A content analysis on the instagram posts of hospital businesses about obesity

Objective: The aim of this study is to describe how obesity, a global public health problem, is presented in the Instagram posts of hospital enterprises in the context of health communication. Method: This study is a cross-sectional content analysis study. The population of the study consist of is all health businesses in Turkey that use Instagram for health communication and include the subject of obesity in their Instagram posts. The sample, determined by the "purposive sampling method", is the 5 private and 5 public hospital enterprises that use the Instagram account most actively as of the beginning of the study. In the study, in which quantitative content analysis was used, the findings were presented in the form of number and percentage distributions. Findigs: Contents related to obesity were coded considering their visual, textual and stylistic features. 564 (7.9%) of the 7 157 posts on the Instagram accounts of health institutions are "obesity" themed. In 99.11% of the contents, profession of the source is not specified. The language of the content was determined as 53.55% "spoken language" and 7.98% "scientific language". In the visuals, 61.70% food and 20.04% female representation took place. In the etiology of obesity, diet-related obesity was the most common with 24.82% and eating habits as the biggest risk factor with 28.72%. It has been observed that the individual protective aspect of health practices is addressed with 90.07%. Conclusion: It has been observed that health institutions give little place to the subject of obesity in their Instagram posts. Not specifying profession in the contents was evaluated negatively in the context of health communication. It is seen that obesity is largely associated with eating habits. It has been determined that obesity is considered as an individual health problem in terms of its causes, precautions and treatment.