'Am I anorexic?': weight, eating and discourses of the body in online adolescent health communication

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

‘STFU and start listening to how scared we are’: Resisting misogny on Twitter via #NotAllMen

This article focuses on the strategies that were used to resist misogyny on the microblogging platform Twitter during March 2021, a time when the hashtag #NotAllMen was trending. We take a critical feminist approach, combining corpus linguistics with a qualitative analysis of #NotAllMen users’ discursive strategies. This particular iteration of #NotAllMen followed the disappearance and subsequent rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a 33 year old white woman who was abducted from a street in London, UK, whilst walking home. Following a keyword analysis (Scott 1997) to survey a dataset of 18,701 tweets containing the hashtag #NotAllMen, we identify salient themes in a sub-set of keyword concordances, and produce a detailed qualitative analysis of the strategies deployed in ten randomly sampled tweets. Despite #NotAllMen initally being used as a statement of protest against supposedly unfair accusations levelled at ‘all’ men, our analysis illustrates the use of resistant and empowering strategies which challenge the misogyny of this message, re-framing the hashtag and thus acting as a form of resistance to its original message: that not all men enagage in gender-based violence. We argue that this points to the strategic use of social media to challenge harmful rhetoric, whereby users exploit the affordances of hashtags. Twitter users engaged in strategies including resistance, opposition, and polarity to the hashtag, evidenced through the linguistic use of expletives, insults, and direct address, most often emerging through metadiscussion of the #NotAllMen hashtag itself; this works as a form of collective counter-protest through hashtag reframing. The hashtag reframing operates as a tool to show how those using the hashtag to focus on the defence of men, rather than critiquing the sociocultural dominance of misogynistic behaviour, ignored the fear experienced by all women and girls of being victims of gender-based violence, rape and murder

Identifying coping strategies used by patients at a transgender health clinic through analysis of free text autobiographical narratives

BackgroundThis paper presents an analysis of 32 narratives written by patients waiting for assessment at a transgender health clinic (THC) in England. Narratives are autobiographical free texts, designed to allow patients to describe in their own words their experiences of their gender identity and/or transition prior to a clinic appointment, as part of the assessment process.ObjectiveNarratives were analysed to identify actions prospective patients had taken to manage their (usually lengthy) waiting times, so that these ‘coping strategies’ could be shared with future patients.DesignCorpus linguistic methodology was utilized to identify common patterns across the whole corpus of text‐based data, augmented with more detailed sociolinguistic analysis of individual narratives.ResultsThere are broad commonalities in the way the transition experience is described across the corpus in terms of presentation of key experiences and feelings. There are specific descriptions of a number of recurring coping strategies, both positive and negative.ConclusionThe empowerment value of writing these narratives may be limited; the existence of recurring key features suggests that patients may feel they have to present their experiences in certain ways to be accepted for treatment. However, dissemination of some positive coping strategies may help future clients of THCs to better cope with waiting times, as well as assisting practitioners in THCs in supporting their patients during this wait.Patient/Public ContributionThe clinic's Service Users’ Research Advisory Group contributed to formulating the objective and design of the study. Results were presented at the clinic's annual PPI conference

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

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Family Practice following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Brown, B.J. et al (2008) Health communication and adolescents: What do their emails tell us? Family Practice, 25, pp.304-311. is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fampra/cmn029Background. It is widely known that barriers exist in communication between adolescents and health professionals. However, little is known about the actual language used by young people articulating such difficulties and whether email might allow them to overcome these problems. Objectives. The aims of this study were to investigate concerns and difficulties relating to communication among adolescents seeking online health advice. Methods. The study design was a corpus linguistic analysis of a million-word adolescent health email database based on 62 794 emails from young people requesting health advice from a prominent UK-hosted and doctor-led website. Results. Young people reported various concerns about their health. They described numerous difficulties in disclosing such concerns to other people, in particular to parents and doctors. However, they readily expressed their concerns by email, displaying elevated levels of directness, particularly in relation to potentially sensitive or embarrassing topics. Conclusion. Email has the potential to facilitate and supplement face-to-face consultations with health professionals. Increased adoption of email by health providers may be an efficient means of engaging with a generation often reluctant to access more traditional health care services and thus encourage them to enter the primary care setting more readily

Identifying coping strategies used by patients at a transgender health clinic through analysis of free‐text autobiographical narratives

Background: This paper presents an analysis of 32 narratives written by patients waiting for assessment at a transgender health clinic (THC) in England. Narratives are autobiographical free texts, designed to allow patients to describe in their own words their experiences of their gender identity and/or transition prior to a clinic appointment, as part of the assessment process. Objective: Narratives were analysed to identify actions prospective patients had taken to manage their (usually lengthy) waiting times, so that these ‘coping strategies’ could be shared with future patients. Design: Corpus linguistic methodology was utilised to identify common patterns across the whole corpus of text-based data, augmented with more detailed sociolinguistic analysis of individual narratives. Results: There are broad commonalities in the way the transition experience is described across the corpus in terms of presentation of key experiences and feelings. There are specific descriptions of a number of recurring coping strategies, both positive and negative. Conclusion: The empowerment value of writing these narratives may be limited; the existence of recurring key features suggests that patients may feel they have to present their experiences in certain ways to be accepted for treatment. However, dissemination of some positive coping strategies may help future clients of THCs to better cope with waiting times, as well as assisting practitioners in THCs in supporting their patients during this wait. Patient/Public Contribution: The clinic’s Service Users’ Research Advisory Group contributed to formulating the objective and design of the study. Results were presented at the clinic’s annual PPI conference

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

The abundance of language data that is now available in digital form, and the rise of distinct language varieties that are used for digital communication, means that issues of non-standard spellings and spelling errors are, in future, likely to become more prominent for compilers of 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 e-mails about health concerns that were sent to a health website by adolescents. Keywords are generated using the original version of the corpus and a version with spelling errors corrected, and the British National Corpus (BNC) acts 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

Does gender matter? A cross-national investigation of primary class-room discipline.

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupFewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male ‘role models’ in schools has an adverse effect on boys’ academic motivation and engagement. Although previous research has examined ‘teaching’ as institutional talk, men’s linguistic behaviour in the classroom remains largely ignored, especially in regard to enacting discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms in both the UK and in Germany, this paper examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics to address the question, does teacher gender matter?Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

National and regional estimates of term and preterm babies born small for gestational age in 138 low-income and middle-income countries in 2010.

BACKGROUND: National estimates for the numbers of babies born small for gestational age and the comorbidity with preterm birth are unavailable. We aimed to estimate the prevalence of term and preterm babies born small for gestational age (term-SGA and preterm-SGA), and the relation to low birthweight (<2500 g), in 138 countries of low and middle income in 2010. METHODS: Small for gestational age was defined as lower than the 10th centile for fetal growth from the 1991 US national reference population. Data from 22 birth cohort studies (14 low-income and middle-income countries) and from the WHO Global Survey on Maternal and Perinatal Health (23 countries) were used to model the prevalence of term-SGA births. Prevalence of preterm-SGA infants was calculated from meta-analyses. FINDINGS: In 2010, an estimated 32·4 million infants were born small for gestational age in low-income and middle-income countries (27% of livebirths), of whom 10·6 million infants were born at term and low birthweight. The prevalence of term-SGA babies ranged from 5·3% of livebirths in east Asia to 41·5% in south Asia, and the prevalence of preterm-SGA infants ranged from 1·2% in north Africa to 3·0% in southeast Asia. Of 18 million low-birthweight babies, 59% were term-SGA and 41% were preterm-SGA. Two-thirds of small-for-gestational-age infants were born in Asia (17·4 million in south Asia). Preterm-SGA babies totalled 2·8 million births in low-income and middle-income countries. Most small-for-gestational-age infants were born in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh. INTERPRETATION: The burden of small-for-gestational-age births is very high in countries of low and middle income and is concentrated in south Asia. Implementation of effective interventions for babies born too small or too soon is an urgent priority to increase survival and reduce disability, stunting, and non-communicable diseases. FUNDING: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation by a grant to the US Fund for UNICEF to support the activities of the Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group (CHERG)

"Can I Be at Risk of Getting AIDS?" A Linguistic Analysis of Two Internet Columns on Sexual Health

Recent global statistics highlight that, out of all new cases of HIV infection, 45% are diagnosed in young people (UNAIDS 2008). Despite a range of new initiatives aimed at increasing young people's knowledge of HIV at the beginning of the first decade of the twenty-first century (UNAIDS 2001), latest figures highlight that such initiatives have not been wholly successful in preventing new infection in young people (UNAIDS 2011). In light of this, the language patterns that young people use when seeking information about HIV/AIDS are investigated. Our focus in particular is on computer-mediated-communication, a relatively under-researched area in the sphere of health communication. Building on previous research (Locher 2006, 2010; Harvey et al. 2008; Harvey 2013), we examine one UK and one US Internet-based, professional, health advice column as sources of advice-information for young people. Despite numerous established health campaigns, young advice-seekers' questions reflect misinformed conceptions, such as the conflation of HIV and AIDS and confusion as to the way in which the virus can be contracted. Our linguistic research gives access to young people's lay beliefs about sexual health and highlights the need to redress such beliefs, with the aim of improving the effectiveness of health education initiatives. We suggest that computer-mediated communication can be one effective medium through which to assess young people's knowledge about HIV/AIDS, as well as effectively disseminating sexual health advice and information by health care bodies