This study examined a specific and controversial issue in health communication: the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Recent studies have shown that both online newsgroups and traditional newspapers have involved in communicating CAM information, but research has not answered whether there are differences between the new and old media. From the perspective of uses and gratifications, this study first investigated that how people are using newsgroups to solve CAM-related problems. Then contents of newsgroup messages and newspaper stories were analyzed to do the comparison in topics, source types, efficacy claims, and CAM categories. The results showed that both similarities and differences existed between the two media.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TEXASAandM/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/577 |
| Date | 30 September 2004 |
| Creators | Zhang, Rui |
| Contributors | Priest, Susanna H., Pride, William M., Eilers, Howard |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 318660 bytes, 117317 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, text/plain, born digital |
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