Daily newspaper reporting on elderly care in Sweden and Finland: a quantitative content analysis of ethnicity- and migration-related issues

Abstract

Media representations are important sources of information especially about contexts that people have limited access to (such as the one we address here, that is, elderly care). Representations of this also give us an insight into how ethnicity-, culture-, and migration-related issues are regarded. This article aims to shed light on media representations related to the nexus of elderly care, ethnicity, and migration in Sweden and Finland, given that the two countries have similar elderly care regimes but different migration regimes. The study uses quantitative content analysis to analyze all of the daily newspaper articles on elderly care that have touched upon these issues and have been published in one major newspaper in each country between 1995 and 2011 (N0347). In this article, we present the topics that these newspaper articles discuss; the elderly care actors that the articles focus on (i.e. whether the focus has been on elderly care recipients, elderly care providers or informal caregivers); the ethnic backgrounds of those who expressed themselves in the articles (i.e. whether the focus has been on the ethnic majority or on ethnic minorities); and the type of explanatory frameworks used in the daily press reporting in question. The article problematizes the media representations of ethnicity-and migration-related issues within the Swedish and Finnish elderly care sectors that the analysis has unveiled in relation to the debate on the challenges that the globalization of international migration poses to the elderly care sector.

Migrant care workers in elderly care: what a study of media representations suggests about Sweden as a caring democracy

“…This project has already generated some publications. For example,Torres et al (2012) focused on country comparisons covering the period 1995-2008, whileTorres et al (2014) presented results covering the period 1995-2011. In addition,Lindblom and Torres (2011) presented results from the Swedish material covering the period 1995-2008, while Torres 2017 revealed how migrant care workers were described in a 3-page-long piece for a Special Issue of Sociologisk Forskning.…”

Othering in Media Representations of Elderly Care: Using the Social Justice Framework to Make Sense of Public Discourses on Migrants and Culture

“…Our previous analysis shows that six themes dominate the daily newspaper reporting to which we draw attention in this article (see Lindblom and Torres, 2011;Torres, 2017Torres, , 2018Torres and Lindblom, 2020 as well as Torres et al, 2012Torres et al, , 2014 (see Fig 1). The themes are:…”

“…The data comes from a project that explores media representations of ethnicity and migration-related issues in relation to elderly care in Sweden and Finland (see Lindblom and Torres, 2011;Torres, 2017Torres, , 2018Torres and Lindblom, 2020;Torres et al, 2012Torres et al, , 2014. Here, we present one of the angles of analysis we have employed when analysing articles published in the two largest national daily newspapers in Sweden: Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) and Dagens Nyheter (DN).…”

Outsourcing Equality: Migrant Care Worker Imaginary in Finnish Media

“…An electronic text-searchable archive has been available from the year 2003. The data were initially compiled and quantitatively analyzed as part of a SwedishFinnish research collaboration (Torres et al, 2014). HS is the dominant Finnish daily and the largest Nordic daily.…”