Spanish 
Chinese 
Russian 
German 
French 
Japanese 
Portuguese 
Hindi Research Article
Socio-Moral Continuity and the Representation of Alcoholism in Four Major American Print Media Sources
Amy Platt*School of Social Welfare, Stony Brook University, USA
- *Corresponding Author:
- Amy Platt
School of Social Welfare
Stony Brook University, USA
E-mail: sweetpea3781@yahoo.com, amy.platt@stonybrook.edu
Received date: July 05, 2013; Accepted date: August 30, 2013; Published date: September 10, 2013
Citation: Platt A (2013) Socio-Moral Continuity and the Representation of Alcoholism in Four Major American Print Media Sources. J Addict Res Ther 4:157. doi:10.4172/2155-6105.1000157
Copyright: © 2013 Platt A. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Scholars have long attempted to explain the factors that lead to alcoholism. Indeed, various attempts to characterize alcoholism have been made including the moral model, the temperance model, the disease model, the harm reduction model, the social education model, and the neurobiological model. Since the introduction of the disease model, it has gained wide consensus in the scientific and therapeutic communities, although not in the public at large. In fact, the public seem to be committed primarily to the moral model and to the public health model secondarily, based on the inordinate influence that broadcast and news media have on society. In this study, articles from four major American newspapers are subject to an exploratory content analysis using constructed random samples to explore how these articles portray alcoholism. The presented results show that of a sample of 881 articles, only seven characterize alcoholism as a disease. Given the persistence of the moral model, in the face of the alternative scientific/therapeutic consensus, the theoretical construct of “socio-moral continuity” is introduced.
