The study “The impact of using person-centered language to reference stigmatized groups in news coverage” by Caroline Murray, Anita Varma and Natalie Jomini Stroud from University of Texas at Austin studied whether using person-centered language (such as “person with substance abuse disorder) rather than stigmatizing terms (such as “drug abuser”) improved trust towards journalism.
Past scholarship has shown that journalism has the tendency to perpetuate negative stereotypes. As journalistic organizations seek to find remedies, which likely will require systemic changes, a simple partial remedy would be the use of person-centered language, rather than disorder-first language.
Despite the positive intentions, person-centered language is not entirely without controversy. Some disability advocates opt for “identity first” language, where the shared ‘disorder’ or feature is proudly presented in front due to the shared culture of the people who share the disorder or feature. This is famously the case of deaf identity.
In the case of autism, the opinions are more mixed – with some advocating for identity-first language (“autistic person”) and others rejecting it in favor of person-centered language (“person with autism”). Nevertheless, in some cases, person-centered language is seen as a positive remedy against stereotypes and called for by academics, although sometimes the real world effects are questioned, such as is the case with homelessness.
Person-centered language was also advocated for by a journalistic guide published by the Marshall Project in 2021, but due to the pushback from many people with disabilities, they no longer stipulate it as a default and emphasizes personal preferences – but there remains scant empirical research on the impact of either language variant that this study addresses.
The study by the authors was a 3 (group: substance use disorder, homelessness, disability) × 2 (stigmatizing terms or person-centered terms) between-subjects experiment. The participants were recruited CloudResearch and organizational outreach, for a total of 339 U.S.-based participants. The sample included 90 people with a disability, 114 people who had experienced homelessness, and 135 people in recovery from substance use disorder.
Most of the participants were white, over eighty percent, with males and females roughly evenly split. Some respondents were removed from the analysis due to providing the same answers for contradictory questions or for spending too little or too much time on the survey etc.. The total was the aforementioned 339.
The news articles used as the stimuli in the study were based on real articles by The Philadelphia Inquirer, Fast Company, and WWMT-TV in Michigan. The articles varied on whether person-centered language was used or not.
The stigmatizing term for substance abuse was “drug abuser(s)” while the person-centered term was “[person/people] with substance use disorder”. For homelessness, they were “homeless person/the homeless” and “person/people without housing”. In disability, they were “disabled person/the disabled” and “person/people with disabilities”.
The measures were trust in the news article (fair, tells the whole story, can be trusted), trust in the journalist (I would trust this journalist to tell my story, I would feel comfortable sharing my personal experiences with this journalist). There were also measures on representation and collective public self esteem measuring how people affected by the term felt about the article.
First of all, the authors found out that the participants overwhelmingly preferred the person-centered language over stigmatizing terms. The participants trusted the news articles using person-centered terms marginally more, but there was no impact on trust towards the journalist.
There was also no difference in how represented the participants felt based on language used (apart from the substance abuse group), but there was higher collective public self esteem coming with person-centered language. However, there was no difference in the intention to engage.
The authors speculate on why the substance abuse group felt more represented, but we at the JRN speculate that the terms there contrasted the strongest, with the stigmatizing term being clearly pejorative, unlike in the other two.
Trust was marginally, but nevertheless improved with person-centered language, which was one of the main findings along with the fact that the person-centered language supported stronger collective public self esteem.
The article “The impact of using person-centered language to reference stigmatized groups in news coverage” by Caroline Murray, Anita Varma and Natalie Jomini Stroud is in Journalism. (open access).
Picture: Untitled by Tiago Felipe Ferreira
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