Journal of Health Communication最新文献

Infotainment is an effective and widely used way of spreading health information. However, the specific mechanism of its effects remains unclear. This study analyzed 215,020 user comments under a popular health animation - the Cells at Work - on Bilibili.com, using the GPT-2 method. The analysis found that when faced with such an infotainment health communication text, audiences' subsequent expressions of health attitudes and related changes were limited, indicating that the effectiveness of infotainment as a means of health communication should not be overestimated. Audiences have different reactions to the health information and entertainment parts of such infotainment. The effect of health information in arousing changes in audiences' health attitudes is lower than that of the entertainment. This indicates that we need to reconsider the balance between the health information and entertainment parts involved.

Using a social network approach, we characterize who Mexican-origin young adults perceive as social support sources for oral health behaviors and provide additional validity evidence for Oral Health Behavior Social Support Scales (OHBSS). From April to September 2022, we gathered social network data from 62 Mexican-origin adults (21-40 years old) through Zoom interviews about their perceived received social support for three oral health behaviors (toothbrushing, flossing, and obtaining dental care) from three potential sources of support (family, health providers, and others/friends). Overall, we found similar results across all three oral health behaviors. We also found evidence for convergent and discriminant validity of OHBSS scales using social network measures. Implications of findings are discussed.

The perception of reality could matter more than reality itself when it comes to disease outbreaks. News media are important sources of information during global disease outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on theories of fear appeals and the social ecological model, we conducted multilevel modeling analyses to examine how media-level and community-level factors influenced the public's risk perceptions of COVID-19 and frequencies of preventive behaviors in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India. We combined a large-scale multi-wave cross-country survey (N = 161,374) with a COVID-19 media coverage archive (N = 10,015,187) to test these relationships. We found that fear in media headlines was positively correlated with people's perceptions of risk but negatively correlated with frequencies of preventive behaviors, controlling for individual-, community-, and cultural-level factors. Similar patterns were consistently identified within each individual country. We also show that community factors interacted with the media environment to influence public risk perceptions and behaviors. Our findings highlight a strong mass media influence during the pandemic, and we discuss the implications of our findings for health communication during crisis times.

While there is ample research on the influence of retracted scientific publications on author reputation, less is known about how a health organization's retraction of scientific guidance can impact public perceptions of the organization. This study centers on the aerosol guidance retraction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2020. X/Twitter social media data were collected via ForSight from September 15 to October 8, 2020, with a machine learning algorithm specifically developed and used to detect sentiment toward the CDC. Regression analyses of the non-bot sample (N = 265,326) tested for differences in CDC sentiment across four stages: 1) baseline; 2) CDC guidance change; 3) CDC retraction of the prior guidance change; and 4) CDC reversion to a tempered form of the initial guidance change. The results show that sentiment toward the CDC increased from Time 1 to Time 2, then decreased for Time 3 with the "posted in error" retraction, but then increased for Time 4 back to a level similar to Time 2. That public perceptions of the CDC could improve after these changes in scientific guidance may be attributed to its self-report of the retraction and reporting that the retraction was a result of unintentional error. This study connects theories of reputation management and trust repair with the growing empirical research on retractions of published scientific research to provide a theoretical explanation for how a major public health organization can mitigate damage to its reputation in the short term.

Communication professionals in Federal agencies must have a seat at their agency's budget formulation table - to inform the budget process from the beginning and to advise on funding for the communications required to achieve program goals. This is one of nine lessons learned from US Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS) systems change efforts that were applied to help create the "We Can Do This" COVID-19 Public Education Media Campaign (Campaign), and these lessons were presented in a 2022 Journal of Health Communication article. Now that substantial evaluation data are available in eight recent research articles to verify the Campaign's success, this lesson can be revisited to identify more specific ways in which it can be applied, along with two additional lessons identified from the Campaign implementation. In light of the Campaign's success, these learnings all can contribute to creating a new framework for guiding quality USDHHS health communication activities in the future - inspired also by four previously-published communication frameworks. The new framework can then be used to build an enhanced structure within USDHHS to handle future public education media campaigns and other communication activities, a matter of particular urgency given the likelihood of a future public health and humanitarian crisis requiring rapid and effective communication responses.

Guided by literature on framing, this study explored how the presence of age labels in different message frames influenced message-evoked fear and anger responses, particularly for older adults with different levels of need for autonomy (NFA), which ultimately affected their physical activity intentions. The results of a three-factor between-subjects experiment, with message frame (gain versus loss) and age label (present versus absent) as manipulated variables and NFA (low versus medium versus high) as quasi-experiment variable (N = 237) revealed that loss-framed message evoked higher levels of fear and anger as compared to gain-framed message. Furthermore, the anger elicited by loss-framing was more pronounced when age labels were present, especially among older adults with low NFA. The moderated mediation analysis revealed that, among older adults with low NFA, loss-framed messages decreased physical activity intentions through message-evoked anger. Notably, this mediating effect was more pronounced when age labels were present.

This study evaluates the efficacy of Media Aware, a comprehensive sex education program with a media literacy education approach, for improving sexual health cognitions among 1139 U.S. community college students (ages 18-19) from 23 campuses. Students were randomized to condition (intervention or delayed-intervention control) and completed pretest and posttest questionnaires. Several main effects of the intervention were found at posttest, including reduced perceived realism of media messages, positive attitudes about risky sex, and descriptive normative beliefs about unprotected and risky sexual activity, and increased self-efficacy to use dental dams. Gender and pretest levels moderated some intervention effects. Women in the intervention group reported less identification with media messages compared to women in the control group. Students in the intervention group who reported lower pretest levels of self-efficacy to use dental dams and to refuse unprotected sex had higher posttest levels on those outcomes as compared with the control group. Students in the intervention group who reported higher pretest levels of normative beliefs about risky sexual activity had lower posttest levels on those outcomes as compared with the control group. Results suggest that Media Aware is a promising method to improve the sexual health of young adults attending community college.

In our research, we examined how three dimensions of opinion leadership-connectivity, maven, and persuasiveness-are associated with sharing positive and negative information about vaccines among parents in Hong Kong through a mixed-methods approach. In two studies, we assessed opinion leadership following a sociometric approach that involved using data from social media (Study 1) and a self-assessment using survey data (Study 2), which yielded largely consistent results. In particular, whereas connectivity and maven were significantly associated with sharing positive information about vaccines, all three dimensions were significantly associated with sharing negative information about vaccines. Those findings suggest that different dimensions of opinion leadership play different roles in information sharing depending on the information's valence. Moreover, the similar pattern of findings from both studies suggested that the sociometric approach and self-assessment may capture the multidimensional nature of opinion leadership equally well. In sum, the findings advance theoretical discussions on the role of opinion leadership in information sharing and offer practical insights into promoting vaccination for children among parents.

With an intersectional orientation, we examine associations between discrimination, health communication, and information-seeking intention about HIV prevention in the context of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among cisgender women through an online survey (N = 341). We elaborate on the idea that intersectional discrimination is a social determinant of health by considering the context with differing power relations-day-to-day life and the healthcare field-based on Bourdieu's field theory, and explore moderating roles of health communication in this relationship according to the structural influence model of communication (SIM). The relationships between intersectional discrimination and intention show different patterns by the context in which intersectional experiences are considered, and the relationships are moderated differently by the mode of health communication. We discuss how to conduct intersectionality-informed health communication research without sacrificing intersectionality's foundational foci.