Biased Portrayal Research Articles

Portrayal of Childhood Cancer in English Language Magazines in North America: 1970–2001

ABSTRACT This article is a content and discourse analysis of the portrayal of childhood cancer in English language magazines in North America. In a unique specification of published research on the media portrayal of disease, magazines were divided into three market or audience groupings called (1) science, (2) news/special interest, and (3) other (women/teen/parenting/health). The predominate frames or discoursesin these three groups were compared and differences were found amongst them and discussed in the article. Considerable evidence suggests that people with cancer are stigmatized. In the analyzed media focused on children, those with cancer are highly idealized and stereotyped. On the one hand, this can be thought of as a very positive portrayal of children in this situation. Children are described as if they possess heroic and idealized character traits, appearances, social characteristics, and personalities. Possible links between this idealized, polarized, and biased portrayal of children with cancer and their documented experiences of stigma are discussed.

The portrayal of older people in prime time television series: the match with gerontological evidence

Empirical studies in several disciplines including sociology, psychology and communications science have investigated images of older people in the mass media, but analyses to date have failed systematically to apply gerontological concepts and to compare the portrayal of old age with ‘real-world’ evidence. A model of older people's internal and external resources was used to assess the portrayal of older people in prime-time television drama series. Three hours of programmes broadcast over six weeks in 2001 of 32 prime-time television series on the four German networks with the largest market shares were examined. The age of 355 portrayed characters were estimated, and the socio-economic, health-related and psychological resources of the 30 characters rated as 60 years or older were assessed. Observational categories and rating dimensions were developed on the basis of the resource model. Older people were heavily under-represented, especially women and those of advanced old age. Furthermore, the representation of older people's social participation and financial resources was overly positive. Finally, older women and men were portrayed in traditional gender roles. The antecedents and consequences of the biased portrayals (of old and young people) are discussed from a psychological perspective.

NÆRBILLEDER AF DET EKSOTISKE: Etnografiske illustrationer af Påskeøen fra anden halvdel af 1700-tallet

This article discusses the theoretical and pragmatic dialogue between the instructions
 given to the artists who participated in European scientific expeditions and the
 production of ethnographic illustrations. The discrepancy between methodological
 criteria and the empirical portrayal of exotic Others indicates an important dilemma:
 that the European representations of alien cultures were deeply rooted in European
 aesthetic idiosyncrasies and ideals of primitiveness. The French artist Gaspard Duché
 de Vancy (ca. 1750-1788) who travelled on François Galaup de Lapérouse’s scientific
 expedition (1785-1788) portrayed the society of Easter Island not according to what he
 actually observed, but rather to the captain’s distrustful judgement of the natives of
 Easter Island. In an effort to solidify a rather biased portrayal of the natives, the artist
 incorporated specific ethnographic devices, including exotic attire, weaponry and the
 gigantic monoliths, endeavouring to give his illustrations a more ethnographic and
 thus realistic outlook. Furthermore, this article discusses an illustration of Easter Island
 that the German traveller Johann Reinhold Forster (1729-1798) made, and which he
 included in his own German translation of Lapérouse’s travels. A study of Forster’s
 illustration indicates that the author generously borrowed crucial elements from Duché
 de Vancy’s original painting, and from two other paintings, made by the British painter
 William Hodges. By uncovering how expedition artists incorporated aesthetic
 idiosyncrasies into their compositions, this article uncovers how ethnographic
 illustrations were manipulated according to an exotic decor, where the alien reality
 was at first patch-worked and as a result constructed.

Simple assumptions on age composition lead to erroneous conclusions on the nature of density dependence in age-structured populations.

Ecologists have debated the nature of density dependence in natural populations for decades, and efforts to detect density dependence from time series of abundance data have paralleled these debates. Yet due to the correlative nature of time series data, these undertakings have been statistically problematic. Most analyses of density dependence have focused on simple population models (i.e., non-overlapping generations), but in reality most vertebrates exhibit more complex life histories, and this complexity has been incorporated into population models in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, adding complexity to population models can further exacerbate efforts to detect density dependence. We examined the effect of adding age structure when inadequate data exist in support; to demonstrate this effect, we adopted Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) as our study organism. Most salmon populations are semelparous and have variable age at maturity. Salmon populations (and many other fish species populations) are typically modeled in terms of numbers of recruits arising from spawners in a given brood year. Recruits are enumerated as they return as adults to spawn, and proper assignment of recruits to brood year requires age information. Unfortunately, while adult counts are common, detailed age information is not. A common practice is to apply long-term averages of age composition to returning adults to "reconstruct" time series of recruits. Here, by conducting simulations and analyzing data from natural populations, we demonstrated that this practice leads to a biased portrayal of density dependence by overestimating recruits from small spawning classes and underestimating recruits from large spawning classes. Also, productivity was overestimated and variance was underestimated, which could lead to overly optimistic predictions of extinction risk or overharvesting.

Among-Run Artifacts in DNA Hybridization

Interest in DNA hybridization data has led to the development of statistical methods for critically evaluating the strength of phylogenetic inferences made from distances (Lanyon, 1985; Templeton, 1985, 1986; Fitch, 1986; Felsenstein, 1987). A recent addition to this set of statistical approaches (Krajewski and Dickerman, 1990) demonstrated the use of bootstrap resampling of replicate distance measures in assessing distance-matrix robustness using, as an example, the uncorrected distance measures presented by Sibley et al. (1990). This analysis was based on the simplistic assumption that variation within a cell of the distance matrix reflected random measurement error alone, with no systematic effects due to experimental design. Here the raw hominoid Tm's (not altered by the various corrections imposed by Sibley et al. [1990]) are reviewed by treating different experimental runs as covariates, resulting in a less biased portrayal of mean distances and a better estimate of random measurement error. Tree fitting (both with and without contemporaneous tips) performed on multiple bootstrap pseudoreplicate T,Tm matrices is used to assess stability in tree topology. Felsenstein (1987), in dissecting variance components in the DNA hybridization distances among hominoids (Sibley and Ahlquist, 1987), found that the only identifiable source of experimental error was that attributable to variation among experimental runs of the thermal chromatography machine. Such among-run variation encompasses both the vagaries of operational parameters of the thermal chromatography apparatus (e.g., temperature overshoots) as well as differences in tracer preparations such as the tracer-length variation treated by Caccone and Powell (1989). The thermal stability measures of Sibley et al. (1990:218-220) differed greatly among experiments in melting temperature of the homologous hybrid as well as in respective AXTm values, corresponding to differences in both intercept and slope of the bivariate comparisons illustrated by Blackstone and Sheldon (1991). For example, experiment 828 had much lower AXTm values than did experiment 864 for the same species comparisons. Pooling replicate distances drawn from disparate experimental runs could result in obscuring relative distances between driver taxa and the tracer species. In an extreme hypothetical case, species A may be represented solely in runs with depressed ATm's, whereas species B may be represented solely in runs with exaggerated ATm's. As an alternative to pooling essentially incomparable data, it should be possible to estimate deviations of whole runs from the average and to correct for these systematic errors before pooling data from different runs for use in phylogenetic reconstruction. A simple method for doing so is applied to the uncorrected Tm's of Sibley et al. (1990:218-220) with the addition of Tm's with Pongo tracer (experiments 679 and 822) calculated by Krajewski and Dickerman (1990) from raw data supplied by Charles Sibley (pers. comm.). Other aspects of the experimental design of DNA hybridization studies can and should be treated, as with multiway analysis of variance of the sort demonstrated by Felsenstein (1987). Here, I discuss only among-run variation, the single experimental factor explicitly identified in the presentation of replicate measures by Sibley et al. (1990). However, Sibley et al. (1990:217) discounted five experiments

The Multicultural Evaluation of Some Second and Third Grade Textbook Readers--A Survey Analysis

Concern over the limited and biased portrayal of minorities in textbooks was documented as early as 1935 by the Conference on Education and Race Relations. Members of this Conference believed that these portrayals of minorities in textbooks were contributing to racial antagonism in the United States.' Over the years other individuals and organizations took up the banner of protest. However, it was not until the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s that publishers seriously heeded requests to improve the portrayal of minorities in textbooks. By the mid-sixties, minorities began to appear more frequently in textbooks; however, the books were still biased and minority group members were still stereotyped. We can best understand these biased and stereotyped portrayals by examining the areas in which they occur. Three such areas are the diversity (i.e., ethnic group representation) of characters, the settings (i.e.., time, location, socioeconomic class) in which characters appear, and their involvement (i.e., roles and the extent of their roles) in the stories.