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People from a country who tend to feel threatened by undefined situations or objects to a higher degree may consider the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as a less defined object and thus show a lower level of acceptance of TCM.

The above assumption of Dr. Xianwen Kuang and Dr. Rining Wei from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at Xi¡¯an Jiaotong-ºìÐÓÊÓƵ University (XJTLU) have driven them to work on an exploratory study on how a country¡¯s level of ¡°uncertainty avoidance¡± may correlate with how news media in the country frame TCM.

Uncertainty avoidance is part of a theory developed around 50 years ago by social psychologist Geert Hofstede to examine how culture affects values in general: The higher the uncertainty avoidance of a socio-cultural context, the more likely those in this context will fear or reject a product they feel uncertain about.

The two academics spoke at the first seminar of HSS¡¯s Medical Humanities Research Group in this academic year on November 17, 2020 where they presented their preliminary results of a research project, entitled ¡°The international framing of Traditional Chinese Medicine: A content analysis of news reports from 10 countries¡±, funded by the China Outside Project Small Grants of HSS ºìÐÓÊÓƵ.

In particular, according to the preliminary results, in countries with a high level of uncertainty avoidance, news media writing about TCM tended to use certain news frames, such as ¡°professional qualification,¡± ¡°responsibility,¡± and ¡°leadership¡±, Dr Kuang said.

With the ¡°professional qualification¡± news frame, news media might include more information about regulations on TCM practices, he said. With the ¡°responsibility frame,¡± news media might attribute responsibility for problems (e.g. failure of a treatment) to a particular person or an organization such as TCM practitioners or clinics. With the ¡°leadership frame¡±, the news media could quote ¡°government leaders to give some explanations about why TCM is useful and why we should receive TCM treatments,¡± he said.

Dr Kuang and Dr Wei together called for further research. ¡°In the near future, we could examine how can we explain different frame use and to what extent we could attribute this to the uncertainty avoidance index,¡± Dr Wei said.

The researchers indicated that they plan to hire more research assistants who are fluent in different languages to expand the sample. ¡°We can look at South America - the uncertainty avoidance index is very high there; and also Japan, which is similar to China in terms of the culture but whose uncertainty avoidance index is very high too,¡± Dr Kuang remarked.