Racial disparities in magazine coverage of mammography.

Abstract

Abstract Abstract #5100 Background: African-American (AA) women are diagnosed with breast cancer later, at a higher stage disease, and have a higher mortality than European-American (EA) women. AA women have a lower rate of mammography screening and this lower rate may account, in part, for AA women's more severe disease at diagnosis and higher mortality. One possible reason for this racial disparity in mammography screening may be that AA women receive a different message than EA women from mass circulation magazines about mammography.
 Material and Methods: A computer-aided content analysis was performed of AA and EA women's magazines with a circulation of greater than one million that contained at least 1,000 words across all the mammography-related articles or sections of articles that were published between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2007. The words that shared similar meanings were grouped into seven categories: (1) religiosity, (2) activity, (3) positive and (4) negative emotions, (5) medical terms, (6) risk factors, (7) race portrayed, by which is meant when race was noted in articles as African American/Black or European American/White. The frequencies of each word were counted across all articles by type of magazine, i.e., predominately AA readers and EA readers. The Pearson product-moment method was used to calculate correlations, the Student's t-test was used for correlated samples to compare the means of the continuous variables, and McNemar's test was used to assess the difference between two correlated proportions. Significance was set at the 0.05 level.
 Results: The magazines that met the study criteria were the African-American magazines Ebony and Essence and the European-American magazines Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Redbook, and Vogue. The six magazines yielded the following total number of words per magazine that focused on mammography: (a) Ebony: 17,221 words, (b) Essence: 20,257 words, (c) Good Housekeeping: 12,998 words, (d) Marie Claire: 7,654 words, (e) Redbook: 29,201 words, and (f) Vogue: 11,482 words. The word categories were compared in terms of their relative word frequencies, AA and EA.
 
 Discussion: There were clear differences in the mammography messages presented in the AA and the EA magazines. The AA magazines contained more references to religiosity, activity, positive and negative emotions, and risk. It was striking that racial references to African Americans were ubiquitous in the African-American magazines, whereas, racial references to either African Americans or European Americans were almost completely absent from the European-American magazines. Citation Information: Cancer Res 2009;69(2 Suppl):Abstract nr 5100.