Analysis of the Link between Media Coverage of Children with Disabilities and Health Education : Focusing on LDA Topic Modeling

Objective: This study aims to analyze the major issues concerning children with disabilities as represented in South Korean news media and to explore their potential linkage to health education. Methods: The news articles related to children with disabilities published between 2020 and 2023 were collected and analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling. Results: Analysis of news articles related to children with disabilities ten key topics. Among these, topics such as ‘improving the educational environment for children with disabilities’ and ‘child abuse prevention campaigns’ emerged as closely related to school- and community-based health education. In particular, preventive campaigns that holistically address both educational access and the right to health offer meaningful insights for the development of future health education programs and policies targeting children with disabilities. Conclusions: This study demonstrates how big data analysis of media content can shed light on public discourse surrounding children with disabilities and emphasizes the need for effective, evidence-based directions in health education.