14 thoughts on “Persuasion-Based Approaches to Health Communication”
This week’s readings were about persuasion-based health communication methods. The first reading focused on developing effective media campaigns. The authors highlighted the essential elements of communication campaigns– intent to generate outcomes or effects, will impact a relatively large number of individuals, will occur in a specific period of time, and will involve an organized set of communication activities. The reading also covered how to plan a campaign, which was similar to the topics covered when we discussed planning a health communication program. Additionally, the reading discussed the key aspects of persuasive messages including incentives, credible evidence, and engaging and understandable material. I think these are essential to any health communication but especially when you are trying to persuade individuals to change their behavior. Incentives, both negative and positive, can influence beliefs. While reading this section I thought about my current work as the graduate assistant for Tobacco Free UMass where a lot of our messaging focuses on negative appeals by educating students about the negative health and environmental impacts of tobacco use.
The second reading discussed social marketing. The authors stated that “the social marketer finds ways to make the environment more favorable for the desired behavior through the development of choices with comparative advantage, favorable cost-benefit relationships, and time and place utility enhancement.†This reminded me of the social theories class I took last fall where we talked about how when possible it’s effective to make the “healthier†behavior the easier behavior so that it is more likely for individuals to be able to make the change. Now I know this isn’t always feasible but it’s something I try to keep this in mind when thinking about intervention design because who cares how great your intervention is if it’s not something that can easily be incorporated into your target population’s lifestyle.
The last reading served as a case study example of narrative communication. The ACCE Project was a DVD fil intervention with current and former African American smokers discussing their stories of smoking cessation. I thought that this was an interesting approach. Based on their preliminary evaluation, they determined that the intervention was highly engaging with the target population. While they had yet to determine the intervention’s effect on smoking cessation outcomes, I am curious as to the intervention’s impact on viewers. Since the material was highly engaging, I find a positive impact on smoking cessation to be promising.
The first reading this week focused on how one can create an effective campaign for health promotion. It emphasized the process, and highlighted how to determine the intended audience, the response you want, the message, and evidence to support the process. Something that I found particularly interesting about this reading was the discussion about incentive appeals. Negative incentive appeals are those which threaten a negative result if a behavior does not change, whereas positive appeals offer positive incentives for behavior changes. The idea of different types of incentives is not something I have consciously considered, and I realized after some thinking that in my own life when I attempt to influence the hearing health behavior of those around me, I tend to only use negative appeals. In other words, I tell friends and family that if they don’t turn their music down, they will lose their hearing. Perhaps, after reading, I could think of another approach to this type of everyday hearing health promotion.
The second reading defined and outlined social marketing. It outlined the framework of the “four p’sâ€: product, price, place, and promotion. I had never heard of these four p’s before reading and could certain see how they would help the planning of a social marketing campaign to change a behavior. The third reading was a study which examined a narrative communication intervention among a group. They hypothesized that allowing this group with a shared culture direct the narratives around the health promotion would help make sure that their message was in line with the social beliefs of the group. The researchers created a protocol and pilot tested it, and found that collecting and reviewing narratives among this group was engaging and successful. I might be able to use this type of narrative exercise in my future work, particularly if I help lead an aural rehabilitation group or work in a nursing home. I might be able to reach the group I am aiming to educate better by interweaving their own narratives and social views.
Creating a health communication campaign is a very strategic process, from choosing your audience, to the type of message you want to portray, to selecting media channels. Everything must be carefully planned out in order to create a successful campaign. As I was reading Chapter 13, I was thinking of different health communication campaigns I had seen before and which of these strategies they implemented. Tobacco campaigns are always the first I think of because they are very pervasive and there is such a wide variety of campaigns used. Nickelodeon used to run anti-smoking ads with messages that would work to debunk what teens thought of smoking. These were positive, yet serious messages. There also used to be prevention campaign messages that used fear tactics, which would often show a grotesque image of what would happen if you smoked. These ones were not on Nickelodeon, of course. The difference is the Nickelodeon campaign wanted to prevent teens from starting to smoke and bring awareness to what teens actually thought of smoking. The other campaign was fear based, working to persuade people to quit smoking, and showed the physical health sacrifices you make by smoking. The campaigns are both based around smoking, but they were aimed at different audiences, and therefore had very different strategies. When looking at the two campaigns, I think the one using facts to debunk social norms would likely be more effective than the fear-based persuasion campaign. I think people are more willing to listen to the first, whereas with the latter, they may think it is too invasive and change the channel.
I never knew the distinctions of social marketing versus a health communication campaign before, so I found Chapter 15 to be very interesting. There are a lot of similarities between the two, but the main focus of social marketing is simply behavior change through the use of the marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. All of these are critical in creating a successful social marketing campaign, but “place†stood out to me the most. The main premise of “place†is that people will do what is most convenient for them. Therefore, if you provide an alternative that is more easily accessible, it will help aid in behavior change. While reading this, I was trying to think if this would be applicable to getting people, namely college aged people, to quit vaping. Currently, in Massachusetts, there is a ban on selling all vape products. The chapter did mention that law enforcement can help to influence change, but to an extent. For this case, I don’t think enforcement of this law alone will help people to stop vaping. By banning vapes, they are making it inconvenient for people to access them, but they are not providing resources or an alternative behavior to assist people in changing this behavior. I personally have not seen any campaigns against vaping. It is a very new issue that people are still figuring the best way to address. I think a social marketing campaign could be successful, but the part I am unsure about is making the “price†section. Vaping initially became popular as a trendy thing to do, but now people are addicted and facing serious health consequences. What are the alternatives or value people will get by stopping? Vaping was supposed to be the “healthy†alternative to smoking, but that did not turn out the way it was supposed to.
The third reading talked about the process of creating health narratives. It was interesting to see the process and the thought that goes into creating a persuasive campaign with personal narratives. The part that stood out to me the most was the use of unscripted personal narratives from real people who had gone through the experience. We talked in class about polished narratives and how they can seem lacking in the aspect of realism. Through the use of open-ended questions, the researchers can help guide the question without scripting exactly what they want people to say. In the chart where we could see the original narrative versus the edited narrative, I was surprised by how similar they were. The original narratives were kept exactly the same, for the most part. I think this helps to create that sense of relatedness between the person telling the story and the audience.
This week’s readings on persuasion-based approaches to health communication covered the development of effective media campaigns for health communication, social marketing, and narrative communication for behavioral intervention. While examining these readings, I couldn’t help but try to apply the material being provided to health communication campaigns that I have recently seen. I have been noticing quite a bit of information regarding the EEE virus over the past month. Specifically, I have seen messages on road signs on the highway, on local news stations, national news stations, and even a public health alert banner on mass.gov. This campaign was in my mind for much of the first reading regarding the development of effective media campaigns.
In the first reading, the process of designing a successful health communication campaign was outlined; the intended audiences, message types, and selecting appropriate channels and formats to name just a few of topics covered. One area that I thought that the EEE campaign did very well was their cover multiple media channels and modes for disseminating their health message. The fact that they are utilizing multiple channels such as television, newspaper, radio, and even road sign PSAs makes it nearly impossible to not see a message somewhere. I think that this particular campaign has provided a great “awareness message” as I’m sure much of the public can now at least recognize EEE as being a public health issue in our area, but I definitely think that it could improve in informing the public about the signs and symptoms. Although awareness aims to motivate people to actively seek further information, I know that I personally have not and I can’t be alone.
In the third reading regarding narrative communication as a tool for health education, It made me consider the possibility that storytelling might be an effective way to further engage the public and persuade them to seek more information regarding EEE. By developing a health communication campaign that includes a personal narrative, the public would be able to see someone who has actually been affected by EEE, either directly themself or indirectly from a close family member or friend. This would be an effective way to advertise the severity of the virus so that the public would be further encouraged to take the virus seriously.
The first reading on designing a health communication campaign aligned with what I am learning about the Health belief Model, Theory of planned behavior, and the Theory of reasoned action. The factors that are associated with actually changing a persons perspective have not changed despite the every growing and changing realm of social media. A Main underpinning truth that this framework of building health communication campaigns relies on is the rational actors theory (The fact that people have their best self-interest in mind and that humans are rational beings). In order to effectively create change in a persons health behaviors a campaign must take into account perceptions about threats, attitudes, towards health behaviors, the subjective norms of surrounding culture, and the persons ability and belief in their ability to take the recommended health action.
Using personal stories in health communication campaigns is a brilliant way to utilize qualitative date analysis. Often when research is taught, in the classes I have taken thus far, qualitative date is brushed over as “less than” when compared to quantitative. There is still a belief that if it is not a randomized control trial the data is not important, but stories are powerful and informative. This study that focused on mainly hospitalized patients stories around smoking offers valuable information to both researcher but also to the general public if utilized in a health promotion campaign.
In the first reading, the section on intended audiences made me think about how we collect information on audiology patients to determine what kinds of hearing aids we should fit them with and whether they are a good candidate for hearing aids. In order to get the most success out of a hearing aid, we need to be asking patients relevant questions that cover important issues for their age group. For example, for adolescents, we need a lot of information about school but for an older patient in a nursing home, we want information on how the nursing home is run and what the setting is like. The section that covered strategic advantages of segmenting groups made me think about how we can get better results from patients if we modify our questionnaires based on the intended audience. This means considering cognitive abilities and reading levels of our patients. The messages we share with patients in clinic also relate to this reading because we have to be aware of how we are presenting the information so the patients understand it and it will stick with them.
I thought the second reading was interesting because it discussed the idea of a “product†as a behavior the social marketer wants the audience to adopt. This was interesting from an audiology point of view because we typically think of the “product†as the technology we are selling to the patient, even though there are also a lot of behavior changes that are necessary before the patient can be successful with hearing aids. This made me think about audiology in a different way because the counseling that we do is just as important as the technology we provide so we are really offering more than one product to our patients. All patients receive information differently and react differently so there are different methods and techniques to counsel patients. Going back to the first reading, making sure we are being strategic about how we market hearing aids and communication strategies can really affect the outcomes and might encourage patients to adopt these “products†like acceptance of hearing loss and hearing aids.
The last reading made me think about a recent study I read that looked at hearing aid success between patients who received motivational counseling during their appointments and patients who did not receive any counseling. The health communication article made me think about how oral storytelling could have a role in future audiology studies. Instead of smoking, a behavior that needs to be changed in audiology is wearing earplugs when you know you will be exposed to loud noises. This includes going to concerts or working with power tools. I think oral storytelling could be beneficial to encourage people to use earplugs because hearing stories of why people decided to wear earplugs to protect their hearing could be more meaningful than just hearing an audiologist tell you to wear them. The article mentioned oral storytelling being a promising in communicating with a community and I think it could also be promising for counseling purposes.
This week’s readings were all about persuasion-based approaches to health communication. Persuasion messages are all about providing the target audience with convincing reasons as to why they should adopt a behavior or abstain from a harmful one. The first reading focused specifically on media campaigns for health promotion. This reading provided very similar steps and frameworks as the other methods of health communication we have read about. Media campaigns need to be rooted in research and every step of the campaign should involve research, it should have persuasive message strategies, it has to pick appropriate channel and source methods, the message must be thoughtfully disseminated, and an evaluation must take place. Just like the other forms of health communication, media campaigns need to have a clear understanding of their target audience and create the campaign around them and their needs. The reading also pointed out that research should be used to decide how to allocate resources. This is not something I had thought about using research for but makes sense because we have discussed that often health communication campaigns have limited budgets, so using research can steer resource allocation in the right direction. There are three different possible intended audiences; the direct focal segment, people who can influence the focal segments, and policy makers. A lot of the time my mind just goes to the intended audience itself for campaigns, but it can sometimes be more useful to use other people to influence the target population’s behaviors. I thought the section that talked about maximizing quantity and quality of dissemination was really interesting. Media campaigns are more common place now since the internet and social media channels make it easy to reach audiences, so creators of campaigns have to make sure their message does not get lost in all the noise. The reading made a good point that there is a fine line between reaching low involvement receivers by repetition of the message but making sure not to cause message fatigue.
The second reading focused on what social marketing is overall. The authors stated that social marketing has been inappropriately equated with health communication and they wanted to make the distinction between the two. Social marketing is the process for effecting any type of change and is based on the processes of private sector marketing. Behavior change is the main goal of all social marketing, whether it be health related or not. It operates on an integrated marketing mix that focuses on product, price, place, and promotion. Product has 3 parts- actual which is the behavior change, core which is the benefits of the behavior, and augmented which is any tangible product or service that the social marketing might be promoting that will support behavior change. Price is getting the target audience to see that the benefits outweigh the costs of undergoing the behavior change. Place is making the behavior change convenient for the audience. Lastly, promotion is the strategic component of social marketing that is made up of creating the message and selecting the channel to be used. The reading pointed out that even though social marketing is not a theory itself, theory has been used to ground a lot of social marketing.
The last reading was a study that laid out a four-step process for using patient narratives to inform creations of interventions. The four steps that were presented were, narrative collection, narrative review, narrative editing, and pilot testing. They tried this process out on an intervention to motivate smoking cessation among low-income minority smokers in the south. Narrative communication is growing in popularity as a form of persuasive communication. Their results showed that the protocol allowed them to successfully develop a multimedia intervention and it was rated as highly engaging to their pilot group.
With the rise of social media and the digital age, it is imperative that public health develops effective media campaigns in order to promote health. Through high-quality graphics, creative ideas, and communication theory fundamentals, this can allow health promotion to reach to a wider audience. According to the reading, “campaigns should be designed with measurable objectives that define an intended response by audience members,†(206). Within the campaigns, there are numerous tactics that help facilitate health behavior change such as awareness, knowledge, salience priorities, beliefs, expectancies, values, and attitudes. Understanding and delivering the main message is key and when doing so one needs to know their target audience well.
According to the reading, Social marketing is a process of effecting change modeled on the processes used in private sector marketing that relies on multiple scientific disciplines to create programs designed to influence human behavior on a large scale. Rothschild explained that education and communication can increase awareness and provide arguments about behavior change but it will not have the power alone to deliver the benefits. I never heard of health being spoken in business terms but this might be something that is covered in health economics. I think that social marketing and health education/communication alone isn’t beneficial in health behavior change and that these tactics and techniques need to be backed up by theories in order for real behavior change to occur.
The first reading discussed how to create effective media campaigns. I found it interesting that the article stated how groups can often be looked at in two ways: who is most in need of a behavior change, and who is most likely to be influenced? Campaigns often target individuals that they believe will be receptive to the message, as it the campaign is then more likely to show an impact during evaluation. This makes me wonder how we can target individuals in the first group: those who do not want to change their behaviors, or who wouldn’t be as receptive to media messages, but that need the behavior change the most.
The second reading on social marketing provided me with new insights on planning health education programs. When learning about the four P’s, the author noted that “promotion” is typically the most visible and attention-grabbing part of the program. In my current role as a graduate assistant in the Center for Health Promotion, I feel that I have definitely put most of my emphasis on promotion, while not considering other components. Going forward, I am interested to see how I can incorporate social marketing to improve outcomes of our health education events.
The final reading detailed a program that used individual’s narratives to motivate smoking cessation among low-income, southern, African-American men who smoke. I appreciated learning about this study because I’ve been wondering about how narratives can actually be used to facilitate health education. I was surprised to see that some of the interview questions were edited and refilmed. Although I understand the purpose of this, I wonder if this in any way impacted the integrity of the individual narratives, or if participants supported the editing.
This week’s reading focused on persuasive approaches to communicating health. Chapter 13 focuses on health campaigns and the way they focus on changing the perceptions and attitudes people have about certain things. This was interesting to acknowledge because I never really saw changing perceptions and changing of behavior as different because I always saw them as directional meaning that once you change perceptions behavior changed but this is not always true. I was able to connect this to the hidradentis suppurativa campaign “No BS about HS” when the campaign was created with intention to increase knowledge about HS as create a community of people who have this.
Chapter 15 focuses on social marketing which differs from health communication because its sole purpose is to lead to change behavior. There are four ps when it comes to social marketing: Place, Price, Promotion, and Product. This reminded me of the nickelodeon worldwide day of play which literally stopped programming of tv shows for a few hours to encourage kids to exercise. Around that time, there are a lot of advertisement for toys and games that encourage physical activity. Nick even holds contests for people showing that they are active and they can win prizes.
I enjoyed reading the last reading most because it talks about narrative communication as a mean to educate others. I believe that this method is truly persuasive because it usually evoke people’s emotions because people can usually relate to narratives. The rawness of unedited scripts in research adds a layer of realness which other campaigns do not have because its dealing with real people and real stories. I think this method works best for target groups that do not have a lot of representation and the narrative comes from people that are a part of that target group because its hearing it from your own.
This week’s readings discussed persuasion-based approaches to health communication. The first reading, talked about the development of effective media campaigns to discuss health promotion. If any type of media is being used, it must be presented in a way that is accessible and relevant to the consumer. There are several different methods that can be used to distribute health-related messages, so the method that is used depends greatly on the target audience. For example, using radio or television commercials may not reach younger audiences as well as online advertisements would.
The second reading discussed the “Four P’s” of social marketing, which include product, price, place, and promotion. I would have never thought about using these factors to describe social marketing, but it makes sense to use them for this purpose. The four Ps allow initiatives to reach specific audiences, and can impact the frequency at which the initiatives are delivered.
The third reading discussed the art and science of patient story telling. This reading stood out to me the most because it allows others to share their narrative. When developing a personal narrative, the language we use must be taken into consideration. When sharing our personal experience, we need to be able to share our truth in order to accurately tell our stories.
Of this week’s readings, I enjoyed reading about narrative storytelling the most. The article said narrative storytelling as a form of persuasive communication used in health education. The benefits of using narrative storytelling is that we hear the stories come from the actual people. Since the narrative stories are personal and usually come from the target population the health campaign is coming from can be useful for them to relate and be motivated to change their behavior.
I took a class during my undergrad and we made digital stories. Many of the digital stories were about personal life experiences of either how we made it to public health, a time where where we struggled or a happy moment in our life. My classmates’ stories varied but I remember one of them speaking about an experience they had with a family member and used it to call for change and recommend a changed behavior. After hearing the story, I remember being so moved by the story that I thought about my own behaviors with this health problem. In that moment, I did not feel persuaded but just moved by the story. Now after reading this week’s readings, I realized that the way they created their story and told the story was effective in persuading me and others in the class.
Growing up, I also remember hearing a lot of stories from people recovering from addiction to alcohol and drugs. Many of the people telling the stories said, “ I am telling you this not to scare you but to raise awareness.†Hearing the stories instilled in me that I wished to never be addicted to drugs or alcohol. While every case around alcohol and substance abuse is different, I tried to take all the precautions to best avoid being addicted.
The readings this week showed me how strategic these stories still have to be even though they are an individual’s own story.
The readings this week helped me to reflect on what we learned from our guest speaker last week. For example, when the author was discussing the different message types, I thought about which message types Sarah’s campaigns used in their work. I think they would likely fall under the category of awareness, because many of the example messages were providing important statistics about the number of children that had been separated from their parents or statements about the legality of seeking asylum. I think much of the campaign was also aimed at evoking emotions to persuade people to act or spread the information. One of the example tweets also had a citation that provided credible evidence to support their message. The cited evidence likely appealed most to the more engaged audience who already had some knowledge of the situation and wanted to learn more.
The table in the first reading provided an interesting representation of the tradeoffs between elements such as access and reach with depth and credibility. The table provides a good example of how you might choose different channels or formats depending on the target population’s (called ‘focal segments’ in ch 13) engagement with the various channels and also the level of engagement they are expected to have. As the reading suggested, some audiences might pay more attention to a dramatic example of negative outcomes related to a certain behavior rather than a lengthy interview with an expert in the field.
I was also interested to learn more about the different considerations related to the actual dissemination of the messages. It makes sense that you want to repeat the message enough for people to remember the information, but not so much that people get annoyed. This made me think about the tweet storm example that Sarah discussed. I’m assuming that they chose to focus on only 2 hours in part to make sure that the target audience didn’t simply get annoyed with the repeated messages. The mention of continuity in the messages reminded me of the ‘toolkit’ of messages that Sarah described. Creating a collection of messages in advance helps to provide some variety but still remain focused on the main objectives of the campaign. Of course this also ties in to the idea of creating a particular campaign hashtag or slogan that can be repeated with various messages to provide some continuity.
I would like to learn more about evaluating the success of health communication campaigns. One of the readings mentioned that it is necessary to continue the campaign as long as resources allow in order to achieve success (ideally the campaign might continue forever). It has also been mentioned in past readings that campaign leaders should set low expectations and reasonable goals in order to increase the likelihood of a successful campaign. It makes sense that you would want to be able to report success back to the funder and to the communities involved, but I’m wondering how to balance the need for a reasonable goal with the desire to actually change health outcomes in the community.
Thanks for sharing, I also read your content carefully it was perfect. Keep shining and inspiring us all! Also check this egg rates website, which provides daily egg rates in India.
This week’s readings were about persuasion-based health communication methods. The first reading focused on developing effective media campaigns. The authors highlighted the essential elements of communication campaigns– intent to generate outcomes or effects, will impact a relatively large number of individuals, will occur in a specific period of time, and will involve an organized set of communication activities. The reading also covered how to plan a campaign, which was similar to the topics covered when we discussed planning a health communication program. Additionally, the reading discussed the key aspects of persuasive messages including incentives, credible evidence, and engaging and understandable material. I think these are essential to any health communication but especially when you are trying to persuade individuals to change their behavior. Incentives, both negative and positive, can influence beliefs. While reading this section I thought about my current work as the graduate assistant for Tobacco Free UMass where a lot of our messaging focuses on negative appeals by educating students about the negative health and environmental impacts of tobacco use.
The second reading discussed social marketing. The authors stated that “the social marketer finds ways to make the environment more favorable for the desired behavior through the development of choices with comparative advantage, favorable cost-benefit relationships, and time and place utility enhancement.†This reminded me of the social theories class I took last fall where we talked about how when possible it’s effective to make the “healthier†behavior the easier behavior so that it is more likely for individuals to be able to make the change. Now I know this isn’t always feasible but it’s something I try to keep this in mind when thinking about intervention design because who cares how great your intervention is if it’s not something that can easily be incorporated into your target population’s lifestyle.
The last reading served as a case study example of narrative communication. The ACCE Project was a DVD fil intervention with current and former African American smokers discussing their stories of smoking cessation. I thought that this was an interesting approach. Based on their preliminary evaluation, they determined that the intervention was highly engaging with the target population. While they had yet to determine the intervention’s effect on smoking cessation outcomes, I am curious as to the intervention’s impact on viewers. Since the material was highly engaging, I find a positive impact on smoking cessation to be promising.
The first reading this week focused on how one can create an effective campaign for health promotion. It emphasized the process, and highlighted how to determine the intended audience, the response you want, the message, and evidence to support the process. Something that I found particularly interesting about this reading was the discussion about incentive appeals. Negative incentive appeals are those which threaten a negative result if a behavior does not change, whereas positive appeals offer positive incentives for behavior changes. The idea of different types of incentives is not something I have consciously considered, and I realized after some thinking that in my own life when I attempt to influence the hearing health behavior of those around me, I tend to only use negative appeals. In other words, I tell friends and family that if they don’t turn their music down, they will lose their hearing. Perhaps, after reading, I could think of another approach to this type of everyday hearing health promotion.
The second reading defined and outlined social marketing. It outlined the framework of the “four p’sâ€: product, price, place, and promotion. I had never heard of these four p’s before reading and could certain see how they would help the planning of a social marketing campaign to change a behavior. The third reading was a study which examined a narrative communication intervention among a group. They hypothesized that allowing this group with a shared culture direct the narratives around the health promotion would help make sure that their message was in line with the social beliefs of the group. The researchers created a protocol and pilot tested it, and found that collecting and reviewing narratives among this group was engaging and successful. I might be able to use this type of narrative exercise in my future work, particularly if I help lead an aural rehabilitation group or work in a nursing home. I might be able to reach the group I am aiming to educate better by interweaving their own narratives and social views.
Creating a health communication campaign is a very strategic process, from choosing your audience, to the type of message you want to portray, to selecting media channels. Everything must be carefully planned out in order to create a successful campaign. As I was reading Chapter 13, I was thinking of different health communication campaigns I had seen before and which of these strategies they implemented. Tobacco campaigns are always the first I think of because they are very pervasive and there is such a wide variety of campaigns used. Nickelodeon used to run anti-smoking ads with messages that would work to debunk what teens thought of smoking. These were positive, yet serious messages. There also used to be prevention campaign messages that used fear tactics, which would often show a grotesque image of what would happen if you smoked. These ones were not on Nickelodeon, of course. The difference is the Nickelodeon campaign wanted to prevent teens from starting to smoke and bring awareness to what teens actually thought of smoking. The other campaign was fear based, working to persuade people to quit smoking, and showed the physical health sacrifices you make by smoking. The campaigns are both based around smoking, but they were aimed at different audiences, and therefore had very different strategies. When looking at the two campaigns, I think the one using facts to debunk social norms would likely be more effective than the fear-based persuasion campaign. I think people are more willing to listen to the first, whereas with the latter, they may think it is too invasive and change the channel.
I never knew the distinctions of social marketing versus a health communication campaign before, so I found Chapter 15 to be very interesting. There are a lot of similarities between the two, but the main focus of social marketing is simply behavior change through the use of the marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. All of these are critical in creating a successful social marketing campaign, but “place†stood out to me the most. The main premise of “place†is that people will do what is most convenient for them. Therefore, if you provide an alternative that is more easily accessible, it will help aid in behavior change. While reading this, I was trying to think if this would be applicable to getting people, namely college aged people, to quit vaping. Currently, in Massachusetts, there is a ban on selling all vape products. The chapter did mention that law enforcement can help to influence change, but to an extent. For this case, I don’t think enforcement of this law alone will help people to stop vaping. By banning vapes, they are making it inconvenient for people to access them, but they are not providing resources or an alternative behavior to assist people in changing this behavior. I personally have not seen any campaigns against vaping. It is a very new issue that people are still figuring the best way to address. I think a social marketing campaign could be successful, but the part I am unsure about is making the “price†section. Vaping initially became popular as a trendy thing to do, but now people are addicted and facing serious health consequences. What are the alternatives or value people will get by stopping? Vaping was supposed to be the “healthy†alternative to smoking, but that did not turn out the way it was supposed to.
The third reading talked about the process of creating health narratives. It was interesting to see the process and the thought that goes into creating a persuasive campaign with personal narratives. The part that stood out to me the most was the use of unscripted personal narratives from real people who had gone through the experience. We talked in class about polished narratives and how they can seem lacking in the aspect of realism. Through the use of open-ended questions, the researchers can help guide the question without scripting exactly what they want people to say. In the chart where we could see the original narrative versus the edited narrative, I was surprised by how similar they were. The original narratives were kept exactly the same, for the most part. I think this helps to create that sense of relatedness between the person telling the story and the audience.
This week’s readings on persuasion-based approaches to health communication covered the development of effective media campaigns for health communication, social marketing, and narrative communication for behavioral intervention. While examining these readings, I couldn’t help but try to apply the material being provided to health communication campaigns that I have recently seen. I have been noticing quite a bit of information regarding the EEE virus over the past month. Specifically, I have seen messages on road signs on the highway, on local news stations, national news stations, and even a public health alert banner on mass.gov. This campaign was in my mind for much of the first reading regarding the development of effective media campaigns.
In the first reading, the process of designing a successful health communication campaign was outlined; the intended audiences, message types, and selecting appropriate channels and formats to name just a few of topics covered. One area that I thought that the EEE campaign did very well was their cover multiple media channels and modes for disseminating their health message. The fact that they are utilizing multiple channels such as television, newspaper, radio, and even road sign PSAs makes it nearly impossible to not see a message somewhere. I think that this particular campaign has provided a great “awareness message” as I’m sure much of the public can now at least recognize EEE as being a public health issue in our area, but I definitely think that it could improve in informing the public about the signs and symptoms. Although awareness aims to motivate people to actively seek further information, I know that I personally have not and I can’t be alone.
In the third reading regarding narrative communication as a tool for health education, It made me consider the possibility that storytelling might be an effective way to further engage the public and persuade them to seek more information regarding EEE. By developing a health communication campaign that includes a personal narrative, the public would be able to see someone who has actually been affected by EEE, either directly themself or indirectly from a close family member or friend. This would be an effective way to advertise the severity of the virus so that the public would be further encouraged to take the virus seriously.
The first reading on designing a health communication campaign aligned with what I am learning about the Health belief Model, Theory of planned behavior, and the Theory of reasoned action. The factors that are associated with actually changing a persons perspective have not changed despite the every growing and changing realm of social media. A Main underpinning truth that this framework of building health communication campaigns relies on is the rational actors theory (The fact that people have their best self-interest in mind and that humans are rational beings). In order to effectively create change in a persons health behaviors a campaign must take into account perceptions about threats, attitudes, towards health behaviors, the subjective norms of surrounding culture, and the persons ability and belief in their ability to take the recommended health action.
Using personal stories in health communication campaigns is a brilliant way to utilize qualitative date analysis. Often when research is taught, in the classes I have taken thus far, qualitative date is brushed over as “less than” when compared to quantitative. There is still a belief that if it is not a randomized control trial the data is not important, but stories are powerful and informative. This study that focused on mainly hospitalized patients stories around smoking offers valuable information to both researcher but also to the general public if utilized in a health promotion campaign.
In the first reading, the section on intended audiences made me think about how we collect information on audiology patients to determine what kinds of hearing aids we should fit them with and whether they are a good candidate for hearing aids. In order to get the most success out of a hearing aid, we need to be asking patients relevant questions that cover important issues for their age group. For example, for adolescents, we need a lot of information about school but for an older patient in a nursing home, we want information on how the nursing home is run and what the setting is like. The section that covered strategic advantages of segmenting groups made me think about how we can get better results from patients if we modify our questionnaires based on the intended audience. This means considering cognitive abilities and reading levels of our patients. The messages we share with patients in clinic also relate to this reading because we have to be aware of how we are presenting the information so the patients understand it and it will stick with them.
I thought the second reading was interesting because it discussed the idea of a “product†as a behavior the social marketer wants the audience to adopt. This was interesting from an audiology point of view because we typically think of the “product†as the technology we are selling to the patient, even though there are also a lot of behavior changes that are necessary before the patient can be successful with hearing aids. This made me think about audiology in a different way because the counseling that we do is just as important as the technology we provide so we are really offering more than one product to our patients. All patients receive information differently and react differently so there are different methods and techniques to counsel patients. Going back to the first reading, making sure we are being strategic about how we market hearing aids and communication strategies can really affect the outcomes and might encourage patients to adopt these “products†like acceptance of hearing loss and hearing aids.
The last reading made me think about a recent study I read that looked at hearing aid success between patients who received motivational counseling during their appointments and patients who did not receive any counseling. The health communication article made me think about how oral storytelling could have a role in future audiology studies. Instead of smoking, a behavior that needs to be changed in audiology is wearing earplugs when you know you will be exposed to loud noises. This includes going to concerts or working with power tools. I think oral storytelling could be beneficial to encourage people to use earplugs because hearing stories of why people decided to wear earplugs to protect their hearing could be more meaningful than just hearing an audiologist tell you to wear them. The article mentioned oral storytelling being a promising in communicating with a community and I think it could also be promising for counseling purposes.
This week’s readings were all about persuasion-based approaches to health communication. Persuasion messages are all about providing the target audience with convincing reasons as to why they should adopt a behavior or abstain from a harmful one. The first reading focused specifically on media campaigns for health promotion. This reading provided very similar steps and frameworks as the other methods of health communication we have read about. Media campaigns need to be rooted in research and every step of the campaign should involve research, it should have persuasive message strategies, it has to pick appropriate channel and source methods, the message must be thoughtfully disseminated, and an evaluation must take place. Just like the other forms of health communication, media campaigns need to have a clear understanding of their target audience and create the campaign around them and their needs. The reading also pointed out that research should be used to decide how to allocate resources. This is not something I had thought about using research for but makes sense because we have discussed that often health communication campaigns have limited budgets, so using research can steer resource allocation in the right direction. There are three different possible intended audiences; the direct focal segment, people who can influence the focal segments, and policy makers. A lot of the time my mind just goes to the intended audience itself for campaigns, but it can sometimes be more useful to use other people to influence the target population’s behaviors. I thought the section that talked about maximizing quantity and quality of dissemination was really interesting. Media campaigns are more common place now since the internet and social media channels make it easy to reach audiences, so creators of campaigns have to make sure their message does not get lost in all the noise. The reading made a good point that there is a fine line between reaching low involvement receivers by repetition of the message but making sure not to cause message fatigue.
The second reading focused on what social marketing is overall. The authors stated that social marketing has been inappropriately equated with health communication and they wanted to make the distinction between the two. Social marketing is the process for effecting any type of change and is based on the processes of private sector marketing. Behavior change is the main goal of all social marketing, whether it be health related or not. It operates on an integrated marketing mix that focuses on product, price, place, and promotion. Product has 3 parts- actual which is the behavior change, core which is the benefits of the behavior, and augmented which is any tangible product or service that the social marketing might be promoting that will support behavior change. Price is getting the target audience to see that the benefits outweigh the costs of undergoing the behavior change. Place is making the behavior change convenient for the audience. Lastly, promotion is the strategic component of social marketing that is made up of creating the message and selecting the channel to be used. The reading pointed out that even though social marketing is not a theory itself, theory has been used to ground a lot of social marketing.
The last reading was a study that laid out a four-step process for using patient narratives to inform creations of interventions. The four steps that were presented were, narrative collection, narrative review, narrative editing, and pilot testing. They tried this process out on an intervention to motivate smoking cessation among low-income minority smokers in the south. Narrative communication is growing in popularity as a form of persuasive communication. Their results showed that the protocol allowed them to successfully develop a multimedia intervention and it was rated as highly engaging to their pilot group.
With the rise of social media and the digital age, it is imperative that public health develops effective media campaigns in order to promote health. Through high-quality graphics, creative ideas, and communication theory fundamentals, this can allow health promotion to reach to a wider audience. According to the reading, “campaigns should be designed with measurable objectives that define an intended response by audience members,†(206). Within the campaigns, there are numerous tactics that help facilitate health behavior change such as awareness, knowledge, salience priorities, beliefs, expectancies, values, and attitudes. Understanding and delivering the main message is key and when doing so one needs to know their target audience well.
According to the reading, Social marketing is a process of effecting change modeled on the processes used in private sector marketing that relies on multiple scientific disciplines to create programs designed to influence human behavior on a large scale. Rothschild explained that education and communication can increase awareness and provide arguments about behavior change but it will not have the power alone to deliver the benefits. I never heard of health being spoken in business terms but this might be something that is covered in health economics. I think that social marketing and health education/communication alone isn’t beneficial in health behavior change and that these tactics and techniques need to be backed up by theories in order for real behavior change to occur.
The first reading discussed how to create effective media campaigns. I found it interesting that the article stated how groups can often be looked at in two ways: who is most in need of a behavior change, and who is most likely to be influenced? Campaigns often target individuals that they believe will be receptive to the message, as it the campaign is then more likely to show an impact during evaluation. This makes me wonder how we can target individuals in the first group: those who do not want to change their behaviors, or who wouldn’t be as receptive to media messages, but that need the behavior change the most.
The second reading on social marketing provided me with new insights on planning health education programs. When learning about the four P’s, the author noted that “promotion” is typically the most visible and attention-grabbing part of the program. In my current role as a graduate assistant in the Center for Health Promotion, I feel that I have definitely put most of my emphasis on promotion, while not considering other components. Going forward, I am interested to see how I can incorporate social marketing to improve outcomes of our health education events.
The final reading detailed a program that used individual’s narratives to motivate smoking cessation among low-income, southern, African-American men who smoke. I appreciated learning about this study because I’ve been wondering about how narratives can actually be used to facilitate health education. I was surprised to see that some of the interview questions were edited and refilmed. Although I understand the purpose of this, I wonder if this in any way impacted the integrity of the individual narratives, or if participants supported the editing.
This week’s reading focused on persuasive approaches to communicating health. Chapter 13 focuses on health campaigns and the way they focus on changing the perceptions and attitudes people have about certain things. This was interesting to acknowledge because I never really saw changing perceptions and changing of behavior as different because I always saw them as directional meaning that once you change perceptions behavior changed but this is not always true. I was able to connect this to the hidradentis suppurativa campaign “No BS about HS” when the campaign was created with intention to increase knowledge about HS as create a community of people who have this.
Chapter 15 focuses on social marketing which differs from health communication because its sole purpose is to lead to change behavior. There are four ps when it comes to social marketing: Place, Price, Promotion, and Product. This reminded me of the nickelodeon worldwide day of play which literally stopped programming of tv shows for a few hours to encourage kids to exercise. Around that time, there are a lot of advertisement for toys and games that encourage physical activity. Nick even holds contests for people showing that they are active and they can win prizes.
I enjoyed reading the last reading most because it talks about narrative communication as a mean to educate others. I believe that this method is truly persuasive because it usually evoke people’s emotions because people can usually relate to narratives. The rawness of unedited scripts in research adds a layer of realness which other campaigns do not have because its dealing with real people and real stories. I think this method works best for target groups that do not have a lot of representation and the narrative comes from people that are a part of that target group because its hearing it from your own.
This week’s readings discussed persuasion-based approaches to health communication. The first reading, talked about the development of effective media campaigns to discuss health promotion. If any type of media is being used, it must be presented in a way that is accessible and relevant to the consumer. There are several different methods that can be used to distribute health-related messages, so the method that is used depends greatly on the target audience. For example, using radio or television commercials may not reach younger audiences as well as online advertisements would.
The second reading discussed the “Four P’s” of social marketing, which include product, price, place, and promotion. I would have never thought about using these factors to describe social marketing, but it makes sense to use them for this purpose. The four Ps allow initiatives to reach specific audiences, and can impact the frequency at which the initiatives are delivered.
The third reading discussed the art and science of patient story telling. This reading stood out to me the most because it allows others to share their narrative. When developing a personal narrative, the language we use must be taken into consideration. When sharing our personal experience, we need to be able to share our truth in order to accurately tell our stories.
Of this week’s readings, I enjoyed reading about narrative storytelling the most. The article said narrative storytelling as a form of persuasive communication used in health education. The benefits of using narrative storytelling is that we hear the stories come from the actual people. Since the narrative stories are personal and usually come from the target population the health campaign is coming from can be useful for them to relate and be motivated to change their behavior.
I took a class during my undergrad and we made digital stories. Many of the digital stories were about personal life experiences of either how we made it to public health, a time where where we struggled or a happy moment in our life. My classmates’ stories varied but I remember one of them speaking about an experience they had with a family member and used it to call for change and recommend a changed behavior. After hearing the story, I remember being so moved by the story that I thought about my own behaviors with this health problem. In that moment, I did not feel persuaded but just moved by the story. Now after reading this week’s readings, I realized that the way they created their story and told the story was effective in persuading me and others in the class.
Growing up, I also remember hearing a lot of stories from people recovering from addiction to alcohol and drugs. Many of the people telling the stories said, “ I am telling you this not to scare you but to raise awareness.†Hearing the stories instilled in me that I wished to never be addicted to drugs or alcohol. While every case around alcohol and substance abuse is different, I tried to take all the precautions to best avoid being addicted.
The readings this week showed me how strategic these stories still have to be even though they are an individual’s own story.
The readings this week helped me to reflect on what we learned from our guest speaker last week. For example, when the author was discussing the different message types, I thought about which message types Sarah’s campaigns used in their work. I think they would likely fall under the category of awareness, because many of the example messages were providing important statistics about the number of children that had been separated from their parents or statements about the legality of seeking asylum. I think much of the campaign was also aimed at evoking emotions to persuade people to act or spread the information. One of the example tweets also had a citation that provided credible evidence to support their message. The cited evidence likely appealed most to the more engaged audience who already had some knowledge of the situation and wanted to learn more.
The table in the first reading provided an interesting representation of the tradeoffs between elements such as access and reach with depth and credibility. The table provides a good example of how you might choose different channels or formats depending on the target population’s (called ‘focal segments’ in ch 13) engagement with the various channels and also the level of engagement they are expected to have. As the reading suggested, some audiences might pay more attention to a dramatic example of negative outcomes related to a certain behavior rather than a lengthy interview with an expert in the field.
I was also interested to learn more about the different considerations related to the actual dissemination of the messages. It makes sense that you want to repeat the message enough for people to remember the information, but not so much that people get annoyed. This made me think about the tweet storm example that Sarah discussed. I’m assuming that they chose to focus on only 2 hours in part to make sure that the target audience didn’t simply get annoyed with the repeated messages. The mention of continuity in the messages reminded me of the ‘toolkit’ of messages that Sarah described. Creating a collection of messages in advance helps to provide some variety but still remain focused on the main objectives of the campaign. Of course this also ties in to the idea of creating a particular campaign hashtag or slogan that can be repeated with various messages to provide some continuity.
I would like to learn more about evaluating the success of health communication campaigns. One of the readings mentioned that it is necessary to continue the campaign as long as resources allow in order to achieve success (ideally the campaign might continue forever). It has also been mentioned in past readings that campaign leaders should set low expectations and reasonable goals in order to increase the likelihood of a successful campaign. It makes sense that you would want to be able to report success back to the funder and to the communities involved, but I’m wondering how to balance the need for a reasonable goal with the desire to actually change health outcomes in the community.
Thanks for sharing, I also read your content carefully it was perfect. Keep shining and inspiring us all! Also check this egg rates website, which provides daily egg rates in India.