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This is the course blog for PH 663 -- the theory-based, practical, action-packed Health Communication course for ace Health Promotion students in the Graduate School of Public Health at San Diego State University.
Week 1: Course intro & overview
-Health Communications
-Types of Communication
-Functions of Communication
Week 2: Labor Day-No Class
Week 3: How Theory Shapes Health Campaigns
-SMCRD
-Them/Us
-Who says/hears what
-Hierarchy of effects
-2 Paths
-"house"
Week 4: Formative Research Overview, Presentation Skills
-"Wrong reason" Health Promotion
-Uses & gratification
-Effects model
-Selectivity
-Formative research
-Active listening
-Focus groups
-Presenation skills
-Body language
Week 5: Understanding & Segmenting Your Audiences I
-Benefits and features
-Segmentation principles
-Types of Segmentation (Demographic, Geographic, Psychographic, Behavioral)
Week 6: Understanding & Segmenting Your Audiences II
-VALS segmentation
-PRIZM geographic
-Forward segmentation
-Backward segmentation
-Inductive
Week 7: Health Literacy
-Health literacy
-Functional literacy
-Levels of literacy (and %s)
-"Showing" vs. "telling"
-Plain language
-SMOG/FOG
Week 8: Message Strategies
-Benefits
-Barriers
-Model
-Types of messages (fear, testimonial, slice of life)
-Risk communication
-Gains vs. losses
-Reference points/anchors
Week 10: Advertising, Public Relations & Media Advocacy
Week 11: Web 2.0, Games, & Interactive Technology
-"media hound"
-Reporters NOT your friends
-Manipulation and ethics
-Find your voice
-Positioning
-"Top of mind"
-Web 2.0 (10 principles)
Week 13: Popular Culture and Entertainment
-Communication contract (presuasion/entertainment)
-Agenda setting
-Entertainment-Education Continuum
Week 14: Mini-Project 2 Presentations
LESSONS TO KEEP IN MIND FOR FINAL PROJECT
- The project should be a reflection of the objectives
- Remember that methods and strategies are distinct concepts
- It's ok to modify objectives and strategies... justify the change!
- Great job not reading from the slides!!!
26 comments:
What I found interesting in Monday's class was the group exercise on how to promote nutrition or physical activity to seniors or teens. Each group had a lot of interesting and different approaches to getting their target audience involved. I realized that a lot of the same channels can be used to promote messages to both high and low level participants of a potential program. As a health communicator, you've really got to be creative and think "outside the box" to grab your audience's attention. I think that's a huge challenge in trying to promote health programs. There are so many great community programs for the public, but too often they go unheard or underutilized because it's being directed to the wrong population, lack of promotion, not enough money, culture and language barriers, and/or insufficient funds to spread the word about health programs. How can we possibly fill in these gaps to make health programs successful? Guess the answer lies within us and how "we" can think "outside the box" to work together and fill in the missing pieces.
This week we delved heavily into theories that shape health campaigns. Strong health campaigns are rooted in research and theories of public health, but there is also the major aspect of how to market these campaigns so the public will actually listen, learn, and change their behaviors. it seems against the nature of working for a social good to manipulate people into embracing our messages, and, initially, manipulation makes me think of so many corporate ad campaigns that have led people to their current poor health habits... it makes me cringe a bit to think of going to that level to really be successful. Wouldn’t it be nice if people just intrinsically cared about being healthy? If it wasn't such a forced concept? Dreamland is a nice place to visit. I’ll just have to work on making the truth that appealing!
Communication was presented as a house, and manipulation as merely coming in through the window instead of the front door. We have to find ways to grab people's attention so we can promote our messages without being thought of as solicitors. This all makes me want to take marketing classes to learn to get the attention of the public, hold on to it, and get the message across... to use the media theories for the greater good of the people, not the corporations!
The most interesting part of this weeks class was the dual process persuasion. Especially in advertising it's amazing how much emphasis is placed on the heuristic thinking of people rather than the systematic side. It seems to me that most advertisers seem to assume that the audience they are targeting does not really have the intelligence to think too hard about any ad. While this might work for normal advertising while promotion health communication messages I feel that any campaign should probably start off heuristically but the campaign needs to eventually appeal to the systematic thinking of people to have a long term impact.
I also found the lab interesting. Before this my only experience with 'lab' work has consisted of smelly gases and broken beakers:-) I found it a relief to actually be doing a lab that involved planning a campaign for seniors to promote physical activity. The approaches based on what type of audience really gave me an insight into how different each campaign needs to be to appeal to that specific target audience. Creativity is definitely the key here...
When we reviewed our class assignment this week, to define and observe communication, I found the variety of classmates definitions interesting. Many stressed the bidirectional exchange of communication. Theory uses bidirectional exchanges when preparing messages but, as we discussed, people do not think systematically rather heuristically. Thus campaigns will often be structured around unidirectional communication for the heuristic thinker.
I do not, however, wish to be a manipulator. Although some stated that manipulation has no value associated with it, making it neither good or bad, I disagree. Using insidious means to create change is never positive yet often justified as a means to an end. Public health campaigns do not focus on those who think about the arguments and issues already but rather those who don't care or know their actions are unhealthy but do them anyway. Takes smoking for example. Smoking any amount of cigarettes will affect your health. It will decrease the longevity and quality of your life. Smokers, any one who smokes a cigarette at any time, can justify themselves out of these statements, also known as denial, rather easily. So my question is then Why do we do what we know is wrong?
Where is the theory on peoples ability to do willingly what we know to be wrong? I'd like to reiterate the point that using decite or artful tactics to reach the heuristic thinker should not be as important as causing people to think more systematically regarding health choices.
I had a lot of fun in class this week. I found the group presentations to be both fun and challenging. I think if I were not in a group there is no way I could have come up with some many different ideas on my own. The project would have been too challenging for one person but brainstorming with several really opened my eyes in what I personally can achieve and what we can do as a group. It was a great initial exercise and it really makes me wonder what we really could achieve given budget guidelines and some research background on serious and teens today.
On a different topic, I wanted to mention that in the reading and in class we discuss health campaigns and compare them to typical advertisements for consumer products. Lately I have noticed a HUGE to do about trans-fat in foods. New York how outlawed trans-fats and there have been countless other mentioning in the news lately. But I also noticed that KFC is using the lack of trans-fats in their fried chicken to get people to buy more of their product. It really makes me think about how they have hidden the fact that friend chicken is still a high-fat item, but they disguise that with "no trans-fat". I think the public really has to think to see through this campaign but I also get the impression that KFC is using heuristic methods to sell more chicken. Any thoughts?
The group presentation seemed to be a little more difficult than expected for most of us. It made me realize how much time you really do need to invest in designing a campaign that will reach your target audience. It is fairly easy to see how a message/program can get looked over regardless of how much time and money are put into it if the message is not received or interpreted correctly.
I was also a fan of the lab section of class this week. I was amazed at how difficult we found the assignment to be. I'm very passionate about the topic we were given- Physical activity and teens-yet I was stuck when it came to deciding what was really going to work for our audience.
We chose Hannah Montana for our source. Yes, I realize that virtually no public health program has the means to hire a celebrity for a high school health campaign...but it was fun to imagine:)
So what would practically work for our audience? Maybe "cool" local high school and college athletes to promote physical activity? That would definately be cost-effective.
I think the idea of dual process persuasion is helpful to the creation of health campaigns because we know we have to focus our efforts on attractive and powerful cues to reach the majority of the audience.
This week for the “lab”/group work my group had nutrition with the teen population. We started out talking about the high involvement group and seemed to breeze through. When we got to the low involvement group, it became much more difficult. It was nice to have other people to bounce ideas off of and try to figure out what would really motivate the teens who were not really all that interested. This exercise just really emphasized that it is much easier to get people involved when they already hold some sort of interest, than to get people who don’t really care to begin caring. This leads to the importance of knowing your audience and what will get them to be interested.
I was in Lindsay’s group on teen nutrition and I agree; it was difficult to come up with a source and a channel for teens that already lacked interest in nutrition. Granted, we only had 15 minutes to come up with our campaign but I defiantly understand why educators spend a lot of time and money doing research and planning campaigns.
If you can’t find a way to give your message relevance to the person who’s receiving it than it’s purely a waste of time and finding relevance to a population is defiantly very challenging.
FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO ADD PHOTOS AND VIDEOS AND OTHER COOL STUFF ON THEIR BLOG...
Look at my post and COMMENT ;)
http://lsirikul.blogspot.com/
I posted a blog on How to do stuff for those who just joined the Blogging World.
Although all group presentations were well done given the limited amount of time given, the one group campaign that stood out the most for me was the one proposing the use of Hannah Montana's celebrity.
The reason being they were able to apply one benefit/cue, etc. so that it would involve the target audience. At the same time, the campaign was unique enough to utilize more or less the same resources to pass 2 separate messages for 2 different groups - thus, potentially reserving costs.
I also found it interesting how many groups utilized the power of celebrity to convey within their campaigns....
This week’s class focused on the key elements of communication (Source, Message, Channel, Receiver, and Destination) and how theory shapes health campaigns.
One of the main points I took from this week’s lecture and readings is the importance of understanding your target audience. As health promoters we want to modify behavior and encourage our target audience to engage in healthy behaviors. In order to influence and ultimately change any behavior, we must understand who our target audience is, what they like, how they think, and who will best influence and motive them.
My favorite reading of the week was a piece on Dual Processing Persuasion. I remember reading about this when I was a psychology undergrad at UCSB, but I did not fully appreciate its message until now. Dual Process claims that people think in two different modes: systematic and heuristic. According to Dual Process, our way of thinking determines influence. A person who is thinking systematically is carefully thinking and looking for evidence, facts, and other arguments. On the other hand, a person who is thinking heuristically is not thinking very carefully at all, but rather skimming the surface for main ideas and cues. In order to influence behavior, we must understand which mode of thinking our target audience is using and then match the right influential tools (arguments or cues) with their mode.
Last but not least, lab was fantastic. Divided into groups we were asked to apply what we learned and develop health campaigns for different target audiences. My group was assigned to a campaign promoting physical activity for teens. Thinking about the power of social influence amongst most teenagers, my group decided that a celebrity speaker, and in particular Hannah Montana (Supposedly she’s a big teenage superstar?), promoting “Get fit with friends” would work quite nicely. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the other campaigns, and once again saw the importance of designing messages according your target audience.
Theories in health communication was the main topic of todays class. I enjoyed hearing the different ideas groups had on how to communicate a campaign to certain populations. I really liked the Hannah Montana group focusing on teens. Its amazing how much power celebrities have and how much they influence our behavior. This is especially true for teenagers. Teenagers look up to these celebrities as role models and sadly true, there are many celeb role models out there that just aren't very positive. Well, not Hannah Montana, she is ok:). I think it is important to use this icons to sell our health communication messages.
The lecture this week was very interesting, especially the part on Dual Process Persuasion. I am realizing that health communication has many different parts and that for us to modify a behavior it important to think about the source, message, channel, receiver, and destination of our health communication campaign. The group exercise in class was also very interesting, it was difficult for me to think about the different ideas on how to get low involvement seniors to get up and be motivated to exercise. In theory it seems so easy to understand, but the application process was much harder than I thought it was going to be, but having people "brainstorm" in a group can inspire some great ideas! One aspect of the lecture that Dr. Engelberg talked about that I can really relate to is the concept of personal relevance. Looking at my own behavior, I do tend to pay attention more closely to issues that are personally relevant to my own life. It's an "AHA!" moment for me that health communication is partly about finding out what makes our target population "tick"!
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Howdy! Sorry about the previous comment...I was having troubles with logging on. I really should do this blog on Monday after class when it's all fresh in my head instead of Friday morning during a break at work. Live and learn...
Like Ceci, I had a good time with the lab. Perhaps it was the group or the topic or just a case of the Mondays. We had a diffucult time differentiating between older folks who are low involvement vs. high involvement. We were going to use the static environmental setting of an assisted living community or a nursing home, but realized the residents in these places lead fairly similar lives and don't always have control over their nutrition. Additionally a nutrition-based intervention would mostly focus on the staff at these locations, not the patrons. Soo....we came up with the swell idea of Paul Neuman (the hottie and the philanthropist) to pull in both groups of high and low involvement. I have never given this much thought to how a seemingly homogeneous group of people can indeed be quite different in the ways in which they need to be approached for affective communcation strategies. Fun stuff...
This week in class we discussed ways to help get our message as health communicators across to our target population. We discussed ways that advertisers use - does sex, beauty, fame and money sound familiar to anyone? Obviously that technique is effective but is it something we should be using as health communicators? Part of me feels that if it is going to grab the attnetion of people them yes, we should utilize these tools. But are we manipulating our popluation?
We also did a lab in class that got us thinking about planning health communication campaigns. Our group was working with teens and physical avtivty. We chose to target 8th grade females and so of course we chose Hannah Montana as our spokeswoman.
For those of you that do not know who she is I've posted a picture on my blog! Of course it is not realistic that a celebrity would always be the source of the message. But wouldn't it be great if we had the means to have a well-know, influential person be a part of our messages. Maybe it wouldn't always lead to a behavior change but it sure would grab people's attention. So if sex, beauty, fame, and money are effective tools for advertisers, who says they can't be effective for health communicators?
Comments below were posted to my blog after class on Monday that is why everything is referred to as "today":
Today I was able to figure out how to post pictures on the blog! yahooo! This blogging thing might turn out to be pretty fun after all. Last week I was in San Fransisco and took some pictures of health advertising communication I saw around campus. In addition I took a photo of USF's health promotion office - which was very small and pretty sad looking (an even greater tragedy after I found out that they are a high ranking school with respect to sports...) I will try to get those pics up later after I download them to the computer. It is a shame that health promotion and disease prevention isn't a larger priority on school campuses.
As for class today I found the discussion interesting - I would say my favorite part was the analogy of getting people into the communication house - when Dr. Engelberg said he thinks that "atleast once a year even the chimney should be used" - I thought that was great stuff. I think that really drove home the point that we should try and exhaust every imaginable means to get people to listen to our health messages! Think outside the box as much as possible when designing a campaign - you don't always have to use the front door.
I really enjoyed our exercise, "Putting Theory into Campaign Development", where we were able to put into action what we learned in class today. I had never thought that to create a campaign you would actually want two different objectives, messages etc. so that you could target your campaign to both High level and Low Level audiences. Wow - what a concept - pretty straight forward - but I would have never thought to do that if someone had sat me down a few weeks ago and asked me how I would attempt to put together a physical activity campaign for teenagers, like Dr. Engelberg did today. It makes sense that people are different, and to maximize the effect of a campaign we want to take these differences into consideration - so that EVERYONE can benefit from all of the hard work that goes behind creating a health campaign - not just those who are ready to act.
Lastly, I wanted to comment on the idea of understanding that "you" are not the center of the universe, but rather "them". This reminded me a lot of the community participatory research that we had learned about in Dr. Ayala's PH662 class (I think that was the #). Maybe it would be interesting to learn more about ways to find out/assess what "they" want? Thats all for now. Check my blog for new pics soon. =) -Crystal
Today's class was full of an array of activities. Some of the highlights included comparing our definitions of communication and health communication from the "Code your own communication" assignment. Although the definitions did not seem to differ substantially, the numbers of total communication instances in different people's days did vary considerably. I believe this conundrum was primarily due to differences in how people spent the one day that they recorded - supporting the notion that one "experiment" is rarely reliable, no matter how well-designed it may be. Perhaps if we had each coded an entire week (or at least three days) and calculate the means, our numbers would have been more similar.
Another interesting activity was the group campaign idea presentations. My group (the "5-a-Dayer's") was asked to design a program targeting teens' nutrition. I liked our ideas and thought they should be implemented somewhere :) Maybe someday I'll take on such a large burden...ha, ha, ha!!! Listening to the other groups' ideas was very interesting. Funny how celebrity endorsement was very popular, but we tended to plan to bring celebrities in to reach out locally (a rather unlikely feat) rather than to (relatively) simply have them participate in a campaign by making a commercial or something, even though they would reach a much wider audience. I guess we all still tend to think along the lines of personalization in this modern world of mass media campaigns on the Internet and television.
Just like most of my classmates, I would make a point for the lab work we did the class. I really enjoyed the hands on experience of really doing something on your own. Though it was a short little exercise, but it was so important as almost everyone had to tease their brain cells and come up with something that is creative and appealing, yet appropriate to the target audience. I feel I am a slacker and a little hesitant when it comes to do something creative ( I think I have some solid wood in the creativity center of brain, in place of some working neurons) . But it was a fun exercise to work with a group and have everyone agree as to what should be the right channel and message for the seniors for PA. It was interesting to see how almost everyone used celebrities as their channel. I feel it was going in the right direction and in this world of competing contingencies, we have to make our campaigns more innovative and receptive, and use of celebrities and latest technology would serve a very good purpose for that. I mean, if the junk food industry uses the hot, good looking models to promote sales, the health campaigns should use equally hot and famous celebrities to promote whole and organic foods. But channel is just one component, what is equally important is the actual message which should be tailored so that its culturally and socially appropriate.
OK now Ihave the right address for the post, I was feeling a bit out of the loop since I had to miss class unexpectedly last week, but im back and look forward to catching up with all of you
Josie
HI all
So I was not in class 9/10 but after looking a thte notes that I got from a very helpful classmate, I found several concepts from class to be interesting. The "House" concept is of particular interest to me, and ways of getting people into the house are not as important as actually getting them in there... even if that means using a "wrong reason". This entails the use of imagination and resource pooling at the very least to fill the "house" with representative pool of people, which is an important starting point for any campaign.
Comment from Laura S.
September 13, 2007 9:37 AM
From Laura's Blog...
WEEK 2: I wrote Oreos because I was eating them while in class (along with soup and cornbread). They were good... although I had problems eating the Oreos (because I had an oral ailment - nothing gross, my tongue is scratched). So today I could not really speak as much as I wanted to (which I guess was a good thing).
It was fun today. We talked about... for more lsirikul.blogspot.com
Comment from Laura S.
September 13, 2007 9:40 AM
Come see photos of Paul Newman from The Paul Newman Fan Club. :)
and also my thoughts on class :P
Comment from Laura S.
September 13, 2007 9:17 AM
FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO ADD PHOTOS AND VIDEOS AND OTHER COOL STUFF ON THEIR BLOG...
Look at my post and COMMENT ;)
http://lsirikul.blogspot.com/
I posted a blog on How to do stuff for those who just joined the Blogging World.
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