AIDS as social construction: text mining of AIDS-related information in the Italian press

Given the relevance of AIDS as a public health problem in the Italian context and of the role of mass media in the social construction of the phenomenon, the aim of the present study is twofold: (1) to explore the main AIDS-related themes in the Italian popular press; (2) to analyse the temporal trends of AIDS representations over the last decades. For the research, we decided to consult Italian newspaper articles produced between 1985 and 1990 and between 2005 and 2010 using the archives of the main two national newspapers (La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera), resulting in an overall sample of 446 newspaper articles. A computer-aided content analysis allowed the detection of five different thematic domains (clusters), respectively focused on: Medical care (7.47%), Family support (37.03%), Science and religion debate (27%), Social exclusion (17.6%) and Healthcare policies (10.9%). These thematic domains are conceived along two main latent dimensions (factors) which explain 72.47% of the data variance which respectively deal with: (1) Attitudes towards people with AIDS (care versus avoidance) and (2) Social mandate on AIDS (powerlessness versus control). The study results also reveal the potential evolution of representations of people with AIDS over time: from stigmatised subjects who represent a risk for the entire society within a climate of social control to people progressively symbolised as frail subjects that need to be taken care of.