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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Health Communication
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1363367
This article is part of the Research Topic Anti-stigma Communication in the 21st Century: Theory, Research, and Applications View all 6 articles

Exemplification and Stigmatization: How News Stories Affect Stigmarelated Attitudes, Emotional Reactions, and Behavioral Intentions towards Students with a Disability

Provisionally accepted
Matthias R. Hastall Matthias R. Hastall *Alexander Röhm Alexander Röhm Claudia Kotarski Claudia Kotarski Sina Resch Sina Resch Ute Ritterfeld Ute Ritterfeld
  • TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Students with intellectual or physical disabilities still face public and institutional stigmatization. The current study examines how different news portrayals of college students with a disability affect readers' stigma-related attitudes and behavioral intentions. A 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 full-factorial experiment was conducted, in which N = 767 respondents were presented a news article about a student with a disability. The article was manipulated regarding exemplar's type of disability, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation. All four tested exemplar characteristics and respondents' gender affected several dimensions of stigmatization, albeit often as interaction effects. Overall, findings indicate that story-unrelated characteristics of portrayed individuals affect readers' generalized stigma-relevant attitudes, emotional reactions, and behavioral intentions. Results are discussed regarding the likelihood for accidental stigmatization through journalistic exemplar choices, and regarding implications for a stigma-sensitive health communication and anti-stigma communication practice.

    Keywords: stigmatization, Destigmatization, Exemplification, Disability, gender

    Received: 30 Dec 2023; Accepted: 28 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Hastall, Röhm, Kotarski, Resch and Ritterfeld. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Matthias R. Hastall, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

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