Health communication and adolescents: what do their emails tell us?

Harvey, Kevin; Churchill, Dick; Crawford, Paul; Brown, Brian J.; Mullany, Louise; Macfarlane, Aidan; McPherson, Ann

doi:10.1093/fampra/cmn029

Cited by 42 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Spoken language is an appropriate language variety with which to compare the E-mails since, although the messages are written, they are in an informal language variety and are dialogic. Thus, speech is a more appropriate point of comparison than the more literary or technical styles commonly found in written language (Harvey et al, 2008). The comparison identified 1,160 keywords pertaining to a range of health-related themes in the adolescent health messages ( Table 1).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Health Communication and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Language of Self-harm

Harvey¹,

Brown²

2012

The Canadian Modern Language Review

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This study explores adolescents' accounts of self-harm with a view to elucidate the implications for health care practitioners seeking to administer care to teenagers in English. Drawing on a corpus of 1.6 million words from messages posted on a UK-hosted adolescent health Web site, analysis began by identifying a range of keywords relating to self-harm. The subsequent contextual examination of these keywords afforded a close description of the contributors' experiences of self-harm and the factors that resulted in their selfinjurious behaviours. A recurring theme was that of the habitual nature of self-harm, with the act being represented as a form of addiction over which they had little control. Self-harmers construct the phenomenon as particularly powerful, and the act is formulated as the only effective means of relief from emotional turmoil. If we are to increase parents and health professionals' ability to respond to self-injury in the medium of English, close linguistic attention to individuals' accounts of self-harm is valuable. Online health resources are also valuable means of eliciting concerns from distressed adolescents who are often reluctant to seek support from professionals face-to-face.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Health Communication and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Language of Self-harm

Harvey¹,

Brown²

2012

The Canadian Modern Language Review

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“…'Gender unspecified' messages account for 10% of the overall number; they are also much shorter and make up an even smaller percentage of the overall words in the corpus (5%). 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 Corpus linguistic methodologies constitute a robust approach to health communication (Locher 2006;Harvey et al 2008;Charteris-Black and Seale 2010). As a way into this substantial dataset and to provide a survey of the salient health themes, the first stage of the analysis involved identifying 'keywords' .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Electronic exchange is now a well-established area of investigation in a range of healthcare settings (Locher 2006;Miah and Rich 2008;Harvey 2013;Harvey et al 2008). One advantage of electronic communication for discussing medical concerns can be its disembodied manner, with the medium protecting advice-seekers' identities.…”

Section: Computer-mediated Health Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(1) University of Nottingham (2) University of Birmingham specialists in child and adolescent health in response to various difficulties that adolescents experience when communicating in face-toface settings with healthcare professionals (McPherson 2005;Harvey et al 2008). The website is designed to be interactive, confidential and evidence-based, providing adolescents with advice and information on a broad range of health issues in accessible, non-technical language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Mullany¹,

Smith

Harvey

et al. 2016

CAM

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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.

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“…The fact that the corpus is generated by adolescents is also of interest to the linguistic community. Adolescents are typically seen as language innovators (Stenström et al 2002) and this is no exception in the on-line community (Crystal 2006:94) Keywords are the starting point for a great many lexically oriented corpus studies (Scott and Tribble, 2006: 55-72;Baker 2006;Harvey et al 2008). They provide a good segue into the study of a large corpus highlighting words and topics which are unusually frequent in the data and therefore may warrant further investigation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spelling errors and keywords in born-digital data: a case study using the Teenage Health Freak Corpus

Smith¹,

Adolphs²,

Harvey³

et al. 2014

Corpora

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The abundance of language data now available in digital form and the rise of particular language varieties used for digital communication means that issues of non-standard spelling and spelling errors are likely to become a more prominent issue for compilers of such corpora. This paper examines the effect of spelling variation on keywords in a born-digital corpus in order to explore the extent and impact of this variation for future corpus studies. The corpus used in this study consists of emails about heath concerns sent to a health website by adolescents. Keywords are generated using the original version of the corpus and a version with spelling errors corrected with the BNC as the reference corpus. The ranks of the keywords are shown to be very similar and therefore suggest that, depending on the research goals, keywords could be generated reliably without any need for spelling correction.

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Health communication and adolescents: what do their emails tell us?

Cited by 42 publications

References 20 publications

Health Communication and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Language of Self-harm

Health Communication and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Language of Self-harm

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

Spelling errors and keywords in born-digital data: a case study using the Teenage Health Freak Corpus

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