seven languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Polish, German, English, and Italian) with the aim of throwing light on its universal and culturally specific features. The media part of the article considers the COVID-19 pandemic as hard news, while its linguistic section focuses on the literal and metaphoric representation of this phenomenon and its instantiation in the Internet memes.
Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 2018
The contemporary information landscape is transforming rapidly. Various communication platforms and networks have expanded, creating open spaces for information exchange between and among authorities, organisations, media outlets and the public. Such interactions were common long before the Internet era, but emerging communication technologies have amplified these practices. It has become less challenging to initiate interactions, and they have the potential to become publicly visible, thus allowing for the coexistence of multiple information flows. This condition applies to day-today interactions and disrupting situations, such as public health crises. In times of crisis, the demand for relevant, precise information and guidance is high, to save human lives, cease the crisis and mitigate possible damage. These transformations bring new challenges to the management of communications in crisis situations. An unfolding crisis creates a rhetorical arena of communication, where different stakeholders provide and receive information (Frandsen & Johansen, 2010, 2016). This exchange occurs on multiple communication channels, including traditional news media, websites, social media and blogs. The arena of crisis communication is complex and dynamic due to several factors, including the highchoice media environment, and redistribution of control over content. A multitude of available media and information sources offers members of the public the opportunity to be selective and consumes information from some subarenas while avoiding others. This development is crucial to institutional crisis communicators, such as public authorities and health agencies, because they may provide and curate information on some media platforms, such as official websites, while others (e.g., news media and social media) are beyond their direct control. Because audiences are inherently cross-media users (Schrøder, 2011), a constructive analytical approach is necessary to adopt a holistic perspective and examine a composition of crisis-related communications on different platforms, not only in relation to the course of crisis events individually, but also in relation to each other. Furthermore, as content producers across different platforms are guided by distinct media logics, the content varies. As a result, different audiences receive different crisis representations, and a deeper understanding of the content on these diverse platforms is necessary to better understand the complexity of crisis communication and develop appropriate response strategies across multiple subarenas. This study investigates variations of communication content across several subarenas of a major public health crisis-the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak. The analysis includes three subarenas where the Ebola crisis was extensively communicated: news media websites, branded Facebook pages of news media companies and