Health Communication最新文献

Caregivers often experience stress, depression, anxiety, and various physical illnesses stemming from the demands and challenges of their caregiving role. However, adaptive coping mechanisms such as benefit finding can mitigate these outcomes. The present study explored the relationship between Alzheimer's diagnostic severity and caregivers' engaging in benefit finding and, more specifically, whether prosocial relational maintenance behaviors communicated by the patient to the caregiver mediates the relationship between severity and benefit finding. A sample of 152 current or former Alzheimer's caregivers completed an online survey measuring their care recipient's Alzheimer's diagnostic severity, their own propensity for benefit finding, and how often the care recipient performed relational maintenance behaviors toward them as the caregiver. Results showed no direct effect existed between Alzheimer's diagnostic severity and caregivers' benefit finding; however, the extent that patients performed relational maintenance behaviors with their caregiver mediated the relationship between Alzheimer's diagnostic severity and caregivers' benefit finding. The significant influence of relational maintenance behaviors underlines the importance and effect of communication between caregivers and care recipients throughout the progression of a disease like Alzheimer's.

This study was designed to test two message features (autonomy support and evidence type) found in clinical trial recruitment videos on social media. Using an online experiment in which 606 individuals watched short-form videos about clinical trials, we assessed the impact of varying autonomy support conditions (supportive vs. non-supportive) and incorporating exemplars of a previous clinical trial participant's experience (vs. base-rate information about participating). The findings show that communicating about clinical trials with an autonomy-supportive approach can reduce psychological reactance and improve perceived message effectiveness, attitudes toward clinical trial participation, intentions to engage with the content (i.e., "liking" and sharing the content), and intentions to participate in clinical trials. When combined with an exemplar, autonomy-supportive messaging can be especially effective at reducing psychological reactance and improving attitudes toward clinical trials. The findings are well-timed, as researchers are increasingly turning to social media to enhance clinical trial recruitment.

Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS), affecting approximately one in every 25 children, presents significant lifelong physical and psychosocial challenges. However, a systematic understanding of the sources of this uncertainty and how individuals communicatively navigate it is lacking. Thus, this qualitative study applied uncertainty management theory (UMT) to examine participants' uncertainty associated with scoliosis. The investigation identified key sources of uncertainty (medical, financial, social, and career) and management strategies through semi-structured interviews with 21 individuals diagnosed with scoliosis in adolescence. Participants appraised their uncertainty as either negative or neutral. In alignment with how they appraised their uncertainty, some interviewees sought to reduce uncertainty by seeking social support and by disclosing or concealing their illness. Others maintained uncertainty by avoiding medical information (or by being told to wait and see about their disease progression), and some adapted to their uncertainty by reframing or engaging in self-care or religion. The results highlight the need for greater medical, psychological, and social support for those diagnosed with scoliosis and highlight the importance of developing tailored uncertainty management strategies to improve patients' quality of life.

Given the increasing scholarly attention to health information avoidance, the current study offers a more nuanced perspective on this communication phenomenon by predicting avoidance intention and behavior and examining their interrelationship. Guided by a reduced version of the proposed model of planned risk information avoidance (PRIA), a combination of a pre-survey capturing the predictors of avoidance intention and an in-situ measurement of avoidance behavior showed that the model explained 36.1% of the variance in avoidance intention, but only 6% of the variance in the occurrence of avoidance behavior and 5.1% of the variance in the frequency of avoidance behavior. Together with the weak correlation between avoidance intention and behavior, this finding revealed an intention-behavior gap for health information avoidance and suggests that the two measures represent different dimensions of health information avoidance. These findings are critical for conceptual clarity, call for distinguishing the predictors of avoidance intention and behavior within the PRIA, and provide guidance for methodological decisions.

Previous research has largely focused on whether restrictive mediation reduces online time or addiction risks, ignoring adolescents' resistance and its psychological outcomes. Considering adolescents' agency in their socialization process, this study explores whether restrictive mediation shields them from depression by limiting entertaining-oriented Internet use (EIU) or inadvertently exacerbates depression by triggering resistance to parental control (RPC), either directly or indirectly through increased EIU. Using data from 7,965 Chinese adolescents and employing structural equation modeling, the study found that more frequent restrictions were associated with reduced EIU, which in turn predicted lower levels of depression. However, frequent restrictions also triggered RPC, which directly increased depression and led to greater engagement in restricted activities, thereby offsetting the intended protective effects of restrictions. Moreover, the study examined varying restriction styles (i.e. how parents implement restrictions) and revealed that their impact on depression depended on both the implementation style and adolescents' responses.

This study examined the crisis communication strategies employed by Uganda's Ministry of Health (MOH) in response to the 2022 Ebola outbreak using a cultural-sensitivity approach. We examined Tweets from September 19 2022, to January 11 2023, during the time of the outbreak. Our findings showed that the ministry responded to the outbreak by using communication best practices, including instructing information and adjusting information. The study also found that the MOH adopted a cultural-sensitivity approach in their risk communication, which included acknowledging and addressing cultural practices that spread Ebola, the use of trusted actors in the communities, adopting religious language in their communication, and community engagement; mobilization, vigilance, and reporting. We conclude that risk communication and risk management efforts can be successful when messages are tailored to specific populations with their cultural beliefs and practices in mind.

The Chinese Patriotic Health Movement (PHM), launched in the early years of the People's Republic of China, was a large-scale campaign aimed at promoting public health. Drawing on Innocenti's (2011) framework of rhetorical threat appeals, this study analyzed the People's Daily and related sources to examine the PHM's mobilization strategies within an authoritarian political context. The PHM successfully mobilized public participation by consistently framing public health as essential for national security, thereby mitigating threats caused by the Korean War. This mobilization employed three rhetorical strategies: 1) Collectivist discourse, presenting public health as a collective endeavor to counter the "U.S. bacterial warfare"; 2) revolutionary and war metaphors, utilizing the Chinese people's war memories and nationalistic sentiment to energize behavioral change; and 3) life ethics, through appealing to emotions of patriotism and honor, framing hygiene as an ethical imperative for national progress and socialist construction. The analysis reveals that the PHM's use of threat appeals emphasized positive emotions and national unity rather than individual fear, aligning with the new regime's narrative of national development.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, community health workers (CHWs) worldwide faced violence and abuse. In India, CHWs, known as Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), encountered community resistance and violence in their frontline roles. However, positioned precariously within a neoliberal public health system, their voices remained absent in policymaking, reinforcing structural invisibility. This study, guided by the culture-centered approach (CCA), draws on semi-structured interviews (n = 30) with ASHAs in Odisha, India, to examine their negotiations with community resistance. Findings reveal that resistance and abuse stemmed from structurally induced fears-misinformation spread via social media, loss of wages, restricted access to resources due to quarantine measures, and community ostracization. However, rather than being passive recipients of violence, ASHAs exercised agency through self-created strategies such as peer learning, leveraging social ties, persistent counseling, and voicing their concerns to senior officials-despite their hierarchical marginalization. This study highlights how India's neoliberal public health system-relying on ASHAs as underpaid, unprotected workers-intensified their vulnerabilities. The individualization of health responsibility manifested at multiple levels: ASHAs were held responsible for pandemic control without adequate resources, while community resistance to top-down health measures was criminalized rather than viewed as a response to structural violence. This framing absolved the state of responsibility, displacing blame onto ASHAs and marginalized communities. The study calls for bottom-up decision-making spaces that include CHWs and their communities as stakeholders, ensuring pandemic policies address systemic inequities rather than penalizing vulnerable populations.

This study examined the information landscape on cervical cancer by employing the extended cancer infodemiology framework and integrated analysis. We analyzed and compared news articles and online platform posts as the two primary sources of health information regarding cancer. Data were collected from BigKinds, a news article database, and blogs and café posts on Naver, which dominates the health information search market in Korea. We analyzed 68,977 documents (news n = 1,043, blog posts n = 56,455, café posts n = 11,479) using traditional manual coding, frequency analysis, and topic modeling to address our research questions. Results show that the key topics differ between news articles and online platform posts on cervical cancer. News covered the "development and clinical trials of treatment" prominently, while recommended hospitals for checkups (blogs) and seeking recommendations for OB/GYN clinics (cafés) were prominent in online platforms. The Cervical Cancer Awareness Month could not influence the frequency or topic of news articles or online platform posts on cervical cancer in Korea. Moreover, the findings show that the dominant engagers were economic daily newspapers (news articles), hospital accounts (blogs), and the cafés on family and childrearing. This study offers empirical evidence of differing pictures across digital platforms. Furthermore, it discusses the possibility that dominant engagers or their interests could have influenced different pictures in the information landscape on cervical cancer.

The marginalization of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (D/HH) group arises from barriers at multiple levels of the socio-ecological matrix. This is primarily reflected in challenges related to effective healthcare services delivery and high-quality patient-provider communication. Utilizing national data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) from 2017 to 2020, we examined the difference between D/HH adults and hearing-abled adults in terms of healthcare services efficiency, patient-provider communication quality, health self-efficacy, and psychological health. The findings revealed that D/HH adults consistently exhibited lower levels than hearing adults in healthcare services efficiency, health self-efficacy, and psychological health, and these differences remained evident from 2017 to 2020. However, the difference in patient-provider communication quality between the two groups was not significant. The study further investigates health self-efficacy as a potential mediator influencing the efficiency of healthcare services and quality of patient-provider communication in their relationship with psychological health. Our findings highlight the imperative to devise specialized communication strategies and enhance healthcare services for the D/HH group.