Health Communication最新文献

Research into end-of-life (EOL) communication has mostly been conducted in Anglophone countries and intensive care settings. In areas where the value of family determination prevails and significant cancer mortality rates, such as China, there remains a necessity for scholarly exploration of how EOL information about late-stage cancer diagnosis and prognosis is communicated when patients have a normal level of consciousness. Drawing on the concept of collective boundary coordination from communication privacy management (CPM) theory, this study employs semi-structured in-depth interviews to explore physicians' strategies for disclosing late-stage cancer in China's general hospitals. Reflexive thematic analysis of the data collected from seven attending physicians and nurses, 13 medical interns, and 11 family members of late-stage cancer patients demonstrates another management pattern of patient privacy and a group of flexible strategies for collective boundary coordination. These findings have implications for the development of CPM and EOL communication in China and other cultures that prioritize family determination.

Online medical consultation services (OMCS) in China always receive high ratings, while offline medical services receive many complaints. The COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened the connection between online and offline medical services in China, but the important question whether the online-offline connection can bring benefits for offline medical services is rarely studied. From a patient perspective, this study explores the impact mechanism of OMCS on the offline physician-patient relationship, attempting to enhance the spillover effect of OMCS on offline medical services and promote communication between physicians and patients. The study adopts trust transfer theory and uses a cross-sectional survey regarding questions about online-to-offline medical service to validate a moderated serial mediation model. The results showed that OMCS usage makes individuals perceive significantly higher levels of offline physician trust and physician-patient relationships. Individuals' satisfaction with OMCS enhances offline physician-patient relationships through the sequential mediating effect of online and offline trust toward physicians. In the online-to-offline physician trust transfer process, online-offline medical service connection and patients' prior satisfaction with offline physician service play significant moderating roles. The trust transfer effect is more effective when the online-offline medical service connection is high and the prior offline service satisfaction is low. This study sheds new light on online-to-offline service and OMCS research, and contributes to trust transfer theory. The study also discusses the practical implications for stakeholders.

The stigma of gynecological diseases (GDs) in China threatens women's health rights. Based on the model of stigma communication (MSC), this study introduced two dimensions of emotional valence and emotional arousal to explore factors associated with the stigma spread of GDs. Content analysis, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) were used to analyze 1,279 related posts and comments on Sina Weibo. Results showed that mark, label, and responsibility were positively associated with the stigma spread of GDs, while peril and the three negative emotions (disgust, anger, and fear) were not. Unlike previous studies, emotional valence and emotional arousal were both positively associated with the stigma spread of GDs, with emotional arousal associated across various topics, especially in news discussion and gender relationships. Emotional valence and emotional arousal significantly improved the model's explanatory power. These findings emphasize the role of emotion in stigma communication, offering insights for stigma spread.

Although alcohol consumption has negative influences on individuals' well-being, drinking holds a significant place in Chinese traditional culture. This study examined how Chinese culture, especially Chinese people's perceptions of their self-identity may be associated with intentions of alcohol consumption. Adopting the perspective of self-views and the theory of planned behaviors as two theoretical frameworks, this study conducted a cross-sectional online survey (n = 869) to examine how individual- and social-oriented self would predict intentions to drink through the mediation of attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. For dimensions of the individual-oriented self, this study found that the independence dimension was positively associated with attitude and perceived behavior control. For dimensions of the social-oriented self, the self-cultivation and social sensitivity dimensions positively predicted subjective norms. Self-view also affected intentions of alcohol consumption through attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. This study offers a cultural perspective to understand the theory of planned behavior and shows that aspects of cultural identity are influential in alcohol consumption.

People experience, engage, and interact with their living world not as disembodied minds, but as embodied beings and motivated actors. The fifteen contributions gathered in this special issue collectively mirror the essential terrain of embodied health experiences in the Chinese context. The collective findings move the field beyond merely describing cultural differences to demanding a fundamental re-theorization of core communication concepts and the adoption of new interdisciplinary methodologies.

The growing prevalence of young children's diabetes in China is exerting an increasingly severe impact on affected families. This study selected 14 sample accounts from the Xiaohongshu platform, where parents documented the daily lives of their diabetic children. Guided by Communicated Narrative Sense-Making theory, a reflexive thematic analysis was conducted, revealing four key, interconnected themes that shape the parental experience: the disruption and reconstruction of self-identity due to psychological challenges and the ongoing struggle for self-preservation; the strains and realignments within family life, encompassing the complexities of parent-child relationships, marital adjustments, and the reevaluation of familial roles; and the broader social context, where parents grapple with dual pressures of adhering to predetermined life paths while managing the economic and healthcare challenges associated with their child's condition. This study advances Communicated Narrative Sense-Making theory by foregrounding online public narratives as sites of parental identity reconstruction shaped by Confucian-Taoist sociocultural constraints, and informs healthcare practices for better supporting diabetic young children and their families.

Participation in triadic medical interaction can be more unpredictable and challenging than that in dyadic interactions limited to patients and physicians. Many studies have explored participants' roles or communication strategies in triadic medical interaction but seldom investigated discursive resources and actions of the third party in interactional tension, especially in Chinese healthcare settings. Eighty-two conversations involving 45 patients, 57 companions, and four physicians were audio-recorded at the neurology clinic of a tertiary hospital in northern China, each lasting between 12 and 20 min. Through conversation analysis, the moments and activities that the third party intervenes in the interactional tension are captured and analyzed at a micro-level. Our collected data reveal that the third-party intervention can be classified into double, unilateral, and nonaligned. Along the gradient, initiatives for actions by the third party are diminished. Five distinct behavioral patterns are identified to represent alignment choices, including serving as and beyond a sounding board, downgrading one side to keep the stance back, prioritizing one party, and deflecting with non-verbal cues and fact-based formulation. This study sheds light on the practical implications of alleviating and addressing the emerging tension before it spreads, especially in neurology clinics where companions are frequently involved. When tension-related parties are at an impasse, the third party can step in by seizing the opportune moment and act as a gatekeeper for the spill-over of the tension through the design and organization of sequences in the interaction.

The disruption of self-identity can be distressful, and it is especially pronounced in people with mental illness. Narratives may allow them to innovate their "selves" in ways that help them adapt to the altered life. Drawing on the Dialogical Self Theory (DST), this study explores how people with eating disorders (EDs) construct and innovate the self by examining their illness vlogging on a popular Chinese video platform. While ED sufferers tend to otherize their ill selves, by producing and posting their vlogs, they gradually learned to reflect on and integrate their experiences into new identities. The study reveals that the ED vloggers view their life as a story from a distance, which enables forming a "bystander me" to reflect on the conflicting "waste me" and "ideal me" positions. They also integrate the "waste me" and "ideal me" into a "sick but recovering me" position, acknowledging their imperfection but also actively seeking treatment and believing that the future will be better. Finally, ED vloggers create a "helper" identity that helps them transform the painful experiences into a resource that can be used to help others, enabling a sense of self-worth, authority, and mission. The visual and performative nature of vlogging enables it to be a dramatic form of self-healing for the narrator, through dialogs with the self and the audience. The study contributes to understanding ED sufferers' identity reconstruction and elucidating the mechanism of the DST.

This study investigates people's lived embodied experiences in a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)-based health program. Guided by the Management of Meaning in Embodied Experience (MMEE) theoretical framework, we conducted in-depth interviews (n = 32) and participant observations (n = 59) to explore how participants interpreted and constructed the meaning of their embodied health experiences and experienced transformations through TCM practices. We identified four key themes: 1) self-discovery and identity transformation through TCM practices; 2) a process of personal growth; 3) integration of TCM concepts and practices into everyday life; 4) increased health awareness and holistic transformation through embodied practices; and several sub-themes. Observations further reveal that participants demonstrated a clear progression from mechanical imitations to an embodied understanding of TCM practices. These findings extend our understanding of health communication from an embodied and Chinese cultural perspective. We discussed the theoretical and practical implications of the study for researchers and practitioners interested in leveraging embodied experiences to promote holistic health and well-being.

A hundred and sixty doctor-patient consultations were recorded in primary care outpatient clinics in two Chinese community hospitals. Our analysis of these consultations revealed that patients frequently resisted doctors' treatment recommendations, including recommended medical tests, and in a few cases doctors' diagnoses. Given the normative orientation to the medical authority attributed to doctors, this pattern of resistance was striking. A collection of instances of patients' resistance to doctors' treatment recommendations revealed a continuum from implicit resistance to more explicit, overt forms of resistance. Implicit resistance forms include not responding or responding only minimally, "answering" the doctor's question with a question, and asking the doctor elliptical questions. In addition to these implicit forms, more overtly disaffiliative moves by patients were identified, including direct disagreements and rejections. By upgrading their resistance through using increasingly more overt forms of disaffiliation, along this continuum, patients appear to negotiate for a medical decision which better accords with their preferences. In this way some consultations or phases of consultations take on the character of negotiations; patients were able to assert their agency over their health care provider (doctor) without provoking the kind of conflict that might compromise the consultation.