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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Ann Natl Acad Med Sci 2021; 57(04): 197-201
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1730126
Review Article

Public Health News Appraisal: An Approach to Content Analysis of News Article on Public Health

Mehul Patel
1   Department of Community Medicine and Family Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
,
Pankaj Bhardwaj
1   Department of Community Medicine and Family Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
2   School of Public Health, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
,
Deepak Saxena
3   Department of Epidemiology, Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
,
Nitin Joshi
2   School of Public Health, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
,
Nitesh Kumar
1   Department of Community Medicine and Family Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
,
Kuldeep Singh
2   School of Public Health, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
4   Department of Paediatrics, School of Public Health, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
,
Abhay Gaidhane
5   Community Medicine, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Maharashtra, India
,
Quazi Syed Zahiruddin
5   Community Medicine, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Maharashtra, India
,
Yogesh Jain 
2   School of Public Health, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
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Abstract

Public Health News Appraisal (PHNA) is a systematic process and an important skill to be mastered by public health trainees by which the strengths, weaknesses, and validity of a news article can be identified. This process helps trainees to identify usefulness of news, recognize any potential for bias, and ascertain whether the news is trustworthy. Trainees can assess whether the news article successfully communicates the intended message to reader. PHNA checklist with 18 questions was designed to help students to achieve this objective. Responses of most of the questions in this checklist are in the form of yes, no, and can’t tell. The articles can be categorized and analyzed based on the comparative PHNA score.

Keywords

public health - content - newspaper article - evaluation

Supplementary Material



Publication History

Article published online:
27 May 2021

© 2021. National Academy of Medical Sciences (India). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial-License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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