The H1N1 pandemic: media frames, stigmatization and coping.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Throughout history, people have soothed their fear of disease outbreaks by searching for someone to blame. Such was the case with the April 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak. Mexicans and other Latinos living in the US were quickly stigmatized by non-Latinos as carriers of the virus, partly because of news reports on the outbreak's alleged origin in Mexican pig farms.

Methods

In this exploratory study we examined the psychological processes of cue convergence and associative priming, through which many people likely conflated news of the H1N1 outbreak with pre-existing cognitive scripts that blamed Latino immigrants for a variety of social problems. We also used a transactional model of stress and coping to analyze the transcripts from five focus groups, in order to examine

SUBMITTER: McCauley M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3907032 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature