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. 2023 Mar:188:122276.
doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2022.122276. Epub 2022 Dec 29.

Framing the virus: The political, economic, biomedical and social understandings of the COVID-19 in Taiwan

Shih-Chang Hung  1 , Shu-Chen Chang  1
Affiliations

Framing the virus: The political, economic, biomedical and social understandings of the COVID-19 in Taiwan

Shih-Chang Hung et al. Technol Forecast Soc Change. 2023 Mar.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study how people use texts and languages to interpret or make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on the theoretical literature of framing perspectives to formulate our arguments that consider the virus a socially constructed reality. We use Taiwan as an empirical case study, using topic modeling analysis of newspaper articles. Our findings show that the language of the COVID-19 coverage combines the four frames of political evaluation, economic impact, biomedical science and social life in varying proportions. These frames are subject to changes in pandemic conditions. Implications for theory and practice are presented.

Keywords: COVID-19; Coronavirus; Framing; Pandemic; Taiwan.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
(a) The number of new confirmed cases in Taiwan per month (January 2020–May 2021). Source: Taiwan CDC (https://nidss.cdc.gov.tw/nndss/disease?id=19CoV). (b) The number of news articles containing the word “COVID-19” or any of its derived forms in Chinese language per month over time (January 2020–May 2021).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The pyLDAvis visualization output.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The change of the four competing frames over time (January 2020–May 2021). Note: The number of news per topic are given in brackets.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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