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‘Am I anorexic?’ Weight, eating and discourses of the body in online adolescent health communication
Ist Teil von
Communication & medicine, 2015-01, Vol.12 (2/3), p.211-223
Ort / Verlag
England
Erscheinungsjahr
2015
Quelle
MEDLINE
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This article explores the communicative choices of
adolescents seeking advice from an internet-based
health forum run by medical professionals. Techniques
from the disciplines of sociolinguistics and
corpus linguistics are integrated to examine the
strategies used in adolescents’ health questions. We
focus on the emergent theme of Weight and Eating,
a concern which features prominently in adolescents’
requests to medical practitioners. The majority of
advice requests are authored by adolescent girls,
with queries peaking at age 12. A combined quantitative
and qualitative analysis provides detailed
insights into adolescents’ communicative strategies.
Examinations of question types, register and
a discourse-based analysis draw attention to dominant
discourses of the body, including a ‘discourse
of slenderness’ and a ‘discourse of normality’, which
exercise negative influences on adolescents’ dietary
behaviours. The findings are of applied linguistic relevance
to health practitioners and educators, as they
provide them with access to adolescents’ health queries
in their own language.