The Ecuadorian Physiotherapist in National Printed Media: A Pilot Study of the Image of a Health Practitioner

Abstract

Corpus linguistics provides tools used to answer society and health related questions. In this pilot study, the feasibility of a corpus-driven analysis to reveal themes associated with the image of the Ecuadorian physiotherapy practitioner in the national printed media was investigated. A specialised corpus of newspaper articles was created by selecting relevant articles published in two Ecuadorian national newspapers in 2010-2015. Frequencies, concordances, and collocations of the term 'fisioterapista' were analysed, and a content analysis on the titles of the articles, sections in which they appeared and the tags which were assigned to their online publications was performed. Noun and adjective collocates of the node term 'fisioterapista' in the corpus were assigned to relevant WordNet semantic domains, with the domains of sport and medicine comprising the majority of the collocations. The physiotherapy profession in the media appeared to be male-dominated, despite the factual evidence from the field to the contrary. The results of this study indicate that the corpus-driven analysis is feasible to sketch the image of the Ecuadorian physiotherapist in national printed media. In general, the articles studied presented to the public the image of the physiotherapy professional in a stereotypical and distorted manner. A full-scope research including other national, regional, and local printed media is justified. This article is based on a poster presentation at the 5th International Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences held in Roma, Italy on September 25-26 , 2015.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s4p538