‘Am I anorexic?’ Weight, eating and discourses of the body in online adolescent health communication

Abstract

This article explores the communicative choices of adolescents seeking advice from an internet-based health forum run by medical professionals. Techniques from the disciplines of sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics are integrated to examine the strategies used in adolescents’ health questions. We focus on the emergent theme of Weight and Eating, a concern which features prominently in adolescents’ requests to medical practitioners. The majority of advice requests are authored by adolescent girls, with queries peaking at age 12. A combined quantitative and qualitative analysis provides detailed insights into adolescents’ communicative strategies. Examinations of question types, register and a discourse-based analysis draw attention to dominant discourses of the body, including a ‘discourse of slenderness’ and a ‘discourse of normality’, which exercise negative influences on adolescents’ dietary behaviours. The findings are of applied linguistic relevance to health practitioners and educators, as they provide them with access to adolescents’ health queries in their own language.

‘Off to the best start’?

“…Within the field of gender and language research, whilst there has been an important focus on discourses of the gendered body in general (e.g. Jeffries 2007;Mullany et al 2015) and on discourses surrounding the linguistics of pregnancy and childbirth in particular (for example, Pizzini's (1991) work on the linguistics of gynaecological examinations during childbirth, Bucholtz's (1999) work on communities of practice and pregnant women, and Page's (2002) work on childbirth narratives), the discourses surrounding breastfeeding practices are currently under-researched. Wolf (2011) points out that, since breastfeeding carries with it such a broad ranging socio-cultural significance, it can figure simultaneously on the agendas of many different sides of the political spectrum.…”

A corpus based, lexical analysis of patient information for radiography

“…family doctor) who had dominated earlier studies. Areas of interest to language researchers have spread beyond the academic and the relational to include a great variety of topics such as public health campaigns (Buckton, Lean & Combet, 2015;Zarcadoolas, 2010), online healthcare information-seeking (Harvey et al, 2008;Mullany, Smith, Harvey & Adolphs, 2015), metaphor in medical talk (Nerlich & Halliday, 2007;Semino, Demjen, Hardie, Payne & Rayson, 2018) and patient narratives (Moore & Hallenbeck, 2010).…”

“…Professionals and patients can respond differently to words, which is likely a response to the connotations of the words. This seems particularly the case with words that reference mental illness such as depression, along with words for body size, weight and the concept of obesity (Mullany, Smith, Harvey and Adolphs, 2015;Ogden et al, 1999;Tailor & Ogden, 2009). The emotional response to a word's connotations are not straightforward, however.…”

“…The study painted a rather bleak picture of the effectiveness of public information strategies, as it found that young people were confused and misinformed about a number of important aspects, including how the virus is transmitted and the difference between HIV and AIDS. The results may go some way improving information initiatives directed at young people, Weight, eating and body discourses were the themes of a study by Mullany, Smith, Harvey & Adolphs (2015). The corpus contained just over 2 million words and was made up of 113,480 advice requests sent to the site over a 5-year period between 2004-2009.…”