Abstract
Mass media content likely influences the decision of women to breastfeed their newborn children. Relatively few studies have empirically assessed such a hypothesis to date, however. Most work has tended to focus either on specific interventions or on broad general commentary about the role of media. In this study, we examined infant feeding advertisements in 87 issues of Parents' Magazine, a popular parenting magazine, from the years 1971 through 1999. We then used content analysis results to predict subsequent changes in levels of breastfeeding among U.S. women. When the frequency of hand feeding advertisements increased, the percentage change in breastfeeding rates reported the next year generally tended to decrease. These results underscore the need to acknowledge the potential role of popular media content in understanding breastfeeding patterns and public health trends.
Highlights
We often assume that mass media content can affect health decision-making
A large number of advertisements supporting hand feeding appeared in our Parents' Magazine sample; 249 advertisements involved hand feeding in the 84 issues analyzed
We endeavored here to examine the relationship between media content and health behavior, exploring the potential role of popular culture products in influencing infant feeding decisions
Summary
We often assume that mass media content can affect health decision-making. A wide literature, documents numerous mass media campaigns in the past century that were predicated on that idea [1]. Perhaps the most useful ideas as to how to locate and determine effects on health have arisen when researchers have stepped beyond the confines of a single, carefullyplanned campaign evaluation to instead look at the impact of an array of media content on health beliefs and behavior [2,3,4,5]. There does appear to be a striking relationship between the presence of supportive or dissuasive news content and the proportion of women who obtained cancer screening. In light of these results, can we detect a similar relationship between media content and breastfeeding?
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