Labelling people with disability in Australian newspapers

Editor’s note: Language on the Move has recently entered into an informal collaboration with the Sydney Corpus Lab, with mutual support and sharing of information and resources. The Sydney Corpus Lab aims to promote corpus linguistics in Australia and has a special interest in bringing together corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis across different contexts. In this post, we feature a recent collaborative project of researchers in the lab.

***

Annmaree Watharow, Monika Bednarek, and Amanda Potts

***

‘What’s in a name?’, we ask, knowing that names matter. Respect matters. So, the question ‘how should people who live with disability be identified?’ becomes a question that speaks to selfhood.

I (Annmaree) have lived with disability for decades, also with the changing tides of identifiers – both how I personally thought of myself and how I was regarded by others. So much Othering in the language, from ‘retard’ and ‘deafie, dumbie’ at school to ‘the deaf one’ at uni. I’ve been ‘disabled’, ‘with disability’ and more recently, ‘living with disability’. When I write, I use ‘person with disability’ or ‘person living with deafblindness’, but honestly, I would rather be ‘a deafblind woman’. For me, the disability which affects communication, access to information and mobility is so intertwined historically and functionally with myself, that we cannot be separated. My experience isn’t the same for many others with disability, and not everyone identifies as having a disability or being disabled or living with disability. When linguists Monika Bednarek and Amanda Potts asked me onboard their project analysing Australian newspapers, I jumped out of my comfort zone to join in looking at how the media is navigating the identifiers of disability, and by extension respect and inclusion.

The difference between identity-first and person-first language – sometimes also called condition-first or people-first language – is key. In the context of disability, identity-first language involves putting the disability first, i.e. using the adjective disabled in front of a ‘human’ noun. Examples include a disabled woman, disabled Australians, a disabled child, disabled people. In contrast, person-first language places the ‘human’ noun – the person – first, and this person-reference is then followed by references to the disability. Different formulations are possible here, for example a woman who has a disability, a man living with disability, children with disabilities, a person with a disability.

This distinction is relevant to a range of identity categories, including disability, obesity, autism, mental illness, substance-abuse, and others. The relative merits of the two different practices are at times hotly debated and there are individual and impairment-specific preferences. It is therefore always best to ask, as Evan Young writes, how people want to be referred to. If it’s not possible to ask someone their preference, Media Diversity Australia’s Disability Reporting Handbook recommends person-first language.

Given these recommendations, how have Australian newspapers actually used these two practices? To find out, we analysed over 22,000 articles from The Australian, The Age and the Herald-Sun over a period of 20 years (from January 2000-December 2019). We chose these three newspapers to include Australia’s generalist national newspaper as well as the metropolitan broadsheet and the tabloid newspaper with the highest average readership level. News stories had to include at least one mention of one of the following terms: “disabled”, “with disability”, “with disabilities”, “with a disability”, “with a mental disability”, “with mental disabilities”, “with a physical disability”, “with physical disabilities”.

Our first interest here is in identifying the ‘human’ nouns that occurred with identity-first and person-first language. We found a large overlap, with most of the following categories identified as frequent and significant in both structures:

• General: people, person, someone
• Adults and children (including family terms): child, man, woman, girl, boy, kid, adult, son, daughter
• National/regional identity: Australian, Victorian
• Role labels: veteran, student, athlete, worker, pensioner, passenger, resident, client

These nouns may occur as singular (child) or plural (children) forms, including possessives (child’s, children’s).

Figure 1 plots how these occur within the texts in our dataset over time to see if anything has changed in the last 20 years (here retrieved using regular expressions written to capture these particular human noun labels).

Figure 1 demonstrates that, with the exception of 2001, person-first forms have been the preferred strategy in our corpus for the past 20 years, appearing roughly 1.5 times as often as identity-first forms between 2000 and 2009. However, the second half of our corpus shows a notably sharp uptick in the appearance of person-first forms. Since 2014, person-first language is four times as frequent on average compared identity-first language, which conversely seems to be undergoing a slow but steady decline.

We also analysed relevant uses of identity-first and person-first language in the sentences in which they were contained. The details of this analysis are available here. Overall, we found many similarities between the two practices, and identified multiple negative or otherwise problematic usages across both, including those that construct a social pathology discourse around disability. It is important for news professionals to be aware of how people want to be referred to, but also pay attention to how such references are used. This will allow moving beyond problematic, stereotyped or stigmatising media representations.

To help in this endeavour, Media Diversity Australia’s reporting handbook identifies several golden rules to improve media coverage. The most important of which is to ask individuals and communities what their preferred identifier is, as there’s no one size fits all identifier. For example, someone living with co-occurring sight and hearing loss (like myself) may identify as a deafblind person, a person with deafblindness, a person with dual sensory impairment, a blind person with hearing loss, a Deaf person with low vision, or simply as someone getting old. Disability is complex and diverse, and part of inclusion means paying attention to identity and identifiers.

***

Dr Annmaree Watharow (MD, PhD) is a Lived Experience Fellow with the Centre for Disability Research and Policy at the University of Sydney. Her first book Improving the Experience of Health Care for People Living with Sensory Disability: Knowing What is Going on was published in February 2023.

Monika Bednarek is Professor in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, and the author of several books and multiple other publications on news discourse, including the co-authored Multimodal News Analysis Across Cultures (CUP, 2020) and The Discourse of News Values (OUP, 2017). She also leads the Sydney Corpus Lab.

Dr Amanda Potts is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. Her specialism is in corpus-based critical discourse analysis of public and professional communication. Her main interest is representations of ideology and identity, most recently in media discourse, medical communication, and language of law.

Reference

Potts, A., Bednarek, M. A., & Watharow, A. (2023). Super, social, medical: Person-first and identity-first representations of disabled people in Australian newspapers, 2000–2019. Discourse & Society, doi:10.1177/09579265231156504 [open access]