The third in a trio of research outputs under our Healthy Homes Communication Action Research Programme*, this research looked into how newsmedia in Aotearoa New Zealand talk about homes and health. The research analysed articles published in a range of media outlets over May-June 2023 and May-June 2024.
Key findings:
- Though the connection between housing and health is mentioned a lot in our media, this is often as a quick aside without much detail or context.
- When the media focused on staying warm and well in winter they often focused on individual solutions (like wearing warm clothes or getting thermal-backed curtains) rather than bigger ideas, like how we can improve the standard of the housing we have available.
- The media reports of tragic housing disasters were empathetic and talked about the need for us to do better as a country, while reporting on daily housing struggles often talked about the needs of different groups being in opposition.
- The Healthy Homes Standards (one of the main legal frameworks for making sure rentals are up to standard) were often taken out of context by politicians who emphasised economic concerns.
- There are lots of different on-ramps to deeper discussions about housing and health and good examples of articles that link individual stories with the bigger picture, asking us to question why as a country we allow these poor conditions to continue.
Public, political and newsmedia talk – how do they compare?
We were interested in how findings of this newsmedia analysis sat against our previous research into how politicians and the general public talk about healthy homes – so how do they compare? We found that:
- In both parliamentary debate and media commentary politicians shifted focus from health to housing supply, sometimes suggesting that healthy housing standards are a barrier to increasing our housing stock.
- In all three datasets (political, public, and the media) individual solutions to our poor housing dominated the narrative, while structural considerations were infrequent.
- Unlike the Hansard reports — which showed a narrow view of what unhealthy housing looked like — both media reporting and public discussion offer a far more nuanced view of the many ways homes can harm health, often shown through first-hand stories.
- The media depictions, and particularly the narrow political rhetoric on healthy homes do not reflect the widespread belief among the general public, demonstrated in our public narratives survey, that the health of our homes is a problem.
A full report on the Newsmedia Thematic Analysis findings can be downloaded here. Results from this research inform communications material developed under the Healthy Homes Communication Action Research programme.
*The Healthy Homes Communication Action Research Project, including this research, is made possible through funding from the BRANZ Building Research Levy and Todd Foundation and the in-kind contributions of WRHHG network organisations.
