Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment

H. Dan O'Hair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351687119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Broadcast media has a particular fascination with stories that involve risk and health crisis events-disease outbreaks, terrorist acts, and natural disasters-contexts where risk and health communication play a critical role. An evolving media landscape introduces both challenges and opportunities for using communication to manage extreme events and hazardous contexts. Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment addresses issues of risk and health communication with a collection of chapters that reflect state-of-the-art discussion by top scholars in the field. The authors in this volume develop unique and insightful perspectives by employing the best available research on topics such as brand awareness in healthcare communication, occupational safety, climate change communication, local broadcasts of weather emergencies, terrorism, and the Ebola outbreak, among many other areas. It features analysis of new and traditional media that connects disasters, crises, risks, and public policy issues into a coherent fabric. This book bridges a substantial, but sometimes disconnected body of literature, and by doing so asks how contexts related to risk and health communication are best approached, how researchers balance scientific findings with cultural issues, and how scholars study an increasingly media-savvy society with traditional research methods.

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Part I

ADVANCES IN HEALTH COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

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1

PRELUDE

Advancing Media Research in Risk and Health Communication Contexts

H. Dan O’Hair

Disease outbreaks, terrorist acts, and natural disasters are obvious examples of contexts in which risk and health communication play a critical role. Broadcast media have found risk and health crisis events to be particularly seductive as stories that fascinate their audiences. Moreover, with digital media evolving at such a rapid rate, many audience members have taken on the role of newsmaker or reporter (Kim, Brossard, Scheufele, & Xenos, 2016)—we are not entirely certain to what effect. Digital media has proven to serve many useful functions such as operating as a conduit for warnings to the public and acting as a gauge for how messages are received and acted upon (Fraustino & Ma, 2015). On top of these dynamic conditions, many in the risk and health communication research communities find extreme events and hazardous contexts to be on the increase, and an evolving media landscape introduces both challenges and opportunities for using communication to manage these situations.

This book will address these issues as well as the research implications inherent in risk and health communication contexts. For example, how are these contexts best approached—inductively or deductively? How do researchers balance scientific finding with social and cultural issues? To what extent can media (legacy and digital) play a role in mitigating the effects of risk and adverse health events? How are potential ethical repercussions of communication disentangled from unfolding and unpredictable events? How do we study an increasingly media-savvy society with traditional research methods?

This book features chapters with leading-edge discussion by authors who offer the best available thinking and analysis on the topics of risk and health communication. To do so, the authors have selected the most salient issues associated with these contexts. Each chapter isolates a particular issue or concern and peels away the surface to expose the difficult choices and subsequent processes facing participants in the communication of risks and health issues. In addition, this book will feature analyses of new and traditional media that connect disasters, crises, risks, and public policy issues into a coherent fabric.

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How the Book Evolved

The research committee of the Broadcast Education Association approached the editor about developing one of the annual research symposiums that is held in conjunction with the annual convention. Routledge has been an important and consistent partner in publishing essays from the symposium. A review team was recruited and empaneled to help the symposium director (and the book’s editor) make competitive selections to appear at the convention. Approximately 80 percent of the essays presented at BEA were invited to be part of the book, and additional chapters were commissioned by the editor from known scholars in the areas of risk and health communication.

The unique perspectives of each author was invaluable in characterizing these contexts and their accompanying challenges. Each chapter represents the best available research in these areas with insightful notions of where current research and best practices should move in the future. In most chapters, original research findings are offered from ongoing research programs. In others, original models and frameworks are presented, capturing a wide array of constituent elements of complex processes and casting them into discernable designs worthy of consideration by researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.

To ensure that the aforementioned goals were met and that the book presents a consistent feel throughout the chapters, each author was asked to adhere to suggestions for conceptualizing and organizing chapter contents. Exceptions and modifications were attended to on an individual basis, but in general authors were asked to address the following issues in their chapters.

• What is the best available media research in risk and health communication?

• What communication and media theories are most relevant and applicable in this context?

• What new ideas are offered in this area (framework, model, theory)?

• What are specific research directions that should be pursued for this context of risk and health communication research?

• What pragmatic implications can you offer practitioners in this area of risk and health communication?

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Thus, the importance of this work is its ability to bring together the best minds on the topics of risk and health communication. These are vital topics that each merit the treatment that is typical of scholarly books. For several years, scholarly books have been one of the featured ways in which academics collect and organize chapters by leading scholars. These works help to establish milestones and may even serve as benchmarks for the development of literature in specific sub-disciplines.

We hope this work will be a capstone for current work in risk and health communication, and serve as a text for an increasing number of undergraduate and graduate courses in crisis communication. It can foster additional interest in risk communication and offer connections between health communication and others engaged in discussing risk and crisis. This book would bridge a substantial but sometimes disconnected body of literature.

Each chapter was reviewed with the following issues in mind.

• Theoretical Grounding (sufficient, appropriate)?

• Risk/Health (significant issue/problem)?

• Connection to “an Evolving Media Environment”?

• Practical and Impactful Implications?

• Theoretical Implications (going forward)?

• Future Directions?

• Unique Contribution to Media Research?

Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment is intended for multiple audiences, although each overlap to a large extent. The primary audience is one quite familiar to scholarly publishers and academic researchers. The book should attract interest among those communication scholars and researchers focusing on media and communication, but also those with specialties in particular aspects of disasters, risk, and crisis addressed in one of the chapters. In addition, it is expected that graduate seminars in risk communication, crisis management, policy management, and even political science will find Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment attractive as a primary or secondary text. A third audience is likely to be found in main campus libraries and public libraries as well as libraries situated at health sciences centers. By involving multiple disciplines, it is expected that a large audience for the volume will be realized.

This volume will follow in the footsteps of other applied scholarly books that have become a vital part of the academic and professional contributions of the communication disciplines. These volumes not only offer the opportunity to capture the best thinking on a well-defined topic, but they have been extremely influential in sparking subsequent discussion and fostering the relevant research agendas. Their individual and collective impact on the field is inestimable.

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Introduction to the Chapters

In the following paragraphs, O’Hair sets the stage for the remaining theory and research presentations by previewing the content of the chapters in the sections to follow. In Part I: Advances in Health Communication Research, four chapters address contexts that are both new and problematic for media professionals.

In Chapter 2, Shin, Miller-Day, and Hecht focus on how alcohol is handled in the media. “Media Literacy and Parent–Adolescent Communication About Alcohol in Media: Effects on Adolescent Alcohol Use” characterizes how media literacy and parent-adolescent communication can affect how young people interpret media portrayals of alcohol use. These effects lead to reports of lower lifetime use of alcohol. The study offers important implications for how messages among family members can influence key behavioral decision-making in essential life choices.

In Chapter 3, Hindman discusses legalized marijuana and unravels the uncertainty often associated with various users. In his chapter, “College Students and Legalized Marijuana: Knowledge Gaps and Belief Gaps Regarding the Law and Health Effects,” Hindman builds theoretical scaffolding from the knowledge gap hypothesis and his own work—termed the belief gap hypothesis—in order to test claims about how students (potential users of marijuana) may be affected in their thinking and knowledge about the health effects of using marijuana during the initial phases following the legalization of marijuana in Washington state. Social media and an evolving media environment play a role in how social media portrayals are linked with social identity expression and potential and the use of marijuana.

The fourth chapter, authored by Crosswell, Porter, and Sanders, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Addressing Unconscious Brand Awareness in Healthcare Communication,” approaches the context of pharmaceutical advertising as a means of shedding light on the visual elements used during message campaigns by pharmaceutical companies. By focusing on how potential consumers perceive the prominence of branding and how it is used to promote awareness of the message, the authors discover that study participants who fixated more on the visual elements of branding had more skeptical views of the communication campaign. Importantly, the idea of “unconscious awareness” was introduced as a critical variable to be considered in future work of this kind, particularly as researchers attempt to make sense of the divide between conscious versus unconscious brand awareness in communication campaigns.

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Tai, Zhang, and Deng wrap up Part I with their chapter, which focuses on a national context. In “Communicating Health-Related Risk and Crisis in China: State of the Field and Ways Forward,” the authors provide a critique to the image of China as a country with unparalleled growth and prosperity for the past 30 years. Attendant to these changes are the presence of natural disasters and hazards, environmental degradation such as water and air pollution and the depletion of natural resources that bring diseases, significant risk, and health issues. This chapter, different from those in this section or elsewhere in the book, first describes an overview of the field of risk communication in China and offers some paths moving forward. In subsequent sections, Tai et al. illuminate many of the challenges facing risk and health communication, in particular nuclear power. Their proposed general strategy for risk and health communication management involves an integrated approach melding research and perspectives from the natural and general sciences, government administrators, and the general public.

In Part II: Communicating and Educating the Public and Media About Risk and Science, four chapters take up issues dealing directly with how messages are formed, crafted, conveyed, and then evaluated for public use. In the first chapter of this section, Scholl, Bogaert, Forrester, and Cunningham, approach risk and health communication from focused and pragmatic viewpoints. As scientists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the authors marry theory with innovative tactics to offer compelling methods for translating research into practice. In their chapter, “Risk Communication in Occupational Safety and Health: Reaching Diverse Audiences in an Evolving Communication Environment,” they forward the argument that the workplace, like many other communicative contexts, is an evolving media home to multiple messages about risks and illnesses perpetrated by chemical and environmental hazards. The chapter takes care to focus attention on the influence of new and emerging media and offers suggestions for how best practices can be developed for use by risk and health communication professionals interested in the occupational safety context.

In the chapter that follows, Rowan and her colleagues present research that explores the influence of television weathercasters on ideas and impressions of climate change. Climate change is presented as a particularly difficult hazard given the slow onset of attendant problems (and contested scientific results). “Best Practices of ‘Innovator’ TV Metereologists Who Act as Climate Change Educators” extends our understanding of media as a tool for informing viewers about science as it affects our lives through weather and climate. In particular, the authors offer a number of different venues and platforms from which to send climate change messages (e.g., blogs, TV, parks, etc.) that would appeal to targeted audiences.

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Extending the notion of how media plays a critical part of our education about risk and health, Ratcliff, Jensen, Christy, Cro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment
• Electronic Media Research Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Part I Advances in Health Communication Research
• Part II Communicating and Educating the Public and Media About Risk and Science
• Part III Situating Theory in Risk and Health Communication Contexts
• Part IV Exploring Messages and Media During Extreme Events
• Index