Media portrayal of illness-related medical crowdfunding: A content analysis of newspaper articles in the United States and Canada

Blake Murdoch · Alessandro R Marcon · Daniel Downie · Timothy Caulfield

26 citations0/0 files storedPLoS ONE

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance Journalism and Media Studies Media Studies and Communication

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Medical crowdfunding is a growing phenomenon, and newspapers are publishing on the topic. This research analyzed how illness-related crowdfunding and crowdfunding campaigns have recently been represented in newspapers that are popular in the United States and Canada. METHODS: A sample of 336 articles about medical crowdfunding published during the two year time period from October 7, 2015 to October 6, 2017 was produced using a Factiva search of the English language newspapers with the largest Canadian and United States readership. A coding frame was developed for and applied to the sample to analyze content. RESULTS: Articles portrayed crowdfunding campaigns positively (43.75%) and neutrally (47.92%), but rarely negatively (4.76%). Articles mostly mentioned the crowdfunding phenomenon with a neutral characterization (93.75%). Few (8.63%) articles mentioned ethical issues with the phenomenon of crowdfunding. Ailments most commonly precipitating the need for a campaign included cancer (49.11%) and rare disease (as stated by the article, 36.01%). Most articles (83.04%) note where donations and contributions can be made, and 59.23% included a hyperlink to an online crowdfunding campaign website. Some articles (26.49%) mentioned a specific monetary goal for the fundraising campaign. Of the 70 (20.83%) articles that indicated the treatment sought may be inefficacious, was unproven, was experimental or lacked regulatory approval, 56 (80.00%) noted where contributions can be made and 36 (51.43%) hyperlinked directly to an online crowdfunding campaign. CONCLUSIONS: Crowdfunding campaigns are portrayed positively much more often than negatively, many articles promote campaigns for unproven therapies, and links directly to crowdfunding campaign webpages are present in most articles. Overall, crowdfunding is often either implicitly or explicitly endorsed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

References

1994Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook 2008The qualitative content analysis process 2012Interrater reliability: the kappa statistic 2017Producing a worthy illness: Personal crowdfunding amidst financial crisis 2019Investigating the Relationship Between Medical Crowdfunding and Personal Bankruptcy in the United States: Evidence of a Digital Divide1 2013Why Crowdfunding Projects Can Succeed: The Role of Proponents’ Individual and Territorial Social Capital 2017Crowdfunding our health: Economic risks and benefits 2009The Commercialization of News

Cited by

2022An overview of Fintech applications to solve the puzzle of health care funding: state-of-the-art in medical crowdfunding 2022Hotel resuscitation by reward-based crowdfunding: A critical review and moderated mediation model 2021A semantic analysis of crowdfunding in the digital press 2025Do you have depression? A summative content analysis of mental health-related content on TikTok

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.