Media Coverage of Injury Prevalence in Tennis: a Content Analysis of Selected Online Newspapers

Abstract

The health benefits of tennis have been well-described. However, like many other sports, playing tennis places athletes at risk of injury with a lot of physical and psychological effects. Thus, research has indicated the need for systematic studies to design useful strategies for the prevention and treatment of tennis-related injuries. Therefore, via a media-based analysis, this study aims to identify the most commonly reported tennis-related injuries and determine the extent of their news coverage in selected Nigerian online newspapers. Vanguard, Punch, The Nation, The Sun, and ThisDay were selected based on their popularity and online readership. A total of 113 tennis-related news articles were gathered via an internet-based search and subjected to content analysis. The articles were collected from January 2015 until December 2020 using “tennis” and “injury” as keywords. The findings showed that tennis-related injuries occur more often in lower extremities than upper extremities. Also, knee injury, hip injury, and elbow injury were the most commonly reported tennis-related injuries in the selected newspapers. Interestingly, these findings concur with previous clinical research on tennis-related injuries. Further analysis revealed that the selected newspapers paid much attention to tennis-related injuries. However, very few news stories reported official responses to tennis injuries. It was envisaged that this study could provide valuable insights on how to discover more efficient data for tennis injury analysis.