Text Network Analysis of Newspaper Articles on Life-sustaining Treatments

Article information

Res Community Public Health Nurs. 2018;29(2):244-256

Publication date (electronic) : 2018 June 12

doi : https://doi.org/10.12799/jkachn.2018.29.2.244

Eun-Jun Park ¹, Dae Woong Ahn ², Chan Sook Park^,³

¹Department of Nursing, Konkuk University, Chungju, Korea

²Undergraduate School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Seokyeong University, Seoul, Korea

³Graduate School of Nursing, Konkuk University, Chungju, Korea

Corresponding author: Park, Chan Sook Graduate School of Nursing, Konkuk University, 268 Chungwon-daero, Chungju 27478, Korea. Tel: +82-43-840-3953, Fax: +82-43-840-3958, E-mail: sook706@hanmail.net

Received 2018 January 30; Revised 2018 May 14; Accepted 2018 June 01.

Abstract

Purpose

This study tried to understand discourses of life-sustaining treatments in general daily and healthcare newspapers.

Methods

A text-network analysis was conducted using the NetMiner program. Firstly, 572 articles from 11 daily newspapers and 258 articles from 8 healthcare newspapers were collected, which were published from August 2013 to October 2016. Secondly, keywords (semantic morphemes) were extracted from the articles and rearranged by removing stop-words, refining similar words, excluding non-relevant words, and defining meaningful phrases. Finally, co-occurrence matrices of the keywords with a frequency of 30 times or higher were developed and statistical measures―indices of degree and betweenness centrality, ego-networks, and clustering―were obtained.

Results

In the general daily and healthcare newspapers, the top eight core keywords were common: “patients,” “death,” “LST (life-sustaining treatments),” “hospice palliative care,” “hospitals,” “family,” “opinion,” and “withdrawal.” There were also common subtopics shared by the general daily and healthcare newspapers: withdrawal of LST, hospice palliative care, National Bioethics Review Committee, and self-determination and proxy decision of patients and family. Additionally, the general daily newspapers included diverse social interest or events like well-dying, euthanasia, and the death of farmer Baek Nam-ki, whereas the healthcare newspapers discussed problems of the relevant laws, and insufficient infrastructure and low reimbursement for hospice-palliative care.

Conclusion

The discourse that withdrawal of futile LST should be allowed according to the patient’s will was consistent in the newspapers. Given that newspaper articles influence knowledge and attitudes of the public, RNs are recommended to participate actively in public communication on LST.

Keywords: Life support care; Hospice care; Hospice and palliative care nursing; Hospices; Semantics

Figure 1.

Flowchart of the study.

Figure 2.

Sociogram of the top 50 keywords based on degree-centrality in general daily newspaper articles on life-sustaining treatments (LST).

Figure 3.

Sociogram of the top 50 keywords based on degree-centrality in healthcare newspaper articles on life-sustaining treatments (LST).

Table 1.

The Top 30 Keywords by Centrality Index in General Daily Newspaper Articles on Life-sustaining Treatments (LST)

Table 2.

The Top 30 Keywords by Centrality Index in Healthcare Newspaper Articles on Life-sustaining Treatments (LST)

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