Representation of autism in Vietnamese news media: a computational framing analysis

Computational corpus analysis and framing analysis of Vietnamese digital news media of over 580,000 words in this study have demonstrated to be a useful method for big data analysis. This paper examined the news media coverage on autism, a public health issue in Vietnam. The language patterns, extracted by WordSmith software, suggested autism is framed primarily as a medical problem and a family issue, not a matter of social policy or an aspect of human diversity. Noticeably, individuals with autism were expected to integrate to fit in with the community, not the other way around, where the society acted as an agent to accommodate autism diversity with an inclusive environment. The study found the underrepresented voices of individuals with autism and family actors, and the dominant voices of healthcare, education and other professionals, while government authorities were almost absent in the media corpus.