COMM 352 | Health Communication Campaigns

Health communication campaigns are coordinated, large-scale efforts to promote health and reduce health risks. Campaigns are traditionally rooted in 1) persuasive approaches which focus on altering attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors and 2) communicative approaches that evaluate multiple levels of communication, different channels, and diverse communication technologies. This course introduces the historical perspectives of health campaigns, provides insights into various theories which inform campaign work, and reviews the methodological considerations of researching, implementing, and evaluating health campaigns. In this course students explore the design and analysis of health campaigns blending theory, practice and methods to critique past, present, and future campaigns. This course stresses practical application as students develop a hypothetical health campaign by which they come to fully understand the ways that campaigns are planned, organized, executed, and evaluated. This course covers a wide range of theories and topics on health campaigns including but not limited to: Agenda Setting, Agenda Building, Uses and Effects, Cultivation, Parasocial Interaction, Edu-tainment, Social Marketing, Diffusion of Innovations, Health Belief Model, Social Norms, Stages of Change, and Knowledge Gap. Applies to the Bioethics (BIOE) program.