[ecrea] PhD Studentship - The Representation of Childbirth & Early Labour: A Multi-Modal Analysis of Media Discourses

We are looking for a PhD candidate who is passionate about media or 
midwifery and willing to learn about the other. Cultural perceptions and 
societal attitudes are known to influence women’s decisions about when 
to enter hospital in labour. The media plays a vital role in 
contextualizing and re-contextualizing important discourses of the day 
to its various audiences. Its role is to integrate the audience (members 
of society) into certain agreed norms, and to continually reinforce 
these. Media has a social responsibility to report and reflect on social 
issues in a responsible and ethical manner, yet such a responsibility 
has not been explored in relation to birth. This PhD studentship will 
advance our understanding of the relationship between the media, culture 
and health-related behaviour and develop a media intervention, which 
will be built around an educational resource for media professionals.

This is a fully-funded PhD studentship which includes a stipend of 
£14,000 each year to support your living costs. Deadline May 10, 2017.

https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/study/courses/phd-studentship-representation-childbirth-early-labour-multi-modal-analysis-media-discourses

Key information

Next start date:
September 2017

Location:
Bournemouth University, Talbot Campus

Duration:
36 months

Entry requirements:
Preferably a 1st class honours degree and/or a relevant Master's degree 
with distinction or equivalent Grade Point Average. If English is not 
your first language you'll need IELTS 6.5 (Academic) or above. For more 
information check out our full entry requirements.


Project details

The media plays a vital role in contextualizing and re-contextualizing 
important discourses of the day to its various audiences. Its role is to 
integrate the audience (members of society) into certain agreed norms, 
and to continually reinforce these. Media has a social responsibility to 
report and reflect on social issues in a responsible and ethical manner, 
yet cultural perceptions and societal attitudes have been shown to 
influence women’s decisions about when to enter hospital in labour. 
Nearly 45% of pregnant women are admitted to UK hospitals in early 
labour each year. Of those, 54% receive medical interventions in the 
form of electronic monitoring, epidurals and caesareans, costing the NHS 
nearly half a billion pounds p/a (NHS 2013). The media is increasingly 
important as most women will only witness birth through the ‘eye of a 
television camera’ but reportedly take their cues on when to enter 
hospital based on what they have seen on television (Luce et al., 2016). 
This supervisory team’s recent systematic review, the third most 
accessed & downloaded article for BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth in 2016, 
found that unrealistic media representations have the potential to 
influence women’s behaviour around birth.

Building on the experience of a successful media tool for suicide (Luce, 
2016), the studentship will develop and validate an innovative, societal 
intervention to address the problem of admission in early labour. The 
media-based intervention will be theoretically informed and developed 
through:

    Discourse Analysis—of newspapers and television programmes to 
determine the common discourses around childbirth and early labour in 
the media
    Focus groups with women and families - to determine how media 
representations of labour and birth are interpreted.
    Interview engagement with media producers - to determine whether 
the media can be harnessed to correct misinformation and change the 
discourse around labour and birth.
    Stakeholder workshop – to validate the tools for the media 
intervention.

The studentship will advance our understanding of the relationship 
between the media, culture and health-related behaviour and develop a 
media intervention, which will be built around an educational resource 
for media professionals. Changing behaviour requires a complex 
intervention, thus this resource will be tested via a stakeholder 
workshop, towards the end of the studentship. The specifics of the 
intervention will be determined by the findings of the qualitative work, 
but it is expected that professional guidelines would be created in an 
effort to change the way that birth is represented in popular television 
programmes. It has been suggested that the media play a significant role 
in influencing health-seeking behaviour in childbirth; the aim of this 
research is to help media portray childbirth in a more responsible and 
ethical manner. The supervisory team has experience of developing a 
similar resource for media professionals in relation to Media Reporting 
of Suicide (WHO, 2008, 2017) and Blogging Guidelines for Suicide, both 
of which have proved successful (IASP and SAVE, 2017).

View the full project description here: 
https://www1.bournemouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/Project%20Description%20-%20FMC%20-%20Luce.pdf

The closing date for applications is 10 May 2017.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please
use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------