The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication

HANDBOOK OF HEALTH COMMUNICATION

HANDBOOK OF HEALTH COMMUNICATION

Edited by

Teresa L. Thompson University of Dayton

Alicia M. Dorsey Texas A & M University

Katherine I. Miller Texas A & M University

Roxanne Parrott Pennsylvania State University

2003

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

Acquisitions Editor: Editorial Assistant: Cover Design: Textbook Production Manager: Full-Service Compositor: Text and Cover Printer:

Linda Bathgate Karin Bates Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey Paul Smolenski TechBooks Hamilton Printing Company

This book was typeset in 10.5/12 pt. Times, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. The heads were typeset in Americana, Americana Italic, and Americana Bold.

C 2003 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Copyright
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microfilm, retrieval system, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher.

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, New Jersey 07430

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of health communication / edited by Teresa L. Thompson, Alicia Dorsey, Katherine I. Miller. p. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-3857-0 (case : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8058-3858-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Communication in medicine—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Physician and patient—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Thompson, Teresa L. II. Dorsey, Alicia. III. Miller, Katherine (Katherine I.) [DNLM: 1. Communication. 2. Physician-Patient Relations. 3. Delivery of Health Care—organization & administration. 4. Health Promotion—methods. 5. Patient Education—methods. W 62 H236 2003] R118.H26 2003 613—dc21 Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2002015809

To Alyse and Tony Teresa Thompson To Leroy and Adam for their love and patience Alicia Dorsey To Jim and Kalena Katherine Miller In memory of Amanda Kundrat Roxanne Parrott

Contents

Preface

1

Introduction Teresa L. Thompson

xiii 1

PART I: INTRODUCTION (edited and with introduction by Katherine I. Miller) 2

Illness Narratives and the Social Construction of Health Barbara F. Sharf and Marsha L. Vanderford

3

Theorizing About Health Communication Austin S. Babrow and Marifran Mattson

35

4

Communication in Medical Encounters: An Ecological Perspective Richard L. Street, Jr.

63

9

PART II: PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION ISSUES (edited and with introduction by Teresa L. Thompson) 5

Provider and Patient Communication Skills Training Donald J. Cegala and Stefne Lenzmeier Broz

6

The Nature of the Therapeutic Relationship and the Assessment of Its Discourse in Routine Medical Visits Debra Roter and Kelly S. McNeilis

95

121

vii

viii

CONTENTS

7

Outcomes of Patient-Provider Interaction Judith Belle Brown, Moira Stewart, and Bridget L. Ryan

8

Medical Disclosure and Decision-Making: Excavating the Complexities of Physician-Patient Information Exchange Catherine M. Gillotti

163

Children, Older Adults, and Women: Impact on Provider-Patient Interaction Jon F. Nussbaum, Sandra Ragan, and Bryan Whaley

183

9

141

PART III: SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY HEALTH ISSUES (edited and with introduction by Alicia M. Dorsey)

10 The State of the Art and the State of the Science of Community Organizing

207

James W. Dearing

11 The Continuing Challenge of Community Health Risk Management and Communication Clifford W. Scherer and Napoleon K. Juanillo Jr.

221

12 Working along the Margins: Developing Community-Based Strategies for Communicating about Health with Marginalized Groups Leigh Arden Ford and Gust A. Yep

13 Social Support, Social Networks, and Health

241

263

Terrance L. Albrecht and Daena J. Goldsmith

14 Everyday Interpersonal Communication and Health

285

Rebecca J. Welch Cline

PART IV: ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES (edited and with introduction by Katherine I. Miller) 15 Organizational Forms and the Provision of Health Care

319

John C. Lammers, Ashley P. Duggan, and Joshua B. Barbour

16 Stress and Social Support in Health Care Organizations

347

Julie Apker and Eileen Berlin Ray

17 Groups and Teams in Health Care: Communication and Effectiveness Marshall Scott Poole and Kevin Real

369

CONTENTS

18 Organizational Rhetoric and Healthcare Policymaking

ix

403

Charles Conrad and Holly Gene McIntush

19 Working Well: Communicating Individual and Collective Wellness Initiatives Patricia Geist-Martin, Kim Horsley, and Angele Farrell

423

PART V: MEDIA ISSUES (edited and with introduction by Roxanne Parrott) 20 Using Media Campaigns for Health Promotion

449

Charles Salmon and Charles Atkin

21 Looking Toward the Future: Health Message Design Strategies

473

Lisa Murray-Johnson and Kim Witte

22 Using Computers to Narrowcast Health Messages: The Role of Audience Segmentation, Targeting, and Tailoring in Health Promotion Rajiv N. Rimal and A. Dawn Adkins

23 Telemedicine: Expanding Health Care into Virtual Environments

497

515

Jeanine Warisse Turner

24 Health as Profit: Public Relations in Health Communication

537

Jeffrey K. Springston and Ruth Ann Weaver Lariscy

25 Popular Media and Health: Images, Effects, and Institutions

557

Kimberly N. Kline

26 Accessing, Understanding, and Applying Health Communication Messages: The Challenge of Health Literacy Jay M. Bernhardt and Kenzie A. Cameron

583

PART VI: LESSONS AND CHALLENGES FROM THE FIELD (edited and with introduction by Alicia M. Dorsey) 27 Opportunities for Health Communication Scholarship to Shape Public Health Policy and Practice: Examples from the National Cancer Institute Gary L. Kreps

28 Lessons Learned from the Field on Prevention and Health Campaigns Timothy Edgar, Vicki Freimuth, and Sharon Lee Hammond

609

625

x

CONTENTS

29 Lessons Learned about Academic and Public Health Collaborations in the Conduct of Community-Based Research Roxanne Parrott and Carol Steiner

637

30 Ethics in Health Communication Interventions

651

Nurit Guttman Author Index

681

Subject Index

729

Preface

The field of health communication has developed tremendously within the last 25 years. Prior to that time, there was only a scattering of research published in widely dispersed publication outlets. There are now two journals devoted exclusively to the topic, but hundreds of other medical and social science journals publish related research on a regular basis. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (LEA) began publishing the journal Health Communication in 1989. Although some of the early submissions left much to be desired and the first few issues were filled just in time for publication, that situation had changed drastically within a year or two. We now find a plethora of high quality submissions and have such a backlog of acceptances (even with only a 15% acceptance rate) that LEA decided to, for the third time, increase the size of the journal in 2001. A few years ago, a competing outlet, Journal of Health Communication, began publication. The competition has in no way, however, diminished submissions to either journal. The reason for this is because there is much good work being conducted in the field. Indeed, there is so much good work being conducted that there is now a need for a comprehensive outlet that summarizes the research in the area. That is the task of the current volume, Handbook of Health Communication. This volume covers many of the important areas of research in the field of health communication. Each chapter, written by a noted scholar or scholars in the relevant area, 1) reviews the theory and research in the area, both within the United States and internationally, 2) critiques that research and the methods that were used, 3) provides suggestions for future research on the topic (a research agenda for the 21st century); and 4) discusses practical implications of the line of research. The authors are from the fields of communication, medicine, and public health as well as government agencies and private health consulting arenas. In addition to covering specific content in each substantive area, the authors were asked to address their topics with the following issues in mind, although not every issue is relevant to every chapter: a) How does this area of research relate to patients’ health and well being or the health and well being of society at large?

xi

xii

PREFACE b) How has this area of research advanced our understanding of the process of human communication? c) How do contemporary societal developments such as managed care impact this issue?

The book begins with an overview chapter, followed by five key sections. Each section begins with a brief introduction. The first section includes a chapter on the social construction of health and illness and chapters on theoretical perspectives used within the field of health communication. This is followed by a section that addresses issues in provider-patient interaction, such as studying provider-patient communication, communication skills and training, disclosure issues, outcomes of provider-patient interaction, and special populations. The following section focuses upon broader social and community health concerns, including prevention, risk perceptions, disenfranchisement, community organizing, and social support networks and health. The next section addresses such organizational issues as health care teams, social support for health care providers, the structure of health care organizations, and the rhetoric of health care organizations. The last large section focuses upon the media by addressing such topics as health information in the media, health campaigns, health PR (included because of the increasing numbers of health communication students going to work in health PR), health literacy, health message strategies, and information technology issues, including telemedicine. The book culminates with a discussion of “lessons from the field” and broader health policy issues. The authors of these chapters have extensive experience with efforts to apply health communication, with some having assumed leadership roles in national agencies to guide practice endeavors. The chapters talk about which findings are actually useful and applicable for practitioners and where research in the area should move. Ethical concerns are also raised. This book is targeted towards the fields of health communication, public health, nursing, and social/behavioral aspects of medicine. It is primarily addressed toward graduate student and faculty markets. It should be of interest to researchers, health care providers, health communication consultants and practitioners, and policy makers. We hope that these audiences find the book helpful and useful. It can be used as both a text and as a reference book. In addition to extending thanks to all of the authors of the various chapters, the editors would like to thank Linda Bathgate of LEA, who first suggested this volume, and Michie Shaw of TechBooks. They are responsible for bringing this book to fruition. Teresa Thompson Alicia Dorsey Katherine Miller Roxanne Parrott (all editors contributed equally to this work)

HANDBOOK OF HEALTH COMMUNICATION

1 Introduction Teresa L. Thompson University of Dayton

What can one say about an area of study that simultaneously allows one to look at the creation of shared meaning and at the impact of messages on health and health care delivery? Although those of us who study communicative processes would argue that all communication is inherently interesting, researchers who examine the impact of communication on health and health care delivery are privileged to focus upon processes of fundamental human import. After all, health issues are of concern to most of us throughout our lives. It may then be surprising that it took communication researchers some time to turn their attention to health issues. The Health Communication Division of the International Communication Association was founded in just 1975, and a division of the same name was made part of the National Communication Association (the largest association of people who study communicative processes) in 1985. This does not mean, of course, that health communication processes were not being examined prior to 1975. The study of health communication had already begun but was sporadic and scattered, with the exception of the early work of Barbara Korsch and colleagues (Korsch, Freeman, & Negrete, 1971; Korsch, Gozzi, & Francis, 1968; Korsch & Negrete, 1972). In addition, whereas some of the first studies were conducted by researchers whose primary interest was communication, more were done by those with interests in medicine, nursing, or, occasionally, social science areas other than communication. For instance, in Costello’s (1977) review of the area of health communication, only five of the published articles he cited had appeared in communication outlets, and three of those focused on therapeutic communication rather than health communication per se. Costello concluded that little of the existing research had been conducted by those within the field of communication, and Cassata (1977) echoed this theme. By the time Thompson wrote her 1984 review of communication in the health and social service professions, 105 out of the 325 works

1

2

THOMPSON

she cited had appeared in communication publications and conferences. As the present volume makes clear, the study of health communication has since burgeoned, both in the field of communication and more broadly in academia and the professions. Some of the growth in research can be attributed to increased funding options for the study of health communication phenomena, but the appearance of outlets for the publication of health communication research is also a contributing cause. In 1989, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates launched the first journal devoted specifically to the study of communication in health care, appropriately named Health Communication, and 7 years later came the inauguration of the Journal of Health Communication. Both journals have provided opportunities for the dissemination of research on communication and health issues and have encouraged researchers to investigate this fascinating area. As scholars have been ignited by the interesting studies published by their colleagues, they have added to the research, causing it to grow exponentially. Numerous other social science and medical journals have also reflected the increase in interest, and it is no longer possible to succinctly survey research on health communication. Indeed, the chapters in this volume make clear the impossibility of covering the entire area of health communication in the same manner as in early reviews (see, e.g., Cassata, 1977, 1980; Costello, 1977; Kreps, 1988; Pettegrew, 1988; Thompson, 1984). Even Thompson’s (1984) review, however, although cut to 20 pages for publication, originally was 100 pages long. The authors of the chapters in this volume were constrained to just 40 pages on focused aspects of health communication, and most still found keeping to this limit a daunting task. In the case of every chapter, several books could have been written on the main topic. Because the goal of this handbook is to present a survey of health communication, the authors did in fact work and rework their chapters to conform to the page limits. It is hoped that this volume provides a worthwhile introduction to the various areas of health communication and encourages its readers, whether students, scholars, or researchers, to delve further into these areas on their own by using the representative (although by no means complete!) citations in each chapter. HISTORICAL PROGRESS

Comparing the early reviews and exhortations to research in this area with the reviews herein indicates the massive movements in scholarship that have occurred. It also indicates, however, that progress is still to be made. Costello’s (1977) review, for instance, focuses upon only four functions of communication in health care: diagnosis, cooperation, counsel, and education. Although, on the broadest level, these four functions are still apparent in the health communication research, health communication concerns have moved well beyond this. For instance, the chapters on organizational issues (Chapters 15–19) address communication concerns that cannot be limited to those narrow foci. The same is true of those scholars who bring a rhetorical or narrative perspective to the study of health communication. Costello’s discussion of research on media issues and campaigns as they relate to health was by far the smallest of his discussions, but that area of research is now among the most widely studied, as demonstrated by Chapters 20–26. Cassata (1977), too, focused his review on interpersonal aspects of health communication. Indeed, Cassata noted that “theories on the dissemination of health education and strategies for patient education still need to be explored by communication specialists” (p. 500). Three years later, Cassata’s (1980) review of the themes identified by Dervin and Harlock’s (1976) review of health communication research included only one that did not focus on interpersonal aspect

1. INTRODUCTION

3

of communication. He argued that “since the development of ICA’s Division of Health Communication, there have been no significant developments in health communication as a field of study” (p. 588). Cassata went on to outline criteria for a discipline, almost all of which the reader will find fulfilled in the chapters in this volume. Other notable changes have also occurred since the early reviews of health communication research. Thompson’s (1984) critique indicated numerous problems in health communication research: a simplistic conceptualization of communicative processes, findings that are not useful to practitioners, scholarship that did build on past research, a lack of theorizing, a lack of emphasis on issues likely to impact those of lower socioeconomic classes, a tendency to blame the health care professional for communication problems, and a focus on individual members of communicative interactions rather than the dyad. Again, the reader will find few of these problems evident in the research summarized in this volume, although several of the authors note that research still tends to avoid a focus on the dyad in favor of looking at (most commonly) the health care provider or (less commonly) the patient (or client or consumer). Thompson suggested a focus on health outcomes, which has now become apparent in some research (see, for instance, Chapter 7). A RESEARCH AGENDA?

In the flagship issue of Health Communication, several noted scholars were asked to suggest an agenda for health communication research. Although different scholars, of course, recommended various directions for research, it is encouraging to note how many of the suggestions they offered have now been fulfilled. The development of the field has come in a decade and a half (the editor of Health Communication is accepting articles for volume 16 as this introduction is being written). Barbara Korsch (1989), for instance, recalled reactions of dismay at the apparent audacity of the early researchers, who even proposed a scientific study of physician-patient communication. She wrote that “in the very beginning there was not even enough evidence to indicate that there were any features of doctor-patient communication that predictably influenced patient responses” (p. 6). Part II of this volume is full of discussions indicating such predictable influence. Korsch’s essay also suggested four key research tasks, all of which have now been addressed in the literature: (a) defining desirable outcomes of health communication (see Chapter 7), (b) exploring ethical considerations (see Chapter 30), (c) integrating some of the more isolated pieces of provider-patient interaction (see Chapter 4, although many of the chapters are pertinent to this task), and (d) treating innovative pedagogy for teaching communication skills (see Chapter 5). Similarly, Kreps’ (1989) essay in the initial issue of Health Communication recommended several directions that have now been taken. He cited Bowers’ (1969) exhortation to make communication research more socially relevant, and this goal has certainly been fulfilled in the research presented here. He also discussed Boulding’s (1956) guidanceadvocating alliances between the professionals and the academics (see Chapter 29) and described the need to reach out and impact health care policy (see Chapter 18). In yet another essay in that direction-setting issue, David Smith (1989) argued in favor of theoretical and methodological pluralism, a perspective that is reflected in Chapters 2 and 6, among others. “Messy” research, a focus on narratives, and consulting with research participants, all of which he advocated, are also recurring themes in this volume. Paul Arntson (1989), in his essay, focused on the role of dealing with uncertainty in health care. Uncertainty is perhaps best addressed in the health communication literature through an

4

THOMPSON

application of Austin Babrow’s (1992) problematic integration theory, which is discussed in several chapters (see, e.g., Chapter 8). Arntson (1989) and Nussbaum (1989) both advocated broadening our study of health communication beyond the traditional health care context. This issue is discussed in numerous chapters in Parts III through VI but perhaps nowhere better than in Chapter 14. Several other of Nussbaum’s suggestions have also been addressed, including the suggestions to focus on the elderly (see Chapter 9) and to examine more closely information flow in health care (see the chapters in Part V). OVERVIEW

Making use of several decades of research on health communication, the authors of the chapters in this handbook have attempted to summarize what we now know about communicative processes as they relate to health and health care and to recommend directions for future research. The book is divided into six parts. The first part presents a broad look at the contribution of theory to health communication, and the following parts organize health communication issues within contextual frameworks, which are traditionally used in the discipline of communication. All of the parts are preceded by a brief introduction. The first part, edited by Katherine Miller, addresses some introductory theoretical and metatheoretical issues. It includes a chapter by Richard Street that is likely to guide health communication research for years to come. It also contains a chapter by Barbara Sharf and Marsha Vanderford on illness narratives and a chapter by Austin Babrow and Marifran Mattson on theorizing about health communication. The second part, edited by Teresa Thompson, focuses on provider-client communication. Its chapters discuss such topics as communication skills training, outcomes of provider-patient interaction, disclosure issues, methods for studying provider-patient interaction, and special populations. Part III, edited by Alicia Dorsey, deals with social and community health issues, including community organizing, community health risk management, social support, everyday interpersonal communication and health, and marginalized populations. Part IV, edited by Katherine Miller, includes chapters on organizational forms, stress and social support, groups and teams in health care, organizational rhetoric, and communicating wellness initiatives. The next section, on media issues, is edited by Roxanne Parrott. It contains chapters on health campaigns, health message design strategies, narrowcasting health messages, telemedicine, public relations in health communication, health information in the media, and health literacy. The handbook closes with a unique section on lessons learned. Edited by Alicia Dorsey, it includes important contributions by individuals who have worked to combine academic and policy (practitioner) perspectives within the field of health communication. This section concludes with a chapter on ethics in health communication research. The field of health communication has achieved an important and useful body of knowledge capable of improving our understanding of all communicative processes as well as our understanding of the social intersections and implications of health issues. This handbook attempts to bring together the entire corpus of work related to the study of health communication in an effort to educate those new to the field, summarize research for those already knowledgeable about health communication, and promote future research on all aspects of the relationship between communicative processes and health and the delivery of health care.

1. INTRODUCTION

5

REFERENCES Arntson, P. (1989). Improving citizens’ health competencies. Health Communication, 1, 29– 34. Babrow, A. S. (1992). Communication and problematic integration: Understanding diverging probability and value, ambiguity, ambivalence, and impossibility. Communication Theory, 2, 95–130. Boulding, K. (1956). General systems theory: The skeleton of science. Management Science, 2, 197–208. Bowers, J. W. (1969). Implications of the New Orleans conference recommendations from the perspective of behavioral scholarship. In R. J. Kibler & L. J. Barker (Eds.), Conceptual frontiers in speech communication (pp. 184–189). New York: Speech Association of America. Cassata, D. M. (1977). Health communication theory and research: An overview of the communication specialist interface. In B. D. Ruben (Ed.), Communication yearbook 2 (pp. 495–503). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Cassata, D. M. (1980). Health communication theory and research: A definitional overview. In D. Nimmo (Ed.), Communication yearbook 4 (pp. 583–590). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Costello, D. E. (1977). Health communication theory and research: An overview. In B. D. Ruben (Ed.), Communication yearbook 1 (pp. 557–568). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Dervin, B., & Harlock, S. (1976, May). Health communication research: The state of the art. Paper presented at the annual convention of the International Communication Association, Portland, OR. Korsch, B. M. (1989). Current issues in communication research. Health Communication, 1, 5–10. Korsch, B. M., Freeman, B., & Negrete, V. F. (1971). Practical implications of doctor-patient interaction analyses for pediatric practice. American Journal of Diseases of Children, 121, 110–114. Korsch, B. M., Gozzi, E. K., & Francis, V. (1968). Gaps in doctor-patient communication: Doctor-patient interaction and patient satisfaction. Pediatrics, 42, 855–871. Korsch, B. M., & Negrete, V. F. (1972, February). Doctor-patient communication. Scientific American, 227, 66–74. Kreps, G. L. (1988). The pervasive role of information in health and health care: Implications for health communication policy. In J. Anderson (Ed.), Communication yearbook 11 (pp. 238–276). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Kreps, G. L. (1989). Setting the agenda for health communication research and development: Scholarship that can make a difference. Health Communication, 1, 11–16. Nussbaum, J. F. (1989). Directions for research within health communication. Health Communication, 1, 35–40. Pettegrew, L. S. (1988). Theoretical plurality in health communication. In J. Anderson (Ed.), Communication yearbook 11 (pp. 298–308). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Smith, D. H. (1989). Studying health communication: An agenda for the future. Health Communication, 1, 17–28. Thompson. T. L. (1984). The invisible helping hand: The role of communication in the health and social service professions. Communication Quarterly, 32, 148–163.

I Introduction Katherine Miller [part 1] Texas A&M University

Teresa Thompson [part 2] University of Dayton

Alicia Dorsey [part 3] Texas A&M University

Katherine Miller [part 4] Texas A&M University

Handbooks serve distinct purposes within an academic discipline. In a sense, they provide both the history and the geography for a field of study, and the publication of a handbook suggests both that the discipline in question has a history worth recounting and can be seen as being “on the map.” This is clearly the case for the discipline of health communication. Our research has moved from relatively atheoretical considerations of a variety of health-related issues to sophisticated considerations that marry the discipline to important theoretical traditions in social sciences and the humanities. In short, health communication clearly has a history worth recounting. Similarly, the discipline of health communication has moved from a relatively undifferentiated and random landscape to one of complex peaks and valleys, rivers and lakes, shifting boundaries and borders. Thus, the cartography of health communication is also worthy of consideration. Both maps and historical documents require context, however, and the first section of this handbook provides that context. Specifically, the three chapters presented in this section lay out boundaries of the field, provide context into how the discipline of health communication has developed, lay out competing understandings of the theoretical underpinnings of our understandings, and argue for directions into future scholarship in health communication. In essence, these chapters set up the context for succeeding chapters on specific research on health communication—research considering

7

8

PART I: INTRODUCTION

patient-provider interaction, social and community health, health in the media, and health care organizations. In her initial chapter introducing the reader to the Handbook of Health Communication, Teresa Thompson takes on the task of providing a brief historical account of the field as a whole and defining some of the outlines of the maps that now define health communication and that will shape health communication scholarship in the future. As she notes, although the field of health communication has only had formal status for three decades or so, questions that join the critical issues of interaction and well-being have been investigated for many years. However, the institutional history of health communication has moved at a very rapid pace, and the very existence of this handbook serves as evidence of the “coming of age” of the discipline. The second three following chapters of this section, then, serve to introduce the reader to some of the more theoretical issues that have engaged health communication scholars in recent years and that will continue to engage them in the future. Austin Babrow and Marifran Mattson provide a comprehensive map of the discipline in their consideration of Theorizing About Health Communication: Preliminary Considerations. Of course, the drawing of any map depends to some extent on the cartographers, and these mapmakers have used several important frameworks to guide their understanding of theory in the discipline. Specifically, they consider a variety of themes and tensions that have characterized health communication scholarship (interplay of the body and communication, science and humanism, idiosyncracy and commonality, and issues of certainty and uncertainty) and analyze those themes using a theoretical map of the field of communication developed by Robert Craig. This analysis, then, serves both to define and explore issues within health communication and to place those issues within the larger disciplinary matrix of communication. In the third chapter of this section, Illness Narratives and the Social Construction of Health, Barbara Sharf and Marsha Vanderford explore an important trend in health communication research that is clearly linked to some of the issues described in Babrow and Mattson’s chapter. Specifically, Babrow and Mattson note the shift in much communication research from an analysis of communication that emphasizes concepts such as “exchange” and “transmission” to one that emphasizes the constitutive role of communication in (re)creating social reality. Sharf and Vanderford explore this tradition by considering general concepts of the social construction of both illness and well-being and by looking extensively at one important approach within this tradition—the search for narrative understandings of physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual health. In the final chapter of this section, Communication in Medical Encounters: An Ecological Perspective, Rick Street examines one of the most studied issues in health communication—communication in medical encounters between providers and patients. This chapter is included in this introductory section rather than in the section on interpersonal relationships, however, because Street works to establish a comprehensive model that both incorporates extant research and points to important new directions for scholars. Specifically, Street proposes an ecological perspective on medical encounters that both explains key processes between patients and providers and places those processes within the social contexts that have a critical emphasis on both participants in the medical encounter and the encounter itself.

2 Illness Narratives and the Social Construction of Health Barbara F. Sharf Texas A&M University

Marsha L. Vanderford Centers for Disease Control

Rose, a 20-year-old college sophomore, was the designated driver for a group of friends coming home from a party one evening in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina. The group lost their way, and while searching for a familiar landmark, Rose failed to stop for a blinking red light. After a police vehicle tailed her car for a few miles, she was signaled to pull over to the side of the road. The police officer shined a flashlight on the three occupants of the car, asked to see Rose’s driver license, directed her to get out of the car, then queried, “What’s the matter with your eyes?” Though Rose explained that, because of a neuromuscular problem, her eyelid muscles sag when she is tired (a condition called ptosis), the officer accused Rose of driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, an allegation that Rose vehemently denied. The officer replied that she could see the effect of alcohol in Rose’s eyes. Rose explained that she suffered from a neurological disease called myasthenia gravis, in her case a congenital condition. Myasthenia gravis is caused by inadequate connections between the nervous system and the muscles, resulting in generalized muscle weakness and periods of extreme fatigue. Medications help to keep the symptoms from being overpowering and to slow degeneration but do not eliminate all the problems. Although Rose showed the officer a disability parking permit, the officer did not buy this explanation. Instead, she insisted that Rose walk a straight line, but being stressed and tired, the young woman had trouble with this task. Rose asked to be given a breathilizer test twice, but her requests were denied. In the end, the officer ticketed her for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI), took her bail bond card, and gave her a date for a court appearance. Rose followed the advice of a disabilities lawyer, who arranged to have Rose’s DUI charges dropped in exchange for her having to take a test for a special driver’s license that permanently categorizes her as a person with a neuromuscular ailment and that requires an annual retest.

9

10

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

Rose’s story is an excellent illustration of how matters of health and illness are socially constructed; that is, how bodily and psychological states of being are perceived and imbued with social and cultural meaning. In this chapter, we start with a brief overview of the social construction perspective, its bases in rhetorical and communication theory, and its application to communication referencing matters of health and illness. Following this introduction, we center our attention on socially shared health-related narratives, among the most common and powerful forms of symbolic construction. Although we refer to a widely diverse scholarly literature, we have not tried to present an exhaustive survey of the field. Instead, we refer to exemplary studies, including some of our own, that we find particularly instructive for understanding the health narrative approach. We then identify, discuss, and illustrate five functions of health narratives: sense-making, asserting control, transforming identity, warranting decisions, and building community. We conclude with several points to consider as the narrative perspective becomes increasingly incorporated into health communication scholarship. Throughout this chapter, we use Rose’s narrative to illuminate our conceptual explanations. EVOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION APPROACH

Sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) defined the social construction of reality as a dialectic between social reality and individual existence—in other words, a symbolically based tension between commonly accepted knowledge and personal understanding. Social constructions of reality are mediated through linguistic expression articulated among people and communities, shaped and recorded as history. The philosophical roots of the symbolic representation of reality are clearly evident in historical and contemporary rhetorical and communication theories. Ever since Plato in the Gorgias ridiculed the sophistic practice of teaching rhetoric as a vehicle of appearance rather than of truth, scholars have debated the role and purpose of communication. Two opposing positions have characterized the controversy: (1) communication ought to represent, to the extent possible, the material world and its truths and (2) language creates the world and its meanings. Two thousand years ago, the Sophists were vilified for holding a relative view of truth and teaching rhetorical skills designed to create appearances and influence public perception. The early Christian Church fathers looked with suspicion on later sophistic rhetoricians, believing that possession of religious truth was inherently persuasive without interpretation or elaboration. This controversy has endured up until the present. Thirty-five years ago, rhetorician Robert L. Scott (1967) argued that rhetoric is epistemic, a way of knowing. His argument presumes that truth is not immutable, able to be conveyed from one person to another, but rather a “set of generally accepted social norms, experience or matters of faith that serve as reference points in working out [human] contingencies” (p. 12) and that are “the result of a process of interaction at a given moment” (p. 13). In short, truth is created through the process of communication. Scott’s position has prompted a variety of responses, resulting in a debate between contrasting stances. One group of disputants claims that rhetoric is an inadequate vehicle for truth (e.g., Croasman & Cherwitz, 1982), whereas another group holds that all knowledge, even our understanding of physical objects, is created through language and intersubjective consensus (Brummett, 1976, 1982). A middle ground was laid out by Railsback (1983), who proposed that material reality is separate from language but not meaningful without symbolic interpretation. Her outlook provides a framework for examining the tension between material reality and the symbolic representation of health, illness, and disease. In a recent review of communication theories, Robert Craig

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

11

(1999) reiterated the dialectic of acquiring and communicating knowledge of reality in slightly variant terms. Craig differentiated between a transmission concept that posits communication as the transfer of information in the form of messages “from one mind to another” (p. 125) and a constitutive approach that conceptualizes communication as a “process that produces and reproduces shared meaning” (p. 125). Elaborating upon this basic distinction, he made a case for using the constitutive or social construction perspective as a “metamodel” encompassing all the various particular theories that attempt to explain how communication works. In the context of health, illness, and medical care, the application of the constitutive model of communication reveals the complexities of moderating between scientific truth derived from the physicality of organic disease and the materiality of bodies, and the meanings of human suffering experienced by patients, their loved ones, and the health professionals who care for them. The social construction approach to health communication has primarily emerged as a reaction to the biomedical perspective, long dominant in the health care arena. Similar to the ancient and contemporary schisms in communication theory we have described, the medical community has historically divided communication about health into two kinds of discourse. The first kind uses objective language to present traditional,1 biomedical information about organic, verifiable, measurable signs of disease conveyed in the authoritative voices of physicians and other health providers, evidenced by clinical signs, laboratory tests, imaging, and other technologies. The second kind uses subjective language to talk about the internal, nonverifiable experience of illness, of being in dis-ease. People undergoing health problems and their families develop their own understandings about physical symptoms, revealing health beliefs, augmented with personal and cultural significance, that transcend the material signs relied upon by clinicians. In medical contexts, the scientific detachment and empiricism of practitioners is valorized, whereas the subjective experiences of patients, reflecting moral, spiritual, and social elements of illness, “inevitably connote insubstantiality, something ‘existing only in the mind’ ” (Donnelly & Brauner, 1992, p. 481). Patients whose accounts stray from physical symptoms, the review of bodily systems, and the medical chronology are characterized as “poor historians” (Brody, 1987) who distort reality with subjective perception and tangential interpretation. However, over the past 25 years, many participants in the health care system, including clinicians, health educators, social scientists, medical humanists, and patients, have challenged biomedicine’s hierarchical epistemological claims, asserting that the “scientific method is only one of several routes to knowledge” (McWhinney, 1989, p. 38). Social psychologist Elliot G. Mishler (1981) laid the foundation for seeing the implications of social construction theory in the context of clinical care. Starting with the proposition that “the world as a meaningful reality is constructed through human interpretative activity,” Mishler explained that “whether or not a particular behavior or experience is viewed . . . as a sign or symptom of illness depends on cultural values, social norms, and culturally shared rules of interpretation” (p. 141). Thus, observation of the same biological phenomenon, such as Rose’s heavy-lidded eyes and inability to walk a straight line, is imbued with quite a different meaning for the police officer, for Rose’s friends, and for Rose herself. Furthermore, Mishler (1984) helps us to understand that within a clinical encounter, although the practitioner and the patient are ostensibly discussing the same physiological

1 Labeling biomedicine as “traditional” is itself an act of social construction. Many of the healing or treatment modalities referred to as “alternative” or “complementary” long predate regular medicine.

12

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

symptoms and reported history, there is nearly always a contrast, and often outright conflict, between what he calls “the voice of medicine” and “the voice of the lifeworld.” Rose has enjoyed a positive relationship with Dr. Harvey, her neurologist, for several years. Nonetheless, there are inevitably significant differences between how the doctor understands the manifestation of myasthenias gravis in his patient as an organic process and Rose’s experience of the impact of the disease on her intellectual, social, and emotional life. For instance, as the voice of medicine, Dr. Harvey is concerned with quantitatively assessing changes in the degree of muscle weakness in her eye. For Rose, the voice of the lifeworld, her concern with optical fatigue is focused on how it will impact her working on a computer screen under stress and thereby affect her performance on the Graduate Record Exam. From a social construction perspective, the work of health communication scholarship is to unpack the sociocultural sources of symbolic usage in health care, for people often accept it as natural and inevitable without considering how meanings emerge from contextual and political sources in ways that mold health beliefs and behaviors, clinical judgments, and organizational routines.2 Two influential works exemplify how the voices of medicine and of the lifeworld have become commingled within everyday discourses. Social critic and cancer survivor Susan Sontag’s (1978, 1988) astute comparative analyses of tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer and AIDS in the 20th century demonstrate the pervasiveness of disease-related connotations in many nonmedical spheres of life as well as how language shapes the identities of people suffering with those diseases, often in negative, problematic ways. For example, over the past 30 years, cancer metaphors have been used to describe the Watergate coverup of the Nixon administration, the scandalous personal behaviors that propelled the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and, most recently, rhetoric from the Bush Administration concerning terrorism in the United States (e.g., expressions of commitment to keep terrorist cells from growing). Sontag claimed convincingly that such insidious verbal comparisons contribute considerably to the suffering of people with cancer. Pushing the direction of Sontag’s work further, cultural studies scholar David Morris (1998) indicated the limits of the biomedical model of health and disease in his discussion of postmodern illness—“situated at the crossroads of biology and culture” (p. 71). In his view, postmodern illness is characterized by ambiguity of existence, is reflective of lifestyle and politics, and is fragmentary and interdisciplinary. Morris cites such biocultural manifestations of postmodern illness as medically mysterious diagnoses like chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, and attention deficit disorder, as well as equally mysterious modes of therapy like pain clinics and modes of complementary healing (mysterious insofar as they resist verification through empirical techniques).3 Cross-cultural scholarship has been particularly useful in revealing the misunderstandings that arise from conflicting cultural constructions. The work of Arthur Kleinman (1988; Kleinman, Eisenberg, & Good, 1978), a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist, has been pivotal in illustrating how illnesses are understood, explained, and acted on through ethnocultural lenses, which he calls explanatory models. His examples show how differences in explanatory models in clinical settings often increase patients’ suffering and sometimes 2 While a wide variety of methodological approaches have been used in social construction work, depending on the nature of the questions asked, there has been particular emphasis on qualitative, naturalistic methods, including archival explorations, discourse analysis, depth interviewing, autoethnography, and participant observation. 3 No wonder, then, that popular fictional media icon, Mob boss Tony Soprano, is afflicted with psychosomatic anxiety attacks, necessitating weekly appointments with a psychiatrist.

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

13

have life-threatening results. An especially striking application of Kleinman’s conceptualization of cultural constructions in conflict is journalist Anne Fadiman’s (1997) tragic ethnographic description of a young girl caught between the American medical system’s approach to epilepsy and her Hmong immigrant family’s comprehension of the condition they called “the spirit catches you and you fall down.” Even modern Western societies that ostensibly share the tenets of biomedicine interpret the practice of medicine in culturally distinct ways, resulting in strikingly different clinical discourses and modes of care (Payer, 1988). To better understand the confluence of the biomedical and sociocultural, the material and the symbolic, let’s briefly consider the multiple and changing ways in which the concept of health is discussed and applied in everyday contexts by various agents. One of the most common definitions of health is in terms of its opposite: Health is the absence of disease. But health is not necessarily such an absolute state. On the popular television drama The West Wing, the fictional President Bartlett, an ostensibly astute, ethical, and tough-skinned chief executive, suffers from multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that threatens his physical and mental stamina. The public revelation of this illness raises questions that have been asked of politicians in real life as well. Is the president sufficiently healthy to continue his role as a national and international leader? What reasons might have justified the president’s not disclosing his health status from the beginning? In fact, we often speak of being healthy in relative terms. We might say someone is healthy who has a chronic illness or permanent disability but is able to carry out key functions of daily living and enjoy mental well-being despite the presence of pain and physical limitations. Conceptualizing health in this way makes explicit that there are psychological and spiritual components of health integrated with the physical components. In another common usage, the term healthy is used to characterize what is found in nature. Although manufactured pharmaceuticals have been increasingly relied upon to protect against or clear up infections and allergic reactions, decrease pain, and even rejuvenate bones and other body tissues, their undesired side-effects have led to the widespread popularity of herbal remedies, accompanied by an ideology that equates what is “natural” with what is healthy, even if substances found in nature also have unintended, unpleasant consequences. This usage of the term contrasts with the way health care is increasingly viewed as an economic commodity. Consumers purchase it, providers supply it, third-party payers and health care organizations manage it, and primary care practitioners coordinate and guard entry to more specialized modes of treatment. Individuals “shop” for doctors (often from a list of those who are “preferred” financially), and physicians find ways to “fire” problematic patients. A variety of practitioners provide care that is considered alternative (or, more recently, complementary) to what is known as traditional or regular medicine, even if the alternative treatments have existed for centuries, predating modern biomedicine. When the concept of health is applied to populations or communities instead of individuals, other indices may come to the surface (e.g., safety from violence, adequate nutrition and shelter, and availability of meaningful employment). At times, the health concerns of the “public” may conflict with the rights of individuals, as in the case of vaccinations or the segregation of infectious citizens. The several ways in which the concept of health has been situationally applied at a symbolic level clearly have serious material consequences—financial, physical, and social—for an array of stakeholders, including patients, caregivers, insurers, clinical scientists, policymakers, and guardians of public health. In short, materiality and meaning are commingled in the social construction work of health communication scholars.

14

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

NARRATIVE APPROACHES TO HEALTH COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP

As we have indicated, the social construction approach to health communication can serve as a conceptualization and method of analysis for a wide variety of issues and purposes. In this chapter, we focus primarily on a particular type of social construction, the application of the narrative perspective to health contexts, especially in the form of illness narratives. Our objective is to explain and illustrate how viewing narration as the defining paradigm of human communication (Fisher, 1987) illuminates common health-related discourses. Although we might have used this perspective to concentrate on clinical interactions, drug advertisements, the policies and practices of managed care, or other facets of health communication, much of our own previous work has investigated discourses reflecting the experience of illness, both at a personal level and as it is represented in popular media, and so we have chosen this kind of discourse as our exemplar.4 Following rhetorician Walter Fisher’s argument that humans are homo narrans, the species distinguished by its ability and predisposition to tell stories, it is our assertion that the most common way of communicating our personally constructed ideas of the realities we experience is through the social sharing of narratives—stories about our lives. Narratives not only reflect individual views of the world but also provide explanations for why things happen in certain ways. They help us to recount people and events of significance, account for motives, causes, and reasons (Fisher, 1987), and are the primary means for involving others in our own world view (Bruner, 1986). Such stories regularly occur in many kinds of contexts. Some are carefully crafted accounts conveyed in public settings and mass media, others are informal tales incorporated into ordinary conversations. As a form of interaction, the illness narrative implies a reciprocal role for listeners, namely, to witness—through attentive listening, acknowledgment, understanding, and perhaps empathy—the suffering of others (Kleinman, 1988). Attention to personal narratives began to emerge in health communication scholarship concurrently with the development of a conceptual distinction between disease, defined as organic malfunctions and pathological processes whose signs and symptoms typically can be observed and quantitatively assessed; and illness, the patient’s experience of disease or ill health (Kleinman, et al., 1978). Ahmed, Kolker, and Coelho (1979), among others, posited a third concept, sickness, to talk about the labels, roles, and societal expectations projected onto diagnosed individuals. Illness is the phenomenon studied by health communication scholars who are interested in the ways that individuals, and sometimes groups, portray their experiences of ill health in specific, individualized contexts. Narrative-based investigations extend the discussion of health and disease beyond the biomedical to encompass the meaning that patients ascribe to their illnesses as they affect roles, relationships, and identities, as well as levels of meaning that reflect social, organizational, ethnocultural, and familial assumptions and influences (Sharf & Kahler, 1996). Clinical medicine has also been shown to employ narrative in its most fundamental activities, including clinical rounds and case reports (Good, 1994; Hunter, 1993; Poirier & Brauner, 1988) and chart notations (Poirier & Brauner, 1990; Poirier et al., 1992), but 4

It will be evident from the range of references cited that we do not claim the health-related narrative as the sole province of health communication. To the contrary, this research on this topic is quite interdisciplinary. Nonetheless, we strongly believe that health communication scholars have made significant contributions to its study.

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

15

notably without representation of the patient’s voice (Donnelly, 1988). Patients’ accounts of their illnesses, Mishler’s “voice of the lifeworld,” are proving to be significant alternate “routes to knowledge,” serving as a means to comprehend the storytellers’ construction of their illness experience. As increasingly depicted through ethnographies, patients’ writings, and media portrayals, such stories give legitimacy to the often unacknowledged expertise of patients, help to establish identity (both of individual patients and groups who share a common health concern), and provide unrivaled insight into the experience of illness (Vanderford, Jenks, & Sharf, 1997). Video representations of patients’ voices are starting to have a significant impact on the education of physicians (Makoul, 1999; VIA Website). Like other types of stories, illness narratives are implicitly appealing and comprehensible because they make use of familiar elements with which we have learned to shape our perceptions of the world. Such elements include characters, the people who enact the events of the story (for example, heroes, villains, victims, and innocent bystanders)5; scenes, the settings in which key events occur (e.g., a clinic or hospital, home, the workplace); motives, the thoughts, emotions, and circumstances that impel characters to take certain actions (for example, fear, concern, anger, accommodation); chronologies or time frames (which emphasize past, present, or future); plots or dramas, the meaning that emerges from how key events and characters’ actions are configured in relation to one another (Charon, et al., 1996; for example, battling disease, accepting one’s fate, or being empowered to make choices and take action); and narrator’s voice or point of view (for instance, a story is always told from someone’s perspective, thus necessarily not representing other perspectives). Finally, as important as the story elements that constitute a narrative is the telling of the story—the process and style of communicating the narrative. Implicit in the way stories of sickness are told are underlying values, such as the desire for information, personal control, recognition of individuality, or enjoyable quality of life. Lack of congruence between the explicit or implicit values within the stories of practitioners and patients is often the source of significant problems in clinical care (Geist & Gates, 1996; Vanderford, Smith, & Harris, 1992). Patient accounts compensate for the partiality and objectification of medical records, creating a more complete picture of illness, health, and disease. Health communication scholars have approached illness narratives as psychosocial maps, revealing the storytellers’ emotional and cognitive journeys. These narratives challenge the voice of medicine as the primary means of understanding health and disease. To interweave both the voice of medicine and the voice of the lifeworld into a consistent, mutually agreed upon story that functions as the basis for clinical care and decision-making is a primary communicative goal, albeit one that is often difficult to achieve (Geist & Dreyer, 1993; Sharf, 1990). Sociologist Kathy Charmaz’s (1999) discussion of her research on patients’ accounts of suffering due to chronic disease illustrates the range of communicative experiences of interest to narrative scholars. “[Suffering] is of the self and it is social. As suffering spreads out, it shapes social relations and limits social worlds” (p. 365). It changes the interaction that sufferers have with others and the roles they can play. As a result, the patient’s very identity is affected. “Although meanings of suffering may begin with the body, they

5 Stories of sickness sometimes treat the body or body parts as characters independent of the person to whom they belong (Cassell, 1985).

16

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

include emotions, accompany losses, and thus, can arise through social as well as corporeal existence” (p. 366). Patients’ changing relationships, interactions, roles, identities, emotions, losses, and growth are the elements of dramatic stories, naturally drawing the attention of narrative scholars (Vanderford et al., 1997). In defining how the application of narrative thought has changed the practice of health care ethics, Jones (1996) pointed to the importance of the particular circumstances and situational details that form the basis for inductive analysis; the acceptance of complicated human emotions, behavior, and connections; and the nonhierarchical recognition and support of people’s capacities “to construct their own life stories and make their own decisions” (p. 268). In their analysis of narratives that unfolded during a support group for epileptic patients, Arntson and Droge (1987) identified four functions of health-related storytelling, that have since been identified in subsequent studies of individuals’ illness accounts. Illness narratives help patients (a) make sense of health and disease, (b) assert control in the midst of physical and psychological losses, (c) transform their identities and social roles as a result of altered health and disease, and (d) make decisions about their health. As illness narratives increasingly move beyond clinical and interpersonal levels of communication and are shared in broader, more public venues, they serve a fifth function: to solidify health-based communities with common visions and social agendas. These five socially constructive functions of health-related storytelling provide the organizational structure for the remainder of this chapter. In summary, the narrative approach to health communication highlight the meaning of the illness experience, primarily to the individual or group with a particular health problem and secondarily to others who witness or read those personal accounts. All who participate in the telling or hearing of an illness narrative help in creating its significance and act as its interpreters. NARRATIVE AS SENSE-MAKING

In the incident described at the beginning of this chapter, the young woman appears to have been unfairly treated. But had the same events been narrated from the police officer’s perspective, that is, from the viewpoint of an individual charged with looking out for reckless drivers, the meaning of the anecdote would almost certainly be very different. After all, Rose’s ailment is, for practical purposes, a largely invisible disability (Matthews & Harrington, 2000) and therefore easy to misinterpret. Unlike paralyzed people confined to wheelchairs or blind people who walk with white canes or guide dogs, Rose appears “able-bodied.” Heavy-lidded eyes due to muscle fatigue constitute a visible but rather subtle sign that the officer noted and interpreted as evidence of alcohol or drug intake. As an alternate narrator, the officer would provide a strikingly different interpretation of this same physical symptom. Most narrative research focuses on the sense-making function of stories—the ability of narratives to create meaning of random events, people, and action. Organizational theorist Karl Weick (1995; see also Miller, 2001; Miller, Joseph, & Apker, 2000) has developed a conceptualization of the process of sense-making that emphasizes the pivotal role of communication and includes attributes particularly relevant to the creation of narratives that enable us to cope with chaotic or confusing conditions often encountered in our everyday lives. According to Weick, sense-making is, among other things, retrospective (is affected by our past experiences); emergent (needs to take into account new experiences);

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

17

interactive (is influenced by social relations and information gained from others); and driven by plausibility (focuses on “what can account for sensory experience, but what is also interesting, attractive, emotionally appealing, and goal relevant” [Fiske, 1992, p. 879]). Weick also points to the strong reciprocal connection between situational sensemaking and one’s notions of personal identity; this link will be explored below as one of the key functions of narrative. Considering these characteristics, much of the development of social and personal meaning is inherent in the creation of good stories. Fisher (1985) asserted that narratives are focused on “words and/or deeds—that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create or interpret them” (p. 2). Individuals are believed to make sense of unexpected, random events as they construct accounts of what they experienced, connecting people and events to create some understandable pattern (Churchill & Churchill, 1982). Critical to this sense-making activity is the distance in time between the actions in the story and the “telling” of it in retrospect. Recalling the events in hindsight, the storyteller can “assume a reflective, observant posture toward those events in a way that was impossible when the events were in progress.” (Brody, 1987, p. 14).6 Storytellers can interpret events, ascribe meanings, justify actions, and make links in retrospect that are less likely to be discerned when the narrator experiences events in real time. Although the sense-making role of storytelling is apparent in accounts in which illness does not occur, this function is especially significant for patients whose lives have been altered by the suffering that results from severe chronic or acute disease or disability. While the details of individual illness narratives are personal and context-specific, scholars who study patients’ stories as a discursive genre have derived general categories of meta-narratives based on how the storytellers make sense of the illness experience. Literary analyst Anne Hunsaker Hawkins (1993) calls this genre pathography, which she asserted has spawned four major types of myths or stories: those of rebirth and the promise of cure, those of battle and journey, those of dying, and those of health beyond medicine (i.e., health through alternative modes of healing). Similarly, sociologist Arthur Frank (1995), himself a survivor of heart disease and prostate cancer, argued that “wounded storytellers” create stories of restitution or recovery, stories of chaos or illness with no hope of recovery, and stories of quest or journey in which the suffering engendered by illness leads to larger purposes or understandings. Whatever the category, narrative scholars agree that the very voicing of an illness experience in story form is itself an act of healing and agency. By virtue of providing a reason for the person’s illness experience, a narrative has the potential to diminish suffering (Brody, 1987) and to allow the person to assume accountability for him- or herself and perhaps others in similar circumstances (Frank, 1995). Naturally, not only people diagnosed with a disease but their family and friends are affected by the illness experience. As caretakers, providers of social support, and fellow sufferers, people in a patient’s extended network create their own explanations of events and experiences. Although narrative scholarship has not sufficiently explored the comparative accounts of patients and their loved ones, a few excellent examples exist, such as two remarkable, intertwined narratives in which a surviving life partner and a partner dying of breast cancer recorded concurrent impressions of shared events over a 2-year period from diagnosis through death (Butler & Rosenblum, 1991). Writes Sandy, the surviving partner: 6

In some renditions, the narrator is not only relaying past events, but is looking to the future as well. In cases where death appears to be imminent, the reduction of distance in time and psyche between the narrator and the yet-to-be experienced resolution often adds to the power and poignancy of the narrative. See, for instance, Christina Middlebrook’s account (1996) of coping with metastatic breast cancer.

18

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

Last night I wrote, “I am excused. I excuse myself. Cancer is what I do now.” Cancer is my work. Barbara’s mood swings, doctor’s appointments, medicines. My feelings. Our writing together. All of it has become my central activity. Cancer swallows up the air of my life and insinuates its presence everywhere. Nothing remains untouched. Inviolate. (p. 48)

Sense-making may also differ among people with seemingly similar illness experiences. A striking example of the power of narrative to help make sense of illness is found in contradictory accounts of women with breast implants (Vanderford & Smith, 1996). In an extended study of patients’, physicians’, and popular press accounts of the breast implant controversy, the stories of women who blamed subsequent illnesses on their implants are compared with the stories of those who also had undergone synthetic breast surgery but did not hold their implants responsible for health problems. The latter group did not blame their problems on implants because their health issues fit within a larger narrative concerning the imperfection of medicine. In one account, a woman tells a story that integrates her understanding of general medical risks with her personal experience: They told me in ‘77, “This [implant] is going to last forever.” I didn’t question it any further. It didn’t dawn on me to question it further, but I do remember them saying that, because I had a good rapport with the doctor. The doctor that I had was the head of plastic surgery at Duke at that time. Dr. X, you know, he just laughed about it. And I said, “You mean when I die they are still going to be there?” And he said, “You are going to be laid out, they are still going to be up there.” I mean, that was their attitude at that time. And of course they were mistaken. But I don’t have any, I don’t know. It was an error, nothing in our bodies last. A hip replacement is silicone, it doesn’t last (p. 82)

This storyteller integrates the rupture of her implants into the natural evolution of knowledge about medical devices and health risks. In this account, the physician is not a villain; his knowledge was just incomplete, albeit the best possible at the time. For the narrator, the risk of a rupture is to be expected as the natural consequence of the deterioration of medical devices. In contrast, women who blamed their implants for a host of illnesses generated stories in which no reason other than their implants could account for their health problems. The chronological relationships developed in the accounts pointed the blame directly on the implants (and indirectly at the plastic surgeons who implanted them), as in the following excerpt: I started having problems a few weeks after that with the implants. . . . The implants were placed directly in, and then three weeks after that I had an infection in where the skin turned real black . . . I mean problem after problem . . . I kept getting infections . . . and there was a bunch of lymph nodes . . . they just kept swelling up . . . swelling of the joints and dryness in your eyes, your mouth . . . I’ve had a rash that would come upon my hands and my feet . . . my dermatologist didn’t know where it was coming from. . . . Since all this started with the implants, I get colds easier and infections, like these little skin cancers they’ve been freezing off . . . nothing heals, I mean every time I turn around they have to put me on antibiotics to get anything to heal. . . . My menstrual cycle . . . has been irregular for a little over a year now . . . (Vanderford & Smith, 1996, p. 32)

This woman’s story highlights the implant procedure as the point at which never-before experienced symptoms and health problems begin to occur.

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

19

As these excerpts illustrate, narrative sense-making frequently involves assigning responsibility and sometimes blame, a process of attribution that occurs both at the level of personal reasoning about illness as well as at more public levels, such as a health campaign. As rhetoricians William G. Kirkwood and Dan Brown (1995) point out in their study of a variety of nontechnical public communications about cancer, heart disease, drug addiction, and so on, questions of responsibility interwoven into particular health-related narratives (Is being overweight an issue of heredity or lifestyle? Is cancer prevention a matter of individual surveillance or environmental regulation?) are as much rhetorical as scientific. These messages are constructed to vary with the audiences to whom they are addressed. Their objectives include fostering healthy behaviors among the undiagnosed public, easing feelings of guilt among and empowering those who have been diagnosed with a disease, and motivating favorable or unfavorable treatment of the sick (e.g., people with AIDS or smokers). In effect, how causative factors of disease are accounted for provides scenarios of innocent and culpable victims, careless perpetrators, or factors of nature or chance beyond human management. Yet, even in the midst of unavoidable disease or disability, the very act of generating a story allows the narrator a certain degree of agency. NARRATIVE AS ASSERTING CONTROL

In recalling her childhood experiences of growing up with myasthenias gravis, Rose has vivid, painful memories of being teased by schoolmates because she had a difficult time with many ordinary physical activities. As a way of responding to this situation, Rose chose to give a fifth-grade oral report on this disease in which she described what the problem is and how it affects people who have it without specifically mentioning that she herself suffered from it. She remembers this experience with a sense of satisfaction, because she felt she had managed to educate her peers and reduce the teasing without directly sacrificing her privacy. In short, she had discovered her own way to exert control over a hurtful situation through a form of narration that she had chosen. However, 2 years later she experienced the opposite effect. When her medication dosage suddenly failed to manage her symptoms, she became very ill and needed to be hospitalized for nearly 6 weeks, a very difficult episode for a seventh grader. Although she asked the school not to disclose to her classmates why she was in the hospital, her science teacher did exactly that, disregarding her request. In this instance, the suffering from being physically sick was increased by a loss of control of personal information—what she came to regard as a usurping of her personal narrative. The relationship of storytelling to increased perceptions of control is especially important in illness accounts. The experience of severe and/or chronic illness strips away multiple sources of an individual’s perception of control within the realm of his or her own life. A sense of suffering can be exacerbated by varying degrees and kinds of lost autonomy. Some forms of loss are physiological but also have emotional repercussions, such as shame, embarrassment, and frustration. For instance, prostate cancer survivors frequently experience loss of control over their bladders and sometimes their bowel functions. Women who have undergone a mastectomy, in addition to the more obvious change in appearance, may experience a loss of range of arm motion, a loss of strength, and a permanent severe swollenness of the affected arm (a condition called lymphedema). People with epilepsy experience unpredictable seizure activity, losing control of their entire bodies and mental concentration. Those with myasthenias gravis, like Rose, are subject to debilitating bouts of fatigue and weakness. Severe and chronic illness frequently is accompanied by physical restrictions which, in turn, leads to the diminishment

20

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

of social relationships. Patients may no longer be able to work, socialize, or participate in as wide a range of activities as they did previous to the onset of disease. Further contributors to suffering often include a reduction in financial resources, a loss of personal energy, and the need to forgo other pursuits in order to focus primarily on pain relief or rehabilitation. Compounding these losses is an increased dependency on family caregivers, medications, and health care providers. The patient role has traditionally been passive, requiring that individuals seek medical help and comply with their physicians’ recommendations (Brody, 1980; Smith & Pettegrew, 1986). Medical diagnosis and categorization has the potential to stigmatize patients as well as restrict their opportunities for recovery, development, and empowerment (Arntson & Droge, 1987). All these sorts of deficits may combine to create a “loss of certainty . . . loss of certainty means losing the collective myth of a ‘taken for granted’ future as well as the personal belief in sustained health” (Charmaz, 1999, p. 366). Assuming that authorship allows individuals with health problems to reassert some control in the midst of multiple losses, Frank (1995) explained that “seriously ill people are wounded not just in body but in voice. They need to become storytellers in order to recover the voices that illness and its treatment often take away” (p. xii). Turning one’s experiences into a narrative creates order by placing previously unexplainable events into relationships. The act of ordering and predicting the future is an act of control (Churchill & Churchill, 1982), as is recounting the history of previous occurrences. Rose’s remembrances of childhood illness narratives illustrate the importance of constructivist issues including: Whose voice is narrating the story? What information is selected for inclusion or exclusion and for which audiences? An additional significant aspect of authorial control is sequencing. A narrator imposes order on experience by creating a chronology of events: [She] is required to sequence the events of the story temporally: “A” happens, then “B,” then “C.” These temporal associations may then well turn into cause-effect relationships. The story’s “illusion of sequence” can impose order on a chaotic, if not random set of events. [For example,] scientifically there may be no explanation for [the occurrence of symptoms or side effects from medication]. By placing these events within a narrative, they may longer be so unpredictable for the narrator. (Arntson & Droge, 1987, p. 161)

By creating order and attributing causes for symptoms and disease, patients may regain a measure of control, denying the dominance of disorder and unpredictability. Importantly, illness narratives sometimes serve as vehicles for patients to project control into a future in which, as the disease or disability accelerates, they might no longer be able to express their choices to physicians and family members. Such stories told to family members or health care practitioners can serve as an advanced directive in place of institutionalized documents. Although for some, dying of an illness is characterized as losing a hard-fought struggle for life, for others, being able to plan how death occurs (i.e., enabling a “good death”) is one of the ultimate measures of asserting control. A man diagnosed as HIV positive explained: “If you are talking to your doctor and you tell him that you don’t want to be saved by any kind of machine that would help you breathe or whatever, the doctor ought to be able to put that in the chart and he ought to be able to respect your wishes on that point . . . if my heart gives out, don’t start it again “(Vanderford et al., 1992, p. 132). Sullivan’s (1997) analysis of women coping with living with breast cancer also described patient narratives in which women asserted control in the midst of terminal illness.

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

21

Like the man with HIV, these women described themselves acting in ways that projected their wills into situations in which they would later lack agency. For example, they told the interviewer how they had planned and arranged their own funerals, written their personal obituaries, and even arranged care for their pets for after their own deaths. As characters taking action in their own life stories, these women featured themselves as agents in control, despite the impending loss of life itself. In short, narrative form puts the “I” back into a person’s understanding of his or her life. Rather than silently comply with the initiatives and orders of others, the patient narrator asserts him- or herself as agent: “The actual narration of a story, saying the words in the appropriate form, makes a place in the world for [the] narrator” (Churchill & Churchill, 1982, p. 77). Creating a story also allows the narrator to emphasize certain aspects of who that agent is, and how illness has influenced that persona. NARRATIVE AS TRANSFORMING IDENTITY

How does Rose make sense of her illness in telling her own story? Would she define herself as disabled? Depending on whom she’s speaking with, she might describe how she faces moderate restrictions in physical exertion and makes regular adaptations in various aspects of her life, such as the kind of work she does or how much rest she needs. Yet her mom told her a long time ago that everyone is born with or develops some kind of imperfection, so she doesn’t consider herself particularly special and feels only occasionally inconvenienced. Although obviously aware that she suffers from a chronic disease, she doesn’t label herself as “sick,” nor does she feel impeded from living her life in ways that she chooses; hers would likely be a narrative about a busy psychology major, nursery school instructor, and fun-loving young adult. Of course, there have been times in her life when the official diagnosis of her disease, sanctioned by a neurologist, has been a necessity, creating a different version of her narrative. For instance, in the large high school she attended, a special designation of disability was needed to excuse her from certain physical education requirements and to ensure a schedule that limited the distance she would need to walk between classes. Her handicapped parking permit allows her to park her car near the buildings where she needs to go for university classes or business. Because of her ailment, she receives tuition assistance from the state of South Carolina. In these cases, an account that labels her as a disabled individual is necessary and welcomed. On the other hand, she would much prefer to focus on stories that do not categorize her primarily as a person with myasthenia gravis in her social and professional identities. Narratives not only serve as a means to assert agency for persons whose control has been diminished but also provide “wounded” storytellers with a means to reshape their identities, either in functional, enabling ways or, alternatively, with an emphasis on loss, trauma, or impairment. Churchill and Churchill (1982) describe the act of storytelling as an approach to self-knowledge: “Storytelling . . . is a mode of coming to know ourselves. . . . [s]tories are devices which shape agents and events into some intelligible pattern. They weld actors to their actions and doers to their deeds” (p. 74). Chronic illness often disrupts a person’s previously established self-image (Corbin & Strauss, 1988). As individuals experience dramatic changes in their health and “realize the crisis has lasting consequences for their lives” (Charmaz, 1994, p. 269), they also face “identity dilemmas,” including changes in roles, relationships, social circles, and activities. Physician Howard Brody (1987) explains that illness threatens a person’s “continuity of memory” or narrative

22

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

coherency when the individual’s confidence in his or her ability to carry out a “rational life plan” is shaken. When severe and/or chronic illness disrupts one’s life plan, “getting better” may not be possible through physical cure but instead requires the creation of a revised life story with a modified identity; “healing involves moving beyond thoughts of recovery and survival to the creation of a self that can ‘thrive”’ (Sullivan, 1997, p. 50) despite impairment, pain, or a more uncertain future. A familiar example of a transformative story that underscores identity issues is Christopher Reeve’s (1998) first-hand account of his physical and existential journey from movie star and Superman persona to quadriplegic patient and survivor to national health activist for spinal cord injuries. Despite such radical transformations, he claims to be “still me,” a pun referring both to his paralysis and to the preservation of a consistent inner core of self-identity.7 Stories that reflect transformation of identity make use of key narrative features that may include identification of critical, life-changing incidents; the revelation of character through multiple perspectives; and the integration of personal expertise and adaptation to illness. The intersection of chronology with critical incident is frequently told in a beforeand-after format, in which the narrator’s sense of self alters at a moment of changed health status (Vanderford & Smith, 1996). Inevitably, the narrative turns to challenges brought on by disease or disability, revealing which circumstances, symptoms, and interactions are normal and which abnormal for the narrator. Usually disease and the resulting sickness contribute to changes in bodily appearance and function that may require difficult and radical changes in self-image and ways of living. Comparing his experience of enduring a heart attack with a later bout of prostate cancer, Frank (1991) observed, “During my heart problems I could no longer participate in certain activities; during cancer I felt I had no right to be among others. . . . Heart attacks are invisible on the body’s surface. To myself and to others, I looked no different. One wears cancer. My own visible stigmas were hair loss and my intravenous line” (p. 92). Another kind of challenge revealed through narrative analysis is the way in which illness alters relationships, an inherent dimension of identity. While renegotiation of relationship roles tends to be gradual, the impact can still be quite dramatic. In a study of men’s accounts of prostate cancer, Arrington (2000), focused on “sex talk”—stories men told in support groups about changes in their relationships with their wives that fundamentally challenged their role as sexual beings and intimate partners.8 In one example, a participant described the tension between him and his wife that his illness had caused: “He complained that the messages presented through the media suggested that sex goes on for one’s entire life, and he lamented that such was not always the case. He expressed frustration that women saw those messages and consequently expected a full lifetime of sex.” Based on research interviews with individuals suffering from a variety of chronic diseases, Charmaz (1995) described the process of adaptation to bodily limits and other illness-related losses as gradual accommodation and acceptance, “flow[ing] with the experience” (p. 657), although other possible reactions include ignoring, minimizing, resisting, reconciling, and embracing. Adaptation in this sense involves a close reexamination of one’s goals, expectations, and terms of self-acceptance. Therefore, illness narratives may convey personal identity both through repetitive patterns and changes in actions and 7 For an in-depth analysis of Reeve’s transformative illness narrative see Geist-Martin, Ray, & Sharf (2002), pp. 23–31. 8 Although Arrington does not label his method as “narrative,” characterizing it instead as grounded theory, the cancer patients accounts reveal their construction of themselves and their relationships with their wives by focusing on characters, actions, and motives.

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

23

choices involving struggle, surrender, and accommodation to alterations in one’s capacities. Indeed, the self revealed during a serious illness may prove to be a complex mix of continuity and transformation. Not surprisingly, the storytelling process allows for various facets of one’s identity to be expressed. As Holstein and Gubrium (2000) pointed out, “narrative editing” allows the storyteller to shift perspectives, both as a way of incorporating complex adaptations and as a strategy for taking various listeners into account: “The storyteller, in effect, is an editor who constantly monitors, modifies, and revises themes and storylines . . . to attend to perspective and to the ways they expect their accounts to be heard” (p. 113). In Rose’s case, we can see two versions of identity, one emphasizing the healthy self and the other focused on the disabled self. Both versions are ways of coping with her varied needs and circumstances; her chosen anecdotes reflect a lifetime of having to accommodate to an ongoing health condition. Charmaz (1995) pointed out that some surgical procedures and medical regimens can result in “upward changes” (p. 668), including improvements in appearance, stamina, and possibly prognosis. Even positive changes in health inspire stories in which patients must redefine themselves. Brashers et al.’s (1999) study of HIV patients focused on the accounts of individuals who had experienced restored hope after protease inhibitor drugs had rescued them from a terminal prognosis. “Revival” required each HIV patients to change their identities to “a person living with a chronic illness rather than a person dying from a terminal illness.” Having already accepted their impending deaths, the narrators’ new circumstances included a change of social status and expectations, hence a need to renegotiate roles and identities. Just as they had earlier adjusted to the “sick role,” revival led the patients to resume seeing themselves as “workers” and to place a positive value on independence, self-sufficiency, responsibility and stability. Some of the best-told and most insightful illness narratives not only prove helpful in strengthening the teller’s capacity for dealing with illness-related problems but also awaken listeners or readers to issues that they may not have been aware of or that they are attempting to deal with in their own lives. One influential and long-enduring example is poet Audre Lorde’s journal (1980) following treatment for breast cancer. In one entry, she pondered the silence surrounding the experience of mastectomy that kept women from sharing their wisdom and fears with one another. Significantly, the crucible of a life-threatening illness experience can change people’s identities in ways they never would have imagined. For instance, Sullivan’s (1997) interviews with breast cancer patients helped transform these women into advocates for the health of future generations, turning their disease into a mission. Reflecting their discussions, the researcher described their collective and personal efforts to increase awareness and educate others about breast cancer. These women were concerned about future generations of women, especially their own daughters. They strongly advocated breast self-examination as a vital way to save lives. Other “ways to spread the word” included donating books to resource centers, participating in fundraising activities, and acting as local resource persons. Nora helped conduct a survey to determine possible causes for the high incidence of breast cancer in the area. . . . Two other women began their own health related businesses. (p. 47)

A final interesting aspect of narrative identity construction we wish to underscore is the ability of many narrators to apply essential personal resources and expertise to the illness experience in order to derive perceptive insights. For instance, sociologist Robert Murphy (1987) analyzed how others reacted to his degenerative paralysis as he labored to maintain his social and professional identities, and writer Reynolds Price (1994)

24

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

incorporated original poetry into his account of learning to deal with the intense pain of a spinal cord tumor. Particularly refreshing is comedian Julia Sweeney’s account (1997) of living with her brother Mike, who was being treated for a terminal brain tumor, while she was simultaneously diagnosed with cervical cancer, turning her Hollywood bungalow into the “International House of Cancer.” And here is how she describes an evening in which Mike was extremely ill and nauseated: We got to the emergency room and they could see that Mike was really dehydrated. They wanted to get a saline solution into him right away, but the veins in his arms were all exhausted and so they were trying to get a needle in up over his ear. And he was continuing to throw up and I was standing in the doorway looking in on this. And, to just show you what a wonderfully dark sense of humor Mike had, in even the most horrific of circumstances, he turned to me and said, “I guess it’s not so funny now that you have cancer too, huh?” And I said, “Yeah, Mike. ‘Cause normally I’d be laughing my ass off.” (p. 121)

In the words of Kathy Charmaz (1995), “Adaptation to impairment takes people with serious chronic illness on an odyssey of self” (p. 675). The same is true for people undergoing other forms of suffering, and the process of narrating an illness experience can reveal a person’s essential character through the struggles to adapt, persist, and thrive. NARRATIVE AS WARRANTING DECISIONS

As mentioned previously, Rose does not consider her illness the defining characteristic of her life. This is not to say that having lived with myasthenias gravis hasn’t deeply affected certain life choices. In fact, Rose has decided to continue with graduate education that will lead to a career as a counseling psychologist, working specifically with children with disabilities and their families. In this very important matter, her illness has shaped her future life story in a direction that she feels is positive—both personally rewarding and of social value. “I want to advocate for others so they won’t have to deal with the same problems I’ve had.” Still, she routinely makes choices about health-related disclosures, deciding what is necessary to say to friends, professors, and people she dates and when it is appropriate to raise these issues. One decision that has been especially significant for her is selecting situations in which she will use a wheelchair. Because she often needs to lean on a friend or family member due to sudden feelings of weakness, she has frequently been mistaken for being drunk. Dr. Harvey dissuaded her from using a wheelchair during high school even though school officials had wanted her to do so. Thus far she has chosen to use a motorized cart on three visits to the Disney World theme park, where her close friend works. Although she is used to being attuned to sudden bouts of fatigue and weakness that necessitate rest and changes in medication, she realized on her first visit that she would not be able to cope in her usual ways with the immense distances and dense crowds in the park. The motorized cart enabled her to maneuver and truly enjoy Disney World. During a visit to New York City, however, she elected not to use a wheelchair. She found herself having to stop and rest constantly, reduced to being a burden to the friends she was visiting and treated like a nonperson by people who didn’t know her well. In the end, she concluded she would have been better off in a wheelchair despite the social stigma it bestows. Nonetheless, making use of a wheelchair changes the nature of her hidden disability; her identity suddenly becomes one of a publicly acknowledged disabled person. This is a

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

25

difficult shift, and because she doesn’t define herself as part of the “disabled community,” she says she has the feeling of being an “imposter” when she makes use of a motorized chair. Perhaps this feeling is increased by the reactions and assumptions made by others about people who use wheelchairs (Cahill & Eggleston, 1995). The complexities and contradictions of integrating the use of a wheelchair into her life are still in the process of being developed and understood within her ongoing story of experiencing illness. Narratives reveal the storyteller’s values or reasons for actions, including routine activities as well as those involved in medical decision making (Vanderford & Smith, 1996). Charmaz (1999) calls stories of suffering “moral parables of right and wrong, of moral virtue and moral flow, of reason and rationalization” (p. 367; see also Bochner, 1998). The inherently moral function that she refers to includes making judgments about desirable and undesirable behaviors, describing appropriate and inappropriate relationships and roles, and implying desired transformations. In telling about their experiences of sickness, narrators are able to position themselves so as to portray character and actions taken within the plotline. Narrative chronology may place the locus of one’s decision making on past events, current demands, or future consequences. The retrospective stance of the narrator allows for ethical reflection; “the temporal gap between one’s actions and the telling allows the narrator to assume a distance about his or her actions as narrated in the story, which creates a space for recognizing actions as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘better’ or ‘worse.’ This space provides the reflective ground for change” (Churchill & Churchill, 1982, p. 74). In this example taken from a discussion within a prostate cancer support group, one participant reveals the motives behind his treatment decision: “That is what my physician told me [that radiation had fewer side effects]. So I opted on the radiation, uh, because, uh, it seemed like that would have less effect upon, uh, the sex life, uh, than an operation, which, uh, I had heard anyway, that the changes that, of losing your ability to have sex was much greater than just by radiation. So I went through the radiation starting in October of 1995.” (Arrington, 2000) Accounts of chronic illness and suffering describe conflicts and explain problems, including the difference between the way things were in the story and the way the storyteller desired them to be. They disclose a storyteller’s attitudes and judgments about events, actions, people, motives, types of relationships, and goals. As a result, stories reveal (implicitly or explicitly) the way the teller thinks the world ought to operate. One HIV patient’s conclusion to a story about his treatment in a V.A. hospital provides a clear example: “I won’t ever come back here. I won’t come back here because I’m not an animal and I don’t behave like an animal. . . . They . . . did nothing to build and boost my esteem and help me deal with the problem of being HIV positive” (Vanderford et al., 1992, p. 134). Just below the surface of complaint, the patient’s emphasis on the values of human dignity and compassion is easy to see. One person’s story frequently has a salutary impact on another’s decision. In a study (Sharf, 1997) of people participating in an online breast cancer listserv, the husband of a woman with early-stage breast cancer asked about the advisability of her becoming pregnant.9 Several women replied with stories revealing their own struggles with this perplexing question, including this response, which detailed the narrator’s attempt to weigh pros and cons (unfortunately, after finally deciding to become pregnant, she miscarried): 9

Clinical studies are not consistent as to whether the increased estrogen levels that accompany pregnancy encourages growth of malignant tumors, and if so, under what conditions. Many women with breast cancer have successfully given birth without tumor recurrence.

26

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

I’m posting to the list in hopes my personal experience is helpful. This is an issue I have been struggling with since I was diagnosed 7 yrs ago. . . . After the miscarriage I worried a lot about whether I’d increased my risk of new breast cancer—those worries have subsided at this point. . . . My best wishes to you and your wife, whatever you decide. (p. 75)

When more than one person is involved in the health care decision-making process, then the issue of co-constructing or overlapping stories frequently comes to the fore. Earlier we referred to the dichotomy that often arises between the voice of medicine and the voice of the lifeworld. Thus, in medical consultations, a negotiated story that interweaves elements of both the patient’s and the practitioner’s distinct narratives is sometimes needed in order to arrive at a care management plan acceptable to both parties (Sharf, 1990). In a different context, sociologist Carolyn Ellis (1995) tells the painful story of her becoming the primary caretaker of Gene, her life partner, who was dying from emphysema. Over several years’ duration, their versions of Gene’s course of illness variously melded and differed as to severity, burdens and responsibilities, and ways of coping. Toward the end of Gene’s life, Carolyn’s story was colored by thoughts of what it would mean to be a survivor, while Gene struggled with impending death. Through very open conversations, both had to come to agreement on whether to use a respirator as a treatment of last resort, since Carolyn would almost surely be the surrogate decision-maker for Gene when the disease prevented him from thinking and speaking coherently. This process of co-constructing a narrative among family members that incorporates a person’s advance directive in the event of life-threatening illness is perhaps one of our most difficult communication challenges. Ultimately, “decisions about health are based on the meaning patients give to symptoms and experiences with disease and their physicians. Narratives function to justify decisions already made and determine future decisions” (Vanderford & Smith, 1996, p. 23, citing Fisher, 1985). Understanding a patient’s story is key to understanding his or her decisions. NARRATIVE FOR BUILDING COMMUNITY

Rose doesn’t particularly identify with the disabilities activists in her community. From her perspective, they seem to make their disabilities the centerpiece of their lives, something she has tried not to do. She’d prefer not to be “lumped into a group.” Her sense of community will be fulfilled from the counseling work with disabled children she has chosen to do. It’s not likely that she will see much public attention given to her particular disability-related problems since myasthenias gravis affects a relatively small number of people, nor are there any mass media images with which she identifies directly. In her youth, the television show that made the biggest impression upon her was Life Goes On, a program that featured a family whose members included a young man with Down’s syndrome played by an actor with Down’s syndrome. Both the fictional character and the real actor proved themselves to be attractive people with capabilities that surprised and pleased the viewing audience. Rose feels that the more the public is exposed to nonstereotypical depictions of illness and disability, the better the chance of acceptance and understanding. So far, we have discussed illness narratives primarily as individual stories of sickness that serve multiple functions for the teller and sometimes have the power to influence others as well. We have also alluded to the co-construction of illness narratives as an important aspect of the interaction between patients and clinicians. Communication theorist Ernest Bormann (1985) conceptualized the interactional ways in which multiple individuals or

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

27

organized groups are attracted to and build upon stories (what he calls fantasy themes), leading to the development of rhetorical visions that provide common histories, coherent depictions of current reality, and desires for the way the world should be. He calls this process—in which stories cohere and build upon each other-symbolic convergence. Applying the theory of symbolic convergence to health-related situations, we assert that narratives serve a communal function in at least three ways: by helping disparate individuals with common maladies provide support to one another, by raising public awareness about specific issues inherent in experiences of illness, and by serving as highly recognizable discourses for advocacy. In this section, we discuss these three aspects of how stories told in group and public formats help to solidify health-based communities. Illness-defined organizations such as face-to-face support groups and online chat groups and listservs share a socially constructed reality shaped by commonly expressed interests, rules of operation, and vocabulary. Communities like these serve the communicative and social functions of enabling members to access a wider range of information than one person is apt to have; giving attention to socioemotional needs and coping skills; and empowering participants to participate in medical decision making, political activist events, and related matters (Sharf, 1997). This occurs largely through discussion generated by the sharing of individuals’ stories of experience. The aforementioned analysis of a support group for individuals diagnosed with epilepsy illustrates how this kind of group discourse changed the way members viewed themselves and their disease. Participants encouraged one another to tell stories in which their disease did not stigmatize them: The narrative mode of communication can provide an opportunity for self-help members to develop a functional language for talking about themselves. . . . Many members described themselves in stigmatizing and helpless words: epileptic, out of control, an embarrassment, depressed, unattractive, and so on. The Chicago self-help group that we observed and taped did not allow members to describe themselves as being epileptic. Victim narratives were also not well received after a while. (Arntson & Droge, 1987, p. 162)

Adelman and Frey’s (1997) ethnographic analysis of Bonaventure House, a residential facility for people with AIDS, is a richly detailed case study of an illness-based community. Because of the particular necessities inherent in this living situation, modes of storytelling evolved that helped to initiate incoming members and to prepare established residents for the deaths of others; create private boundaries and cooperation within a limited physical space; and balance a sense of normalcy with ongoing loss and crisis. Of particular interest are the symbolic strategies used to positively reframe grief and fear with celebration and continuity. These rely heavily on rituals, tokens, and stories of departed residents that help to sustain, both spiritually and materially, those currently coping with the problems of the disease. The sense of community emanating from ongoing support groups and residential organizations is focused on participants who choose to identify with the goals and activities of those groups. Community building may also be assisted through popular dramatizations that serve as outreach to people who might otherwise never perceive themselves as identified with a common set of health concerns. There are any number of excellent examples of media portrayals that raise public consciousness about the difficulties of living with serious and/or chronic disease. Singhal and Roger’s (2000) analyses of “entertainmenteducation” focused on how health prevention topics such as safe sex, family planning, and other lifestyle behaviors are dealt with on soap operas and other types of televised entertainment programs. In fact, entertainment television can be seen as an important element of planned health promotion campaigns. Less scholarly attention has been given to

28

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

television dramas (and occasionally comedies) and films featuring problematic narratives of illness, such as a young mother’s lengthy struggle to remain connected with her husband, children, and friends as she coped with life-threatening ovarian cancer on thirtysomething (Sharf & Freimuth, 1993); actor Tom Hank’s portrayal of a lawyer with AIDS battling job discrimination in Philadelphia; crusty NYPD Blue detective Andy Sipowicz’s fear of submitting to treatment for prostate cancer (Arrington, 2000); and professor Morrie Schwartz’s lessons on coming to grips with terminal illness and the orchestration of a good death.10 Although entertainment-education about health issues is generally treated as the province of the electronic mass media, ethnographer and performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood (1988) provides an example of using live performance for similar purposes. While serving as a public health officer in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand, Conquergood organized a theatrical presentation using the refugees’ mythologies and cultural stories, along with newly-developed characters, to convey messages about how to maintain sanitary conditions in the crowded campground, so different from the environment these people had lived in previously. Entertainment-educational efforts include teaching audiences about diagnoses, symptoms, and treatments about which they may not have been aware; considering good and poor role-modeling behaviors in approaching problems related to illness; and initiating talk among family and friends on previously ignored or repressed topics (Sharf, Freimuth, Greenspon, & Plotnick, 1996). In a sense, the engaged audience becomes a community of learners, hopefully better prepared to think about and act upon similar episodes in their own lives. A third way in which narratives help to form the foundation of an illness-related community is in the service of various forms of advocacy, especially to raise funds and change policy (Sharf, 2001). Personal stories of lived experiences of illness told by admired celebrities have helped to rivet public and political attention to an unprecedented degree. Notable examples include actor Christopher Reeve’s speech at the 1996 Democratic presidential convention and his appearances in front of other audiences on behalf of spinal cord injury research and Michael J. Fox’s testimony to Congress in support of funding for Parkinson’s disease research. Equally effective are strategies to bring the narratives of suffering and courage of ordinary people to our attention. One of the best-known and affecting works of this kind is the AIDS quilt, whose immense expanse of personallydedicated patchwork pieces poignantly reminds spectators of the human toll of this health problem.11 The National Breast Cancer Coalition has widely disseminated its “Faces of Breast Cancer” exhibit in a variety of venues, including museums, shopping malls, and scientific conferences. The exhibit comprises photographs of women from each of the 50 states who have died from breast cancer, along with brief narratives describing their contributions to family and community. Participants in the various versions of the Race for the Cure participate and wear T-shirts in memory of loved ones who did not survive their fight with this disease. In each of the examples, the accumulation of personal stories serves a similar purpose—to illustrate the extent and proximity of the problem in a way that generalized statistics cannot.

10 Tuesdays with Morrie eventually appeared as a best-selling book (Albom, 1997), a series of interviews with Ted Koppel on Nightline, and a televised, feature-length movie. 11 The availability of effective new generations of drugs to combat HIV in the United States have quickly changed the social construction of AIDS from a certain killer to a problematic but chronic disease. In the meantime, the devastation of lives from AIDS in the resource-poor African continent continues at an alarming rate, largely out of view from the American public. Perhaps an international version of the quilt needs to be produced and exhibited.

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

29

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF HEALTH SCHOLARSHIP: TO BE CONTINUED

This review of the social construction perspective in health communication scholarship has highlighted the rhetorical origins of the tension between the physical world and symbolic representation, and the application of this approach to communication issues related to health and illness. Although narrative inquiry is only one of many ways of approaching health communication research, its benefits lie in the application of knowledge related to the meanings that individuals like Rose and others that we have quoted, paraphrased, and described here create out of health and illness. The voice of the patient, so often absent in clinical research, is now heard more often because of the emphasis that health communication as a field of inquiry has given to it. The construction of personal stories of suffering is useful to the individual dealing with serious and/or chronic sickness by allowing the individual to make sense of a situation that may at first seem to have no discernible explanation; assert control over what feels like a chaotic set of circumstances; document the transformations in identity spawned by the illness experience; and identify reasons for making decisions related to treatment, adaptation, and coping. The sharing of illness narratives contributes to the formation of community, be it for purposes of public education, social support, or political advocacy. Although we cannot forecast in what directions health communication studies using a social construction approach will develop, clearly this kind of scholarship, once rare, is now accumulating with increasing frequency. We would like to conclude with a few guidelines that we think can help maximize the utility and influence of the social construction approach:

r r r

r

Contextualize discourse. Whether it be historical, social and/or cultural, the context in which the discourse under investigation emerges and is articulated is critical to interpreting its meaning. Social construction emphasizes the connectedness of context and significance. Identify contrasting perspectives. When there is more than one account of reality among key participants in the situation being studied, key points of divergence and commonality should be identified and explored. Incorporate cultural sensitivity. Our understanding of cultural differences as they are manifested in narrative content and styles of storytelling is limited. Awareness of actual distinctions is increasingly important in both clinical and public health contexts as populations continue to diversify and cross-cultural communication becomes at once more prevalent and more problematic. Reveal what is rhetorical. Social construction analysis should be concerned with how language and other forms of symbolization both shape and reflect people’s shared perceptions of reality. In health communication research, the Health promotion messages (along with the public’s response to these) and health policy are particularly important to explore from a rhetorical vantage point.12

12 For example, see Kimberly Kline’s rhetorical analysis (1999) of breast self-examination campaigns, which in part supports the criticism of women’s health activists that these messages detract from perceptions of agency and efficacy in the early detection of breast cancer. Rather than simply dismiss these campaigns, she suggests specific ways in which they can be improved so that women audiences feel empowered and health promotional behavior is encouraged at the same time.

30

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

r

r

Be alert to the clinical implications of personal narrative. Social construction analysis should strive to clarify how patient narratives are understood by and responded to by clinicians; how the communication of narratives (by or about patients) affects the quality of clinical care; and how sharing of illness-related narratives impacts patient empowerment, participation, and decision making. Recognize the tension between emancipation and appropriation of voice. It has been argued that scholarship that helps to break the silence about experiences labeled as vulnerable or shameful are acts of social justice, insofar as the telling of stories enables self-knowledge, promotes healing, and encourages societal change (Varallo, Ray, & Ellis, 1998).13 Still, the liberating effects of providing a platform for the public telling of powerful personal stories must be tempered with the realization that the same process of scholarship is necessarily one that edits and punctuates those narratives so that they become supporting evidence for the researcher’s own arguments and point of view. The use of others’ stories in the service of one’s own research leads anthropologist Susan Estroff (1995) to ask, “Whose story is it anyway?”

Finally, we will conclude by underscoring the insight of communication scholar Arthur Bochner (1998), who reminds us that narrative inquiry is at its core a moral activity, one that is purposely and self-consciously entwined with the values of narrator and characters and is always personal, whether it be a matter of telling our own stories or “thinking with” (p. 349), resonating with, another’s story, inevitably from the framework of our own lives. As we “listen” to Rose’s story, her voiced struggle to make moral choices throughout her young life seems palpable. Though the situations impelled by her particular illness may seem rare, her ongoing quest to manage her identity with a sense of empowerment in the face of physical and social adversities is one with which many of us can identify. Even though I need the assistance of others sometimes, I don’t like to be treated as fragile. . . . Control is a big issue for me. I conserve my energies and know my limits. And I like doing things that help others; it helps my sense of self-esteem. . . . My illness has given me good things. It’s made me really self-aware—things I like and don’t like about myself. It helps me to empathize with others. —Rose, at age 22

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors wish to thank “Rose” for agreeing to share her narrative through a series of interviews conducted for purposes of this chapter. REFERENCES Adelman, M. B., & Frey, L. R. (1997). The fragile community: Living together with AIDS. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ahmed, P. I., Kolker, A., & Coelho, G. V. (1979). Toward a new definition of health: An overview. In P. I. Ahmed & G. V. Coelho (Eds.), Toward a new definition of health: Psychosocial dimensions (pp. 7–22). NY: Plenum. Albom, M. (1997). Tuesdays with Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson. New York: Doubleday. 13 The assertion of narrative-based research as social justice stems from the authors’ interviews with incest survivors.

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

31

Arntson, P., & Droge, D. (1987). Social support in self-help groups: The role of communication in enabling perceptions of control. In T. Albrecht & M. Adelman (Eds.), Communicating social support. Sage. Arrington, M. (2000). Sexuality, society, and senior citizens: An analysis of sex talk among prostate cancer support group members. Sexuality and Culture, 4, 151–158. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bochner, A. P. (1994). Perspectives on inquiry II: Theories and stories. In M. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 21–41). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bochner, A. P. (1998). Storied lives: Recovering the moral importance of social theory. In J. S. Trent (Ed.), Communication: Views from the helm for the 21st century. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Bormann, E. (1985). Symbolic convergence theory: A communication formulation. Journal of Communication, 35(6), 128–138. Brashers, D. E., Neidig, J. L., Cardillo, L. W., Dobbs, L. K., Russell, J. A., & Haas, S. M. (1999). ‘In an important way, I did die’: uncertainty and revival in persons living with HIV or AIDS. AIDS Care, 11, 201–219. Brody, H. (1980). The patient’s role in clinical decision-making, Annals of Internal Medicine, 93, 718–722. Brody, H. (1987). Stories of sickness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brummett, B. (1976). Some implications of “process” or “intersubjectivity”: Postmodern rhetoric. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 9, 21–54. Brummett, B. (1982). On to rhetorical relativism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68, 425– 430. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, S., & Rosenblum, B. (1991). Cancer in two voices. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink. Cahill, S. E., & Eggleston, R. (1995). Reconsidering the stigma of physical disability: Wheelchair use and public kindness. Sociological Quarterly, 36, 681–698. Cassell, E. J. (1985). Talking with patients: Vol. 2. Clinical technique. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Charmaz, K. (1994). Identity dilemmas of chronically ill men. Sociological Quarterly, 35, 269–288. Charmaz, K. (1995). The body, identity, and the self: Adapting to impairment. Sociological Quarterly, 36, 657–680. Charmaz, K. (1999). Stories of suffering: Subjective tales and research narratives. Qualitative Health Research, 9, 362–382. Charon, R., Brody, H., Clark, M. W., Davis, D., Martinez, R., & Nelson, R. M. (1996). Literature and ethical medicine: Five cases from common practice. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 21, 243–265. Churchill, L. R., & Churchill, S. W. (1982). Storytelling in medical arenas: The art of selfdetermination. Literature and Medicine, 1, 73–79. Conquergood, D. (1988). Health theatre in a Hmong refugee camp: Performance, communication, and culture. TDR: Journal of Performance Studies, 32, 174–208. Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (1988). Unending work and care: Managing chronic illness at home. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9, 119–161. Croasman, E., & Cherwitz, R. A. (1982). Beyond rhetorical relativism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68, 1–14.

32

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

Donnelly, W. J. (1988). Righting the medical record: Transforming chronicle into story. Journal of the American Medical Association, 260, 823–825. Donnelly, W. J., & Brauner, D. J. (1992). Why SOAP is bad for the medical record. Annals of Internal Medicine, 152, 481–484. Ellis, C. (1995). Final negotiations: A story of love, loss, and chronic illness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Estroff, S. (1995). Whose story is it anyway? Authority, voice, and responsibility in narratives of chronic illness. In S. K. Toombs, D. Barnard, & R. A. Carson (Eds.), Chronic illness: From experience to policy (pp. 76–102). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fadiman, A. (1997). The spirit catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Fisher, W. R. (1985). The narrative paradigm: In the beginning. Journal of Communication, 35(4), 74–89. Fisher, W. R. (1987). Human communication as narration: Toward a philosophy of reason, value, and action. Columbiasc: University of South Carolina Press. Fiske, S, (1992). Thinking is for doing: Portraits of social cognition from daguerrotype to laserphoto. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 877–889. Frank, A. W. (1991). At the will of the body: Reflections on illness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, Illness, and ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geist, P., & Dreyer, J. (1993). Juxtapositioning accounts: Different versions of different stories in the health care context. In S. Herndon & G. Kreps (Eds.), Qualitative research: Applications in organizational communication (SCA Applied Communication Series, pp. 79–105). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Geist, P., & Gates, L. (1996). The poetics and politics of re-covering identities in health communication. Communication Studies, 47, 218–228. Geist-Martin, P., Ray, E. B., & Sharf, B. F. (2002). Communicating health: Personal, political, and cultural complexities. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Gergen, K. J., & Gergen, M. M. (1983). Narratives of the selves. In T. R. Sarbin & K. E. Scheibe (Eds.), Studies in social identity (pp. 254–273). New York: Praeger. Good, B. J. (1994). Medicine, rationality, and experience: An anthropological perspective. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, A. H. (1993). Reconstructing illness: Studies in pathography. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (2000). The self we live by: Narrative identity in a postmodern world. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunter, K. M. (1993). Doctors’ stories: The narrative structure of medical knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jones, A. H. (1996). Darren’s case: Narrative ethics in Perri Klass’s Other Women’s Children. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 21, 267–286. Kirkwood, W. G., & Brown, D. (1995). Public communication about the causes of disease: The rhetoric of responsibility. Journal of Communication, 45, 55–76. Kleinman, A. (1988). The illness narratives: Suffering, healing and the human condition. New York: Basic Books. Kleinman, A., Eisenberg, L., & Good, B. (1978). Culture, illness, and care: Clinical lessons from anthropologic and cross-cultural research. Annals of Internal Medicine, 88, 251– 258. Kline, K. N. (1999). Reading and reforming breast self-examination discourse: Claiming missed opportunities for empowerment. Journal of Health Communication, 4, 119–141. Lorde, A. (1980). The cancer journals. Argyle, NY: Spinsters Ink.

2. ILLNESS NARRATIVES

33

Makoul, G. (1999). Using patient narrative videos for understanding better the illness experience. Academic Medicine, 74, 580–581. Matthews, C. K., & Harrington, N. G. (2000). Invisible disability. In D. G. Braithwaite & T. L. Thompson (Eds.), Handbook of communication and people with disabilities: Research and application (pp. 405–421). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: Morrow. McWhinney, I. (1989). The need for a transformed clinical method. In M. Stewart & D. Roter (Eds.), Communicating with medical patients (pp. 25–40). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Middlebrook, C. (1996). Seeing the crab: A memoir of dying before I do. New York: Anchor. Miller, K. (2001). Communication theories: Perspectives, processes, and contexts. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Miller, K., Joseph, L., & Apker, J. (2000). Strategic ambiguity in the role development process. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 28, 193–214. Mishler, E. G. (1981). The social construction of illness. In E. G. Mishler, L. R. Amarasingham, S. D. Osherson, S. T. Hauser, N. E. Waxler, & R. Liem (Eds.), Social contexts of health, illness and patient care (pp. 141–168). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Mishler, E. G. (1984). The discourse of medicine. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Morris, D. B. (1998). Illness and culture in the postmodern age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murphy, R. F. (1987). The body silent. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Payer, L. (1988). Medicine and culture: Varieties of treatment in the United States, England, West Germany, and France. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Plato. (1998). Gorgias (J. H. Nichols, Jr., Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Poirier, S., & Brauner, D. (1988). Ethics, language, and the daily discourse of clinical medicine. Hastings Center Report, 18, 5–9. Poirier, S. & Brauner, D. (1990). The voices of the medical record. Theoretical Medicine, 11, 29–39. Poirier, S., Rosenblum, L., Ayres, L., Brauner, D. J., Sharf, B. F., & Stanford, A. F. (1992). Charting the chart: An exercise in interpretation(s). Literature and Medicine, 11, 1–22. Price, R. (1994). A whole new life: An illness and a healing. New York: Scribner’s. Railsback, C. C. (1983). Beyond rhetorical relativism: A structural-material model of truth and objective reality. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 69, 351–363. Reeve, C. (1998). Still me. New York: Ballantine. Scott, R. L. (1967). On viewing rhetoric as epistemic. Central States Speech Journal, 18, 9–17. Sharf, B. F. (1990). Physician-patient communication as interpersonal rhetoric: A narrative approach. Health Communication, 2, 217–231. Sharf, B. F. (1997). Communicating breast cancer on-line: Support and empowerment on the Internet. Women and Health, 26, 63–82. Sharf, B. F. (2001). Out of the closet and into the legislature: The impact of communicating breast cancer narratives on health policy. Health Affairs, 20, 213–218. Sharf, B. F., & Freimuth, V. S. (1993). The construction of illness on entertainment television: Coping with cancer on thirtysomething. Health Communication, 5, 141–160. Sharf, B. F., Freimuth, V. S., Greenspon, P. & Plotnick, C. (1996). Confronting cancer on thirtysomething: Audience response to health content on entertainment TV. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 157–172. Sharf, B. F., & Kahler, J. (1996). Victims of the franchise: A culturally sensitive model for teaching patient-physician communication in the inner city. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and the disenfranchised: Social health issues and implications (pp. 95–115). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

34

SHARF AND VANDERFORD

Singhal, A., & Rogers, E. M. (1999). Education-entertainment: A communication strategy for social change. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Smith D. H., & Pettegrew, L. S. (1986). Mutual persuasion as a model for doctor-patient communication. Theoretical Medicine, 7, 127–146. Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sontag, S. (1988). AIDS and its metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sullivan, C. F. (1997, Spring) Women’s ways of coping with breast cancer. Women’s Studies in Communication, 20, 31–53. Sweeney, J. (1997). God said “Ha!”: A memoir. New York: Bantam. Vanderford, M. L., Jenks, E. B., & Sharf, B. F. (1997). Exploring patients’ experiences as a primary source of meaning. Health Communication, 9, 13–26. Vanderford, M. L., & Smith, D. H. (1996). The silicone breast implant story: Communication and uncertainty. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Vanderford, M. L., Smith, D. H., & Harris, W. S. (1992). Value identification in narrative discourse: Evaluation of an HIV education demonstration project. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 20, 123–161. Vanderford, M. L., Stein, T., Sheeler, R., & Skochelak, S. (2001). Communication challenges for experienced clinicians: Topics for an advanced communication curriculum. Health Communication, 13, 261–284. Varallo, S. M., Ray, E. B., & Ellis, B. H. (1998). Speaking of incest: The research interview as social justice. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 26, 254–271. VIA (Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment) Website. Learning from patients about the illness experience. Downloaded on October 14, 2002 from http:www.viaproject.org. Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

3 Theorizing About Health Communication Austin S. Babrow and Marifran Mattson Purdue University

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

This chapter, like communication on any topic, necessarily reflects a universe of assumptions that must remain, like the physical universe, largely unexplored. Still, it will be useful to examine our main assumptions before pushing too far with our examination of the topic. If nothing else, looking at these will provide a useful general reminder of the limits of any one essay. It will also protect against overly ambitious aspirations or claims and foster subsequent alternative investigations. For these reasons, we will begin with the general considerations that have guided our more specific thinking on theory and theorizing in health communication scholarship. Health communication studies frequently draw on and seek to inform communication scholarship in general. Hence, these studies necessarily reflect currents within the broader field. In the encompassing field, there are reasoned and often passionate calls for both greater unification and greater diversification (e.g., Dervin, Grossberg, O’Keefe, & Wartella, 1989a, 1989b; Levy & Gurevitch, 1993a, 1993b). We believe that the calls for greater unity and diversity represent a basic dialectical tension (Babrow, 1993; Craig, 1999). There are other such tensions in this debate. Hence, we will adopt a dialectical stance at many points in this chapter. In short, we believe there is meaning and value in both the unification and the diversification of communication scholarship. Moreover, we believe that creative efforts to engage with these seemingly antithetical (cl)aims can add significantly to communication research in general and health communication scholarship in particular. Hence, we will try to represent the impulse toward unifying perspectives and also the argument for differentiation and diversification.

35

36

BABROW AND MATTSON

The chapter begins with a discussion of the nature of health communication theory. Among other things, it provides a definition of theory and explores the relationship between theory and practice. The essay next considers the nature of health communication by elucidating what we believe to be four of its distinguishing features. The chapter then reviews various schemes for differentiating types of health communication theory. Finally, we use one such scheme, Craig’s (1999) communication-centered framework, to sketch (a) selected connections between theoretical traditions and the distinguishing features of health communication and (b) practical implications of each form of theorizing. THE NATURE OF HEALTH COMMUNICATION THEORY Defining Theory

Not only is there no broadly acceptable definition of theory, it is tempting to conclude that it would be both impossible and undesirable to construct such a definition. Still, in composing a chapter about theory and theorizing, we are necessarily guided by some more or less comprehensible general conception of our subject. We would rather make our working conception explicit than compose it as an acrostic. According to our conception, a theory is a consciously elaborated, justified, and uncertain understanding. This definition is intentionally much broader than some appear to desire (e.g., Berger, 1991; cf. Craig, 1993; Proctor, 1992; Purcell, 1992), but we believe it is not so broad as to be meaningless. It emphasizes several issues that we think are crucial to understanding the nature of theory. A theory is, at base, an understanding. It can be an understanding of what the theorist believes to be a concrete object that exists independently of human conception. Alternatively, the “object” of a theory may be thought of as a product of human conception, or it may be some hybrid or variant of these extremes. However, theoretical understandings differ from what are probably our most common understandings—the tacit formulations that guide us unawares and are frequently difficult if not impossible to access consciously. For example, any competent speaker can generate an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences, perform countless speech acts, manage turn-taking and topic selection within conversation, and understand profoundly ambiguous utterances with relative ease and without conscious awareness or understanding of the underlying structures, processes, and dynamics that make these remarkable achievements possible. By contrast, theories of generative grammar, speech acts, turn-taking, topic selection, and interpretation are consciously constructed understandings. Conscious understandings can be as simple as a single proposition (e.g., the media promote unhealthy body images; nurses are more in touch with the whole patient than are doctors), but a theory is an elaborated understanding involving a number of concepts and suppositions about their interrelationships (cf. Anderson, 1996; Littlejohn, 2002; Reynolds, 1971).1 In addition, the consciously elaborated understandings that merit being 1 Some scholars, particularly some social scientists, attempt to differentiate “a sense of understanding” from “explanation” (Singleton & Straits, 1999). For instance, explanation is thought to take the form of a simple deductive argument connecting some antecedent to some consequent (or a chain of antecedents and consequents), whereas a sense of understanding involves something deeper, usually the description of an underlying causal process (see Reynolds, 1971). The distinction is troublesome for various reasons. For instance, it sets up a potentially infinite and futile regress; one can push the inquiry ever further, requiring ever more basic causal processes to explain the ostensible connections at higher levels of explanation or understanding. At some

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

37

called theories are justified but uncertain. What we mean by this is that a theory emerges from processes and practices of sense-making; these may be empirical, interpretive, critical, or otherwise (see Bochner, 1985; Miller, 2002; see section below). In any case, theoretical sense-making processes and practices not only construct understandings but justify belief in or perception of the reasonableness of the emerging, elaborated constructions. Depending on the nature of the theory (i.e., its metatheoretical commitments; see section below), there may be some effort to distinguish between its substance and its justification. For instance, some empiricists claim to maintain a strict separation between theory and data. Alternatively, one may see theoretical constructions and their justifications as inextricably intertwined, as in interpretive theory (see Anderson, 1996). We believe it is essential to emphasize that a theory is a justified understanding; even (and perhaps especially) empiricists who aim for a strict separation of theory and justification are utterly disinterested in (empirically) unjustified understandings. For these reasons, some have argued that theorizing is a rhetorical (argumentative, persuasive) enterprise. In other words, theorizing is seen by some as an inherently communicative process by which we attempt to formulate a consciously elaborated and justified understanding of the world (Anderson, 1996; Craig, 1999; K. Miller, personal communication, April 26, 2001). Finally, a theory is a fundamentally uncertain understanding. The uncertainty may be thought to reflect the nature of the world we are attempting to theorize about, which we might call ontological uncertainty, or it may be rooted in the nature of how we come to know, which we might call epistemological uncertainty (Babrow, 2001). In any case, for people interested in consciously elaborated understanding of the world, uncertainty necessitates justification (for brief sketches of contrasting views, see Babrow, 2001; Bradac, 2001). This in turn makes theory integral to a wide range of intellectual enterprises. Theory and Practice

It is tempting to assert that health communication scholarship is first and foremost about concrete practices in the world, but what does this mean? For some, it means that health communication scholarship must emphasize doing over theorizing (Clift, 1997; Nzyuko, 1996; Witte, 1996). The handiest counter to this view is Kurt Lewin’s contention that there is nothing so practical as a good theory. But a less radical stance, one that is not squarely contradicted by Lewin’s dictum, is that health communication theory is meaningless if it does not influence practices related to health and illness (also see Craig, 1989, 1999). Several points seem highly relevant to this stance. One is that claims about the influence of theory on health practices are limited in the sense that, although we can make judgments about the past or present practical value of any particular theory (i.e., its influence on practice), these practices and judgments do not necessarily anticipate the theory’s value in the future. Slavish devotion to past or present utility is an inherently conservative posture. A second important issue is that the foregoing consideration must not be taken as licence to pursue a theory without thought about its potential future impact on practice. Our inability to anticipate future uses of a theory does not mean that “anything goes.” On the contrary, there is no reason to think that a theory is used only for good or it is disused. Theoretical applications also can be harmful. For instance, unreflective applications of various point one might question whether one is moving away from rather than closer to a sense of understanding, particularly when processes at multiple levels interpenetrate in complex ways (see Babrow, 1993, 1998). Moreover, much communication scholarship is directed at events in which causal analysis is problematic— events characterized as indeterminate, undetermined, or underdetermined (Anderson, 1996).

38

BABROW AND MATTSON

forms of uncertainty reduction theories can endanger health. More specifically, many efforts to promote health screening are based on theories that take uncertainty reduction as the main reason for health screening and as the main avenue for promoting such screening. That is, they assume that the main motive leading to and outcome of participation in health screening is the reduction of uncertainty about one’s health status. Promotional efforts based on this assumption may obscure more complex motives and trample on the concerns of those engaging in these procedures. For instance, Babrow and Kline (2000) argued that single-minded applications of uncertainty reduction theories to promote breast self-exam probably disempower women in various ways and thereby threaten their health. In short, theoretical applications can turn out badly. That we cannot anticipate the future with certainty does not absolve us from the responsibility for careful, critical, searching reflection on potentialities as well as critique of current and past practices. A third issue is that, whatever claims we might make about the usefulness of a health communication theory, they depend on some set of values. Anderson (1996, chap. 8) described several different conceptions of the appropriate values or aims of theory. These include the objectivist position that the only value in science is context-free truth; various cultural and critical theories that advocate self-consciously political or economic values; and hermeneutics, which opens up a world of infinite possibilities for context-appropriate values. Hence, judgments of value, practical or otherwise, must be made with great care and an awareness of their inescapable parochialism. As for the relationship between theory and practice, Thayer (1982) asserts that, in its earliest usages, the term theory applied to the description of actual practices: The original Greek notion of theory was straightforward enough: If you wanted to write down a theory of something, you would locate a person who could do that something better than anyone else, and write down how that person did it. But the later Greeks, out of their concern to distinguish the educated from the working classes, separated the head from the hand. We’ve been stuck with the consequences ever since. (p. 21)

Thus, the dualism of “theory” versus “practice.” With Thayer and others (e.g., Craig, 1989, 1999), we believe that this dualism need not hobble us. Communication theory should be about the practical problems of being human: The human relevance of a theory of communication lies in what understandings it may help us to gain of the inextricable relationship between communication and human nature, of the consequences of how we communicate for the human condition. Anything less is not a theory of human communication, but merely reflects a “theory” of how to get on in the academic establishment. (Thayer, 1982, p. 27)

Ultimately, in keeping with our understanding of the preceding, we believe that concerns about the contributions of health communication theory to practice have little to do with the nature of theory and more to do with the activities of theorists who fail to complete the circle in which theory and practice interpenetrate. One final issue worth considering at this juncture is directly related to the necessity of closing the circle of theory and practice. We wish to note Bateson’s (1972) dictum that the map is not the territory. No theory will ever be anything but an incomplete map, one of perhaps an infinite number of renderings of its domain. Whether we are materialists or idealists (see Anderson, 1996, chap. 2), we must beware the inclination to mistake our

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

39

representations for whatever it is that we wish to represent; we must be open to the world beyond our current conceptions. With this caution in mind, we turn to our map of health communication theory. CHARACTERIZING HEALTH COMMUNICATION THEORY Points of Contention

Given our definition of theory, what is health communication theory? This question gives rise to knotty issues, most notably the difficulty of defining both health and communication (Kreps & Thornton, 1992; Pettegrew & Logan, 1987; Ratzan, Payne, & Bishop, 1996; also see definitions by Clift & Freimuth, 1995; Rogers, 1996; Sharf, 1993). We take a different approach to this issue. As noted earlier, since health communication scholarship is informed by and seeks to inform the broader field of communication, the former necessarily reflects currents within the latter. Hence, it is no surprise that the same criticisms that have preoccupied the broader field—its disciplinary status, its legitimacy, its distinctiveness, and so on—also appear in discussions of health communication scholarship (Berger, 1991; Burgoon, 1995; Cassata, 1980; cf. Nussbaum, 1989; Smith, 1989). Because these topics have been aired elsewhere, we will not revisit all of them here. Rather, we will note perhaps the most significant criticism: the contention that much of what passes as health communication theory could be subsumed within interpersonal and mass communication scholarship (Berger, 1991). Whereas other chapters in this handbook belie Berger’s judgment of the past accomplishments of health communication scholarship, we wish to offer a different sort of response and from it derive a view of the nature of health communication theory. As Craig (1989, 1999) has argued, communication scholars have long struggled with the tension between theory and practice, with the latter having been perhaps the driving wheel. We contend that health and illness make up the most elemental realm in which to study the nature and importance of communication: Communication in health and illness constitutes the most vital of human experiences. No other human phenomenon is more elemental than health and illness, none connects us more viscerally with our aspirations, or confronts us more palpably with our limitations. Moreover, given the dynamics of these elemental experiences, and especially given that they are constituted in the communicative interweaving of body, mind, and society, health communication represents among the most complex, challenging, and potentially rewarding areas for scholarly inquiry. (Brashers & Babrow, 1996, p. 243)

If anything is surprising, it is that it has taken so long for health communication to emerge as a central concern of the field. It is also surprising that the emergence of health communication scholarship has encountered any resistance at all. This resistance is best understood as an example of the gratuitous criticism that follows many emerging specialty and hybrid fields of study. Unifying Themes and Tensions

The important question to ask is not whether health communication constitutes a distinctive content domain or context for theory development. Rather, we must ask, What about health communication is distinctive? Clearly there are commonalities in basic communication

40

BABROW AND MATTSON

processes across domains. For example, regardless of context, nonverbal displays of emotion and the constitutive rules of speech acts will be much the same. As another illustration, whether the content involves politics, health, or other matters of social concern, the media will set the public agenda; the media shape our sense of what is important to think about and legitimize some ways of thinking while delegitimizing others by selective attention and ways of framing issues. But distinctive features of communication about health and illness warrant focused attention for the same reasons that specializations emerge in fields such as biology, chemistry, history, or literature and that hybrid fields such as biochemistry, cognitive science, and cultural studies are developed. Each specialty or hybrid field is uniquely positioned to illuminate its subject matter. Each offers unprecedented opportunities for cross-fertilization with other specialty or hybrid fields as well as with the source disciplines. In short, focused study of health communication will more efficiently and effectively reveal its distinctive character than will general studies of interpersonal or mass communication. What then are the distinguishing features of health communication? We believe that four characteristic tensions mark health communication as an especially significant form. Interplay of the Body and Communication. Health communication is significant for the pronounced and profound tensions and interplay between the realms of communication and the body. Zook’s (1994) discussion of the biopsychosocial turn notes two aspects of this interplay: “the material existence of biochemical pathways between mind and body, and the effect of psychological, social, and cultural variables on personal health behaviors” (p. 354). As a powerful example of the former, Melzack’s (1999; Loeser & Melzack, 1999) neuromatrix theory of pain suggests that communication processes and practices, along with a variety of other inputs, shape the neural network that produces sensations of pain. But the distinction between the “direct pathways” and the presumably indirect influences of communicative practices on the body and health behavior are difficult to sustain upon reflection (also see Zook, 1994). Physical dis-ease shapes communication, from a pointed cry of pain to grumbling complaints and from information and diagnosis seeking to support seeking. In turn, these communication acts and processes influence bodily states (e.g., relief, generalized or specific distress; see Lazarus, 1991, chap. 10), which in turn influence communication, and so on. Moreover, these specific and local experiences of the interplay of communication and the body are shaped by powerful social and cultural forces influencing individuals’ behavior (Blum, 1981). Communities form individuals’ behavior symbolically and tangibly (Allen & Allen, 1987). As agents of the dominant culture, communities transmit values and norms that symbolically circumscribe some behavioral choices and encourage others. As systems of exchange and influence relationships, communities establish opportunities for people to behave in some ways, but not in others. (Finnegan & Viswanath, 1990, p. 20)

Hence, the communicative interweaving of bodily sensation, cognitive-emotional sensemaking, and various layers of social structures and practices fabricate the social meaning of physical states and the physical meaning of social states. The interplay of body and communication is powerfully illustrated in the processes by which physical sensations and diseases are conceptualized and labeled. For example, cultural variations in the language we use to talk about our bodily states are revealing

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

41

(Zborowski, 1969). Culture shapes how we label our physical states, and clearly we react to and treat ailments differently depending on how they are labeled. Hence the dilemma noted in Cassell’s (1985) landmark work on physician-patient talk: “How do doctors ever make a diagnosis? How can we distinguish between a ‘terrible’ (Jewish) pain and an ‘annoying’ (Irish) pain?” (pp. 53–54). Obviously, then, the interplay of language and bodily sensations shapes the experience of illness; these interactions are themselves shaped by historically bound sociocultural constraints. Studies of metaphor also reveal the interplay of body and communication. For instance, consider analyses of metaphor in domains such as cancer (Sontag, 1978), AIDS (Sontag, 1989), the immune system (Martin, 1994), and death and dying (Ross & Pollio, 1991). Such work reveals that figurative conceptualizations of the body and bodily processes such as disease and dying shape understanding, attitudes (e.g., stigmatization), and social action. In a curious turn, Sontag’s (1978, p. 3) analysis of the role of metaphorical conceptualizations of illness led her to “call for a kind of linguistic cleansing of medical and lay attitudes toward disease such that the true biological core of disease can be apprehended and distinguished from its metaphorical extensions” (Aronowitz, 1998, p. 13). Sontag’s desired goal is curious because medical historians have demonstrated repeatedly the difficulty of apprehending “the biological core of disease unadulterated by attitudes, beliefs, and social conditions” (Aronowitz, 1998, p. 13). Indeed, our labels and conceptualizations of disease are continually reconfigured by developments in social attitudes (e.g., homosexuality and a host of women’s conditions), diagnostic tests, and treatments. For instance, Aronowitz (1998) discusses the increasing number of new diseases rendered discoverable by our advanced technological capacity. For example, we can now observe individual differences in serum cholesterol levels and continuous electrocardiographic monitoring that can lead to diagnoses such as hypercholesterolemia and silent cardiac ischemia, “diseases” that have no corresponding phenomenological basis until a patient is found or “constructed” by screening tests. Similarly, the expanding knowledge of the human genome will undoubtedly lead to the “construction” of new diseases based on correlations between individual genetic variation and clinical states. What configuration of nonbiological factors explains the appearance of such diseases at a particular moment in time? In whose interest is it to view diseases as legitimate? What is the effect of a new label on the patient and the doctor-patient encounter? These questions remain at the center of medical practice. (pp. 37–38)

Clearly, these questions should be at the center of communication theory and research (also see Brashers, 2001). They apply not only to the communicative processes that articulate the meaning of new tests but also to those that shape the meaning of new treatments. For example, new drugs affect not only bodily states but also disease categories and therefore our understanding of emotional and physical health. Frequently, and not surprisingly, these changes are the focus of substantial debates, which in turn shape disease categories, uses of these new drugs, and the bodies made possible by the social, cultural, and historical moment. These phenomena are powerfully illustrated in the ways that psychoactive drugs have reconfigured conceptions of mental illnesses and treatment and in debates about these drugs, their uses, and their effects on conceptions of illness and health care (e.g., Breggin, 1991; Breggin & Breggin, 1994; Kramer, 1993; Luhrmann, 2000; Valenstein, 1998).

42

BABROW AND MATTSON

Hence, in many ways, health communication is significant for the pronounced and profound interplay of the body and communication. Theories of health communication ought to at least recognize this interplay. Those that emphasize it have the potential to illuminate one of the key distinguishing characteristics of health communication. Science and Humanism. A second distinctive characteristic of health communication is the pronounced tension between scientific and humanistic assumptions, values, aspirations, and limitations. What we have in mind here are the sometimes discordant interests people have in the power and potentialities of science and the desire to recognize and actualize our humanity. This tension has many manifestations. It is evident in debates about biomedical versus biopsychosocial models, disease versus illness, technique versus meaning, and “alternative” versus “traditional” therapies as well as in disputes within medical ethics. For instance, not only do biopsychosocial models (Engel, 1977) recognize the interplay between the body and communication, debate between their advocates and the adherents of biomedical models exemplifies tensions between the traditional scientific imperatives of materialism and reductionism and efforts to understand the significance of mental or ideational human realities (see Anderson, 1996, chap. 2). In saying this, we do not mean to equate humanistic and biopsychosocial models, for the latter can be thought of as scientific. Rather, we mean to say that this approach, more so than traditional biomedical health care, attempts to recognize the human meanings of disease. A poignant illustration of the contrast and tensions between scientific and humanistic orientations is found in contemporary attitudes and practices related to death and dying (see Ari`es, 1981). In the United States, changes in nutrition, sanitation, engineering safety, and medical technology have caused a shift in the nature of our dying. Death, rather than occurring shortly after the onset of an acute illness or injury, now typically is the endpoint of one or more lengthy chronic illnesses (Callahan, 1993; Fox, 1980; Jones, 1982; Stroebe & Stroebe, 1995). Ethicist Daniel Callahan (1993) has argued that these changes have created a practical paradox in health care: as medical science and technology have gained control over a widening array of assaults on our lives, the process of dying has become more agonizing. Contemporary medicine has replaced the certainty of death from a given illness at a given hour with the uncertainty of a vanishing line between life and death. Yet despite the uncertainty, encouraged by scientific discoveries and technological innovation, we have become a death avoidant culture (Nuland, 1993). Some argue that death has replaced sex as a core cultural taboo (Gorer, 1965; Kearl, 1996). Callahan contends that we have lost the willingness and perhaps the capacity to talk openly about death except in the bloodless technical terms of medicine and the law. In short, Callahan argues, we have been attempting to control death through monomaniacal scientific and technological efforts. As a result, death has lost much of its meaning. We have become insensitive to the most profound challenges posed by critical illness and death—the ancient and unanswered questions that dying raises about human existence. Most notably, in the blinkered pursuit of control, we have obscured a fundamental, age-old question that embodies our deep ambivalence about death: whether it should be fought or accepted (Callahan, 1993, p. 89; see Hines, Babrow, Badzek, & Moss, 1997, 2001; Hines, Moss, & McKenzie, 1997). Since we cannot and should not go back to a time when we were powerless to deal with mortal illness and death, Callahan argues, we must find ways to deal more forthrightly with this ancient question. We must, in short, face and refashion our understandings of nature and death and ultimately of what it means to live

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

43

a human life. Science cannot do this, but neither can we undertake the necessary private and public discussion without recognizing the powerful imperatives of science. Hence, as revealed in this most basic example, a profoundly significant characteristic of health communication is the pronounced tension between scientific and humanistic assumptions, values, aspirations, and limitations. Idiosyncracy and Commonality. A third characteristic of health communication is the tension between idiosyncracy and commonality. Of course, this tension reflects the challenge of intersubjectivity or identification in all communication. That is, if meaning is inescapably experiential, and if no two people share a common history, then shared meaning is a problematic notion. However, what we want to say about health communication is that it is distinct because of the ways that it magnifies the tension between our uniqueness and commonality. One of the ways that this occurs is in debates between advocates of two major models of disease and illness. Historians of medicine have labeled as “ontological” the view that diseases are specific entities that unfold in characteristic ways in the typical person. In this framework, diseases exist in some Platonic sense outside their manifestations in a particular individual. The other compelling account of illness, the “physiological” or “holistic,” stresses the individual and his or her adaptation, both psychological and physical, to a changing environment. In this framework, illness exists only in individuals. These ideal-typical notions have been in a state of dynamic tension since antiquity. (Aronowitz, 1998, p. 8)

Ontologically inclined thinkers “question whether one has to treat the ‘whole person’ if one can rid him or her speedily and painlessly of disease and hence prevent the necessity of a long-term ‘association’ with the medical professional” (Jenkins, 1998, p. 354). Reflecting this inclination in the health communication literature, Burgoon (1995) would like to see such practices enforced with boot leather applied to the rear of recalcitrant patients. But those more inclined toward the holistic orientation respond by arguing that disease/illness is frequently not that simple to treat and that the force of medical authority is often countered by reactance (Fogarty, 1997; also see below). The debate between ontological and holistic models of disease and illness reflects the basic tension between idiosyncracy and commonality in health communication. This tension constitutes a faultline in scholarly conceptions of health care and promotion, in the interactions between patients and health care providers, and in the conceptions of risk held by health communicators and their audiences. For example, the tension is reflected in the ever-present possibility of debates over relative expertise, what counts as legitimate evidence, the meanings of (relative) risk, decision making, and so on. In addition to the various models of disease and illness, the tension between idiosyncracy and commonality is also manifested in the distinction between affirming the personal meanings of an illness (and by extension our life and being) and affirming our common humanity. For instance, illness is at once a private and public matter. We strip illness of its public significance when we promote patients’ individual autonomy as if it were the only important human value (Babrow, Hines, et al., 1998; Callahan, 1993; Smith, 1996). Indeed, we strip ourselves of our humanity when we promote autonomy as our cardinal value. “Human beings will and must be a burden on one another; the flight from dependency is a flight from humanity” (Callahan, 1993, p. 127). Of course, we also stand to lose when we

44

BABROW AND MATTSON

deny the individual significance of illness. Although we all become sick and eventually die, each pain—particularly in the way it is borne—marks out our individuality, and each passing is the loss of a light that will never shine again. So, in these and many other ways, health communication is characterized by the tensions between idiosyncracy and commonality. (Un)Certainties and Values, Expectations and Desires. Uncertainty is central to the experience of illness (Atkinson, 1995; Babrow, Hines, & Kasch, 2000; Babrow, Kasch, & Ford, 1998; Brashers & Babrow, 1996; Katz, 1984). The significance of uncertainty is suggested by the observation that expectations pervade illness experiences. Expectations play a role in the production of somatic disorders, in the processes by which disorders are labeled as worthy of medical care and illness labels are applied, and in recovery and prevention (Jones, 1982). Moreover, the significance of uncertainty is demonstrated in research explicitly concerned with uncertainty and illness (e.g., Cohen, 1993; Mishel, 1988, 1990) as well as in studies of stress and coping (e.g., Lazarus, 1983; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982; Taylor, 1983), and human helplessness and perceived control (e.g., Abramson, Garber, & Seligman, 1980; Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Bandura, 1982; Brenders, 1987, 1989). (Babrow, Kasch, et al., 1998, p. 2)

Given its pervasiveness, it is not surprising that uncertainty is the locus for much of the tension between the realms of communication and the body, scientific and humanistic assumptions and aspirations, and idiosyncracy and commonality. Indeed, some perspectives take uncertainty as their focal point and, based largely on mechanistic or biomedical frameworks, emphasize accurate communication of knowledge and uncertainty (e.g., models of judgment under uncertainty, rational choice and decision analysis, and theories of risk; but see efforts to overcome some of these limits in Friedman, Dunwoody, & Rogers, 1999) or uncertainty reduction (Albrecht & Adelman, 1987; Sheer & Cline, 1995). Others take uncertainty as a starting point for more open-ended analysis. In particular, a number of writers have begun to develop theories of the relationship between communication and uncertainty management (Brashers, 2001; Brashers et al., 2000; Mishel, 1988, 1990; Parrott, Stuart, & Cairns, 2000). And, in a related vein, still others, including some interested in management or coping, see uncertainty as only half of the heart of illness (Babrow, Kasch, et al., 1998; Babrow et al., 2000; Brashers & Babrow, 1996; Ford, Babrow, & Stohl, 1996; Hines, 2001; Hines, Babrow, et al., 1997, 2001). For instance, problematic integration theory suggests that uncertainties take on meaning only relative to the values at stake in health and illness. Moreover, Babrow (2001, in press) has recently argued that this theory counters a wide variety of common misconceptions about uncertainty: That it has a single or narrowly homogeneous meaning, such as that it is necessarily bad (Brashers, 2001; Ford et al., 1996; Mishel, 1988, 1990) or the result of insufficient information (Babrow, Kasch, et al., 1998; Babrow et al., 2000). That the main response to uncertainty is information seeking, the aim and significant outcome of any encounter with uncertainty is its reduction (or frustration of this aim), and its reduction is always possible.

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

45

That uncertainty and its attendant problems are resolved exclusively by managing the level of uncertainty (as opposed to engaging in a reappraisal of values or more holistic transformations). That any one resolution of an unpleasant uncertainty is the final punctuation of experience—or, for that matter, that any dilemma involving expectation and desire has a clear first cause. That the course of such a dilemma is predictable in a specific and robust sense.

In summary, much recent theorizing about health communication has emphasized that uncertainty pervades illness experiences and communication about health and illness. A subset of that work (for a review, see Babrow, 2001) further suggests that the meaning of uncertainty in general—that is, in any of its particular forms—is profoundly dependent on the values at stake. Moreover, this theorizing recognizes that our evaluation of whatever is at stake depends on how we formulate and manage uncertainty. This occurs, for example, as we cope with chronic illness, with irreversible losses from aging and illness, and with approaching death. Our sense of possibilities, our construction of the unknown, of the knowable, and of the nature of what it means to know conditions what we value and the extent to which we value it (Babrow, 2001); so too what we value shapes what we take to be possible, both by compelling us to cling to possibility (the essence of hope; see Babrow, 1992, 1995; Beach, in press) and by forcing us to act in ways that are intended to affect objective chances. As mundane examples, think of the motives related to diet, exercise, political organizing, and changing health care providers and care plans. For a heroic example, consider the pursuit of a cure for a child’s illness depicted in the 1992 movie Lorenzo’s Oil. In health communication, therefore, values force the rearticulation of (un)certainty and (un)certainty compels the rearticulation of values (Babrow, 1992, 2001, in press; Babrow et al., 2000; Babrow & Kline, 2000). Summary and Implications of Our Map

As the many chapters in this handbook attest, health communication researchers are engaged in a vast, varied, and dynamic enterprise. It is unlikely that many theories will embody all of the characteristic tensions we have identified. However, to the extent that a theory recognizes and attempts to grapple with these characteristics, it will do justice to what is distinctive and significant about health communication. Moreover, to the extent that other areas of communication theory and research are also interested in these tensions, health communication theories that grapple with these characteristics will contribute substantially to the entire field. The very nature of the characteristic tensions we have described suggests that health communication theories ought to be developed with a dialectical sensibility. In other words, we believe that the most productive way to theorize about health communication is to illuminate and struggle with the theses and antitheses embodied in the tensions sketched above. We also are convinced that communication constitutes these tensions and the varied responses to them in health and illness experiences (for a view of various responses to dialectical tensions, although in the realm of interpersonal relationships, see Baxter & Montgomery, 1996). Finally, it should be said that we do not believe our analysis of significant distinguishing features captures all of the important and distinctive issues in health communication. We offer our analysis not only in the hope that it will provoke theories that contend with

46

BABROW AND MATTSON

the tensions we have identified but also with the wish that it will stimulate more refined, searching, and illuminating metatheories. ORGANIZING HEALTH COMMUNICATION THEORIES

There are a host of ways to formulate an organized understanding of health communication theories—essentially, to formulate alternative maps of the domain of theories (as opposed to the domain of health communication experiences). For instance, we might construct a topical scheme based on the four distinctive tensions in health communication (sketched above). The trouble with this sort of scheme is that the theories we would most like to highlight—those of the sort we would like to encourage—would be unclassifiable in the sense that they would engage with all of these tensions. Other alternatives would be to classify theories by context or level of analysis, which is largely the approach taken in this handbook, or to order them by their historical evolution. Another important approach is to organize theories by their metatheoretical commitments. The appeal of this alternative is that it illuminates various underlying, often tacit philosophical commitments. There are, however, numerous ways to approach metatheoretical issues. One powerful approach, recently undertaken by Anderson (1996), is to classify theories according to their (often implicit) answers to questions about ontology, epistemology, praxeology, and axiology. To paraprhase Anderson, the ontology of a theory makes a claim about what is, and more specifically it answers the questions: “What is the nature of the phenomenal world? What is our manner of engagement with that world? What is the nature of the individual within that world?” A theory’s underlying epistemological commitments reflect a view of what we can know; it answers the questions: “What is the character of the justified argument? What is the relationship between theory and method?” Praxeology entails claims about how theorizing is done; in other words, it answers the question, “What is the practice of the practical argument?” Finally, axiology refers to one’s view of the value of theory. The corresponding question is, “What is the presence of theory in society?” (pp. 2–3) For each of these questions, there are several possible answers, and although some combinations of answers are unlikely, theorists have formulated many different combinations. As a result, there are many different ways of distinguishing theoretical genres. One of the more common ways of comprehending these varieties is exemplified by Bochner (1985, 1994), who argues that a pragmatist stance is central to all discussions of communication inquiry. “The pragmatist point is that the terms that will prove most useful depend upon the purposes to which inquiry is directed. Because there are a number of legitimate goals that [scholars] may seek to achieve, there are a number of different vocabularies that may be applied to these goals” (Bochner, 1985, p. 36). For these reasons, Bochner (1985) compares and contrasts three metatheoretical perspectives—empiricism, hermeneutics, and critical theory—in terms of their goals, views of phenomena, theoretical functions, production of knowledge, and judgment of truth claims (also see Miller, 2002). In a later paper, Bochner (1994) includes narrative theory as another alternative vocabulary for theorizing about communication. “By admitting that there are at least three legitimate goals to which our . . . work can be addressed, we are liberated from the obligation to find a universally accepted standard for judging which point of view about . . . inquiry is ultimately correct” (Bochner, 1985, p. 52). The pragmatic thread has recently been used to weave an even broader tapestry of scholarly goals in Craig’s (1999) synthesis of seven historical traditions within the field of communication. Craig developed his conception of the field of communication using

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

47

three lines of argument. The first line advocates a constitutive metamodel of communication; such a metamodel pictures different theories as varied “ways of constituting the communication process symbolically for particular purposes” (p. 127). The second line of argument is that communication theory ought to be seen as metadiscourse, or communication about communication. In other words, “the technical practice of communication theory largely derives from our ordinary, everyday practices of talking about communication” (p. 129). Craig’s third line of argument is that communication is best conceived as a practical discipline. He envisions “communication theory as an open field of discourse engaged with the problems of communication as a social practice, a theoretical metadiscourse that emerges from, extends, and informs practical metadiscourse” (p. 129). Seen from this perspective, health communication theory is understood to emerge from practical efforts such as those designed to foster patient autonomy. For example, the doctrine of informed consent (Beauchamp & Childress, 1994) and the Patient Self-Determination Act (Doukas & Reichel, 1993) give rise to theory building, which in turn is intended to inform and refine these practices (e.g., Hines, 2001; Hines, Babrow, et al., 1997, 2001; Katz, 1984). Based on these three foundational arguments, Craig lays out seven traditions within communication theory: rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychologic, sociocultural, and critical. Among the many virtues of this formulation is that, unlike in a number of previous attempts to differentiate types, communication theories in this scheme have “something to agree and disagree about—and that ‘something’ is communication, not epistemology” (p. 135). In other words, Craig views these seven traditions as different ways of conceptualizing and problematizing communication. In addition, Craig’s framework is laudable for its attempt to promote metadiscourse. He does this doubly well in the sense that (a) he identifies ways that each tradition can be used to engage with everyday practice (i.e., ways that each tradition both supports and challenges commonplace understandings) and (b) he describes topoi for argumentation across traditions (summarized in his Table 2).2 Our aim here is not to reproduce Craig’s analysis by applying it in full to health communication theory. Rather, we want to foster disciplinary development—dialogue and theory building—and practical engagement along the lines he suggests. Although we cannot discuss all possibilities, we can at least illustrate the sort of theoretical and practical matters suggested by our view of health communication and the perspective on theory represented in Craig’s work. Therefore, following are thumbnail sketches of the seven approaches to theorizing and brief examples of points of contact between each tradition and the tensions in health communication identified above. We also describe one or two pragmatic implications of each theoretical perspective. The Rhetorical Tradition

According to Craig (1999), the rhetorical tradition theorizes communication as a practical art of persuasive discourse (traditionally, artful public discourse, although these boundaries have eroded over the centuries; see Bizzell & Herzberg, 1990). Rhetorical theory has 2 A reader of an early draft of this chapter pointed out that Craig’s framework, by dividing the field into seven camps, may discourage rather than encourage metadiscourse. Any such scheme runs this risk by creating categories. However, we believe that Craig’s analysis of topoi for argumentation across traditions serves as a powerful impetus for dialogue and mutual exploration. Unfortunately, due to space constraints, this chapter can only point interested theorists toward Craig’s potentially healing topoi.

48

BABROW AND MATTSON

enormous implications across the spectrum of public deliberation over health care policies of every sort. And as traditional boundaries have been challenged, scholars have developed analyses of ever wider forms and contexts of suasive texts and discourse in the rhetorical tradition (e.g., Condit, 1990; Sharf, 1990; Solomon, 1985). We believe that rhetorical theory is particularly well suited to studying characteristic tensions in health communication. Notably, from nearly its inception, the rhetorical tradition has grappled with the role of discourse in arriving at probabilistic judgments and also with the tensions between reason and emotion (Bitzer, 1981; Craig, 1999; Howell, 1956). Hence, it is well suited to studies of the communicative framing of uncertainty and values and the tension between expectation and desire. Moreover, rhetorical theory has important implications for understanding the mutual interdependence of the symbolic and physical realms (Chesebro, 1982) and tensions between scientific and humanistic orientations (Harter, Stephens, & Japp, 2000; Sharf, 1990; Solomon, 1985). Rhetoric is also fundamentally about creating a sense of identification—shared or common meaning and the constitution of community—out of the multiplicity of voices, selves, and experiences that make up our individuality (Burke, 1969; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969). Hence, rhetorical theory has much to add to our understanding of the tension between idiosyncracy and commonality so essential to health communication. The rhetorical tradition also offers resources for bridging theory and practice. As noted earlier, Craig (1999) discusses ways that rhetorical theory both appeals to the common sense of everyday discourse (e.g., the value of informed judgment and the improvability of practice) and challenges metadiscursive commonplaces (e.g., mere words are not actions, appearance is not reality, style is not substance, and opinion is not truth) (p. 133). Consider, for instance, the many changes in the style of health care practice wrought by managed care (Lammers & Geist, 1997; Mattson & Brann, 2002; Miller, 2001). In its extensive considerations of style, rhetorical theory can be used to challenge policymakers (see Chapter 18), insurers, and pracitioners who wish to maintain that these profound changes in the style of health communication and care are not also profound changes in the substance of communication and care. The Semiotic Tradition

According to Craig (1999), the semiotic tradition theorizes communication as intersubjective mediation by signs and sign systems. A “crucial and revolutionary aspect” of semiotics, as developed in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, is its “insistence on the primacy of relations and systems of relations. . . . The strategy can be stated most simply as a shift in focus, from objects to relations. It is relationships that create and define objects, not the other way around” (Culler, 1986, p. 147). Hence, semiotics problematizes the nature of individual signs and meanings, positing instead that signs are meaningful only in relation to other signs. Intersubjectivity, then, arises to the extent that webs of relationships are shared by communicators. Semiotics has important implications for the distinctive tensions in health communication described above. For instance, consider the tension between the realms of communication and the body. Knuf and Caughlin (1993) illuminate the ways that diet advertising builds up new systems of representation in which the body and self are transformed. Splashy linguistic and glossy visual signs link the body to vitality, social acceptability, and self-esteem. Moreover, through the process of “symbolic inversion,” weight reduction is transformed into the consumption of products, and an industrial diet product takes the place of natural foodstuffs. In these ways, viewers are socialized into a pattern of chronic

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

49

dependence on diet products and the diet industry—a dependence on outside assistance— rather than seeing weight reduction as an uncommodified moderation of calorie intake and expenditure. Similarly, Gemin (1997) analyzes the semiotic production of codependent identities. Semiotic insights also can be used to promote positive innovations in health communication practice. Craig (1999) notes ways that semiotic theory both appeals to some commonsense postulates of everyday discourse (e.g., understanding requires a common language; the danger of miscommunication is omnipresent) and challenges other metadiscursive commonplaces (e.g., words have correct meanings and stand for thoughts; codes and media are neutral). Consider, for instance, the widespread (though sometimes reluctant) embrace of new technologies as media for health communication. Web sites sanctioned by medical authorities convey not only accurate content but also, inescapably, the medical establishment’s imprimatur on patients’ self-directed study of disease, self-diagnosis, and self-treatment. Although these authoritative sites may urge visitors to consult a physician, the cautionary notes cannot remove the necessity of an initial judgment of health status by the patient or Web visitor, nor are the admonishments likely to deter the majority of people willing to diagnose and treat themselves. Semiotic theory thus suggests important issues that must be managed by would-be sources and users of health information. The Phenomenological Tradition

As Craig (1999) characterizes it, the phenomenological tradition theorizes communication as dialogue or experience of otherness: Authentic communication, or dialogue, is founded on the experience of direct, unmediated contact with others. Communicative understanding begins in prereflexive experience arising from our bodily existence in a shared lifeworld. . . . Hence, phenomenology challenges the semiotic notion that intersubjective understanding can be mediated only by signs (Stewart, 1995, 1996), as well as the rhetorical notion that communication involves artful or strategic uses of signs. . . . Among the paradoxes of communication that phenomenology brings to light is that conscious goal seeking, however benevolent ones intentions may be, annihilates dialogue by interposing one’s own goals and strategies as a barrier against one’s direct experience of self and other. (pp. 138–139)

Outside of Rogerian psychotherapy, phenomenological approaches to health communication have been rare (for exceptions, see Orbe & King, 2000; Peterson, 1987; also see Mattson, 2000). Nonetheless, this tradition can be used to derive important ideas about the tensions that characterize health communication. For instance, consider the tension between the realms of communication and the body. Zook (1994) argued that both the biomedical and biopsychosocial models are based on dualistic conceptions of mind and body that misapprehend both the nature of health and illness and of communication. In the biomedical model, illness is reduced to biological pathology (i.e., disease), whereas the biopsychosocial model allows for the interdependence of psychological, social, and physiological factors. But in both models, according to Zook, “biological function is affirmed as the foundation of health” (p. 358), and communication serves to further colonize a lifeworld of predefined biological health (p. 359). By contrast, a phenomenological theory of health and communication opens the way to a truly holistic conception of health as a state of being-in-the-world.

50

BABROW AND MATTSON

Being-in-the-world is . . . being-embodied. Our experience of the world arises first and foremost within the prereflective unity of body and self in lived experience. Embodiment thus precedes the more narrowly constructed “body as idea (i.e., object)” that we find in both medical models. As such, the question of the meaning of our being [e.g., an ache, a lump] is not merely a concern—it is the concern. (p. 363)

The phenomenlogical tradition also offers avenues for influencing health communication and health care practice. Notably, Craig (1999) identifies ways that the tradition appeals to the common sense of everyday discourse (e.g., we all need human contact; we should treat others as persons, respect differences, and seek common ground) and challenges other common beliefs (e.g., communication is skill; the word is not the thing; facts are objective and values subjective) (p. 133). As just one example, phenomenology challenges widespread practice by suggesting that skill instruction, strategy, and artifice, rather than improving communication, create barriers to authentic contact between patients and care providers. Rather than imposing preconceived understandings, health care providers and patients should be encouraged to cultivate sensitivity and openness (Mattson, 2000). The Cybernetic Tradition

Craig (1999) contends that, in the cybernetic tradition, communication is theorized as information processing—processing that allows systems to function (and often causes them to malfunction). Communication involves encoding, transmission, and decoding. Moreover, depending on the focus and complexity of the particular theory, communication can also include feedback and more or less complex system regulation and environmental impact. (Of course, a system and its environment together constitute an encompassing supersystem, and hence “environmental impact” is just another instance of information processing.) Theories in the cybernetic tradition are clearly suited to studying characteristic tensions in health communication (Donohew & Ray, 1990). For instance, theories in this tradition have much to tell us about the tensions between the realms of communication and the body insofar as they are conceived as distinguishable yet interrelated systems. Moreover, family systems theories (Bochner & Eisenberg, 1987; Minuchin, 1974; Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967; Whitchurch & Constantine, 1993) are applicable to the tension between idiosyncracy and commonality. A member’s illness stresses the family system (e.g., creating role and boundary ambiguity; see Boss, 1999; Northouse & Northouse, 1998, chap. 3). Interdependence forges a common experience among family members. However, individuals are themselves open systems and are elements within many systems in addition to the family. The particular, unique configuration of each individual’s relationships to these other systems creates idiosyncratic experiences and meanings of the very illness that disturbs the entire family. In addition to its suitability for studying the distinctive tensions of health communication, the cybernetic tradition also offers resources for bridging theory and practice. Craig (1999) discusses several ways that this tradition appeals to the common sense of everyday discourse (e.g., the mind and brain are identical; information and logic are valuable; complex systems can be unpredictable) and challenges other commonplace notions (e.g., humans and machines differ; emotion is not logical; cause and effect are linear). For instance, systems theory counters the resilient and pernicious linear effects notion that patient “noncompliance” is a function of some characteristic of the patient (e.g., ignorance or irresponsibility) or the physician (e.g., inadequate compliance-gaining ability). Systems

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

51

thinking suggests that control and resistence are mutually conditioning features of the traditional hierarchical relationship. Fadiman’s (1997) depiction of the “collision” between the Hmong and the American medical establishment provides a poignant example of this dynamic. Although health-promoting change might be accomplished to some degree by first-order changes, such as the physician pressing less and/or the patient complying more, the fundamental dynamic can only change by a second-order transformation in the nature of the relationship (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). The Sociopsychological Tradition

Communication, according to the sociopsychological tradition, is “a process in which the behavior of humans or other complex organisms expresses psychological mechanisms, states, and traits and, through interaction with similar expressions of other individuals, produces a range of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral effects” (Craig, 1999, p. 143). Although this tradition has implications for all four of the distinctive tensions in health communication, the most obvious are related to the tension between (un)certainty and values. A wide range of theories and foci illustrate this point. For instance, theories of health beliefs (Janz & Becker, 1984; Mattson, 1999), risk (Friedman et al., 1999), fear (Berger, 1998; Witte, 1992), compliance (Burgoon, Birk, & Hall, 1991), social support (Albrecht & Adelman, 1987, especially chap. 11; Ford et al., 1996), uncertainty management (Brashers, in press), and problematic integration (Babrow, 1992; Hines, in press) all grapple in some way with uncertainties and values. Ultimately, each of these theories must confront the tensions between expectations and uncertainties on the one hand and values, desires, and wishes on the other (Babrow, 2001-a, in press-b). The sociopsychological tradition also has both commonsensical and unobvious implications for health communication practice. Craig (1999) notes that these theories appeal to commonly accepted ideas: that communication reflects personality, that beliefs and feelings bias judgments, and that people in groups affect one another. These models also counter familiar notions: that humans are rational beings, that we know our own minds, and that we know what we see. For example, explaining illness is more than merely processing clear and thorough information; rather, it is working out health beliefs and uncertainties within the context of related beliefs and values that constitute our sense of self, roles, and relationships through interaction with health care providers, loved ones, and others (Babrow et al., 2000; Mattson, 1999; more generally, see Whaley, 2000). Sociocultural Tradition

Craig (1999) states that the sociocultural tradition views communication as “a symbolic process that produces and reproduces shared sociocultural patterns” (p. 144). In other words, shared systems of beliefs, values, language, political economy, and various other institutional arrangements make communication possible. Moreover, our communication reproduces these very arrangements. Still, as Craig notes, in given interactions and across time, there is need and opportunity for improvisation and hence for the production of new sociocultural arrangements. [Communication problems] are thought of as gaps across space (sociocultural diversity and relativity) and across time (sociocultural change) that disable interactions by depleting the stock of shared patterns on which interaction depends. Conflicts, misunderstandings, and difficulties in coordination increase when social conditions afford a scarcity of shared rituals,

52

BABROW AND MATTSON

rules, and expectations. . . . Such perturbations in the ecology of codes and media disrupt interaction, but at the same time enable the creative production of new meanings and new means of communication. (p. 145)

Whereas the sociocultural tradition is relevant to all of the four distinctive tensions in health communication, it has especially significant implications for the tension between scientific and humanistic assumptions, values, aspirations, and limitations. In particular, cross-cultural studies reveal the enormous difficulties of reconciling the perspective of Western allopathic medicine with that of indigenous healing. Fadiman (1997) provides compelling illustrations. Consider the dilemma faced by a physician when the mother of a Hmong patient was unable or unwilling to follow a clearly effective medical prescription deemed necessary for the child’s survival and then threatened—with some credibility— to kill herself and her remaining children in response to the physician’s threat to have the child removed by Child Protective Services. As another example, a Hmong mother perceived the removal of a soiled string around her baby’s wrist when she was admitted for emergency treatment as a life-threatening act; in the mother’s view, an evil spirit, or dab, might steal the child’s spirit once the securing string was removed. In other words, the most basic assumption of Western medicine, that well-established medical science trumps all other forms of knowledge, may be overturned when cultures interact (also see Airhihenbuwa, 1995; Geist, 1994). Like the other traditions, the sociocultural tradition can be linked in important ways to practice. Craig (1999) suggests that sociocultural theories can appeal to common-sense notions such as the idea that the individual is a product of society, every society has a distinct culture, and social actions have unintended effects. He also notes that these theories challenge belief in individual agency and responsibility, the absolute identity of self, and the naturalness of the social order. Obviously, then, sociocultural theories represent a substantial challenge to sociopsychological approaches to the problem of “noncompliance” (see Mishler, 1984). The Critical Tradition

Finally, according to the critical tradition, genuine communication occurs in the process of discursive reflection, but material and ideological practices in society often preclude or distort discursive reflection and hence prevent authentic communication (Craig, 1999). Ray’s (1996) collection of essays on communication and disenfranchisement offers numerous powerful examples of the application of critical theory to health and illness: [The] volume examines the communication-disenfranchisement relationship, specifically how it is accomplished, managed, and overcome. Through interactions with the family, friends, and institutions, and from the mass media, definitions of acceptable identities, acceptable behaviors, acceptable topics of discussion, and acceptable expectations are made clear as to who “fits” where in American society, who controls the resources, who makes the decisions, and who sets the social standards. (p. xvi)

Critical theorists and researchers attempt to uncover the material practices and hegemonic ideologies that distort communication. Like the other six traditions Craig (1999) identifies, critical theory is highly relevant to the various distinctive tensions in health communication. For instance, the tensions

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

53

between scientific and humanistic assumptions and values and between idiosyncracy and commonality appear to be consistent with key tensions in feminist thought (Bullis & Bach, 1996). These same dialectical oppositions are illustrated in Babrow and Kline’s (2000) application of problematic integration theory to critique the “ideology of uncertainty reduction” that ignores or delegitimizes women’s experience of breast self-exams. As one more example, Mattson, Clair, Sanger, and Kunkel (2000) illuminate the tension between idiosyncracy and commonality in a case study of a woman’s search for social support. The relevance of critical theory to distinctive features of health communication also suggests significant opportunities to address practice. Craig (1999) notes that the critical tradition both appeals to the common sense of everyday discourse (e.g., power and wealth perpetuate themselves; freedom, equality, and reason are of value; discussion produces awareness and insight) and challenges metadiscursive commonplaces (e.g., the traditional social order is both natural and rational; science and technology are objective) (p. 133). The most important of these challenges arises in the critical analysis of power relationships in health care institutions and practices (Foucault, 1973). For example, Lupton (1994), who has written some of the most trenchant works in this area, argues the following: Although the health promotion perspective relies heavily on a critique of the biomedical model, it fails to challenge the hegemony of ideologies that deflect the responsibility of health maintenance from the state to the individual (Stevenson & Burke, 1991). The role of culture is reduced to emphasis on “lifestyle” choices, and health or ill-health states are still regarded as being “externalized” to the body rather than being products of social processes (Hepburn, 1988, p. 62). (p. 57)

Waitzkin (1991) has demonstrated that this critique applies not only to health promotion but with equal force to face-to-face encounters with health care providers. Summary

Numerous theoretical traditions have been useful in illuminating health communication. This is not surprising when one considers the affinity of these traditions for the four characteristic tensions that we believe lie at the heart of health communication. Although one might argue, therefore, that theory in this area is nondistinctive, we contend that the four tensions in health communication identified in this chapter constitute a unique gestalt. This is not to say that scholarship in the area should develop apart from the broader field; such a suggestion would parallel the equally distasteful proposition that the many traditions within communication theory ought to be held apart. We would like to see greater attention to the points of common concern. At these junctures there is ample room for recognition of shared understanding as well as debate. In this sense, discourse along the lines suggested by the four characteristic tensions in health communication (also see Craig’s (1999) topoi for argumentation) should prove salutary both in health communication research and application and in the communication field as a whole. CONCLUSION

The prospect of writing this chapter, when we first considered it, was both exciting and daunting. It was intellectually and politically exhilarating to have the opportunity to reflect on and perhaps shape scholars’, students’, and practitioners’ understandings of such a

54

BABROW AND MATTSON

vibrant field of research. It was also unnerving to face the challenge of constructing a meaningful view that took into account the diversity and ongoing growth characteristic of the field. In this chapter, we offer not so much a review of extant health communication theory as a view of what such theorizing has been and could be like. This choice was motivated by our confidence that the other chapters would cover the varieties of theory that we only touch on here. Moreover, rather than discussing specific theories, we decided to speak primarily at a more general level. In making this decision, we took some guidance from Craig’s (1999) important work. Specifically, rather than emphasizing particular metatheoretical questions, such as those reviewed by Anderson (1996), or recapitulating epistemologically based frameworks that have been so well articulated in past works (e.g., Bochner, 1984, 1994; Deetz, 1996), we tried to focus more centrally on communication processes, practices, structures, and content. The emphasis on communication rather than epistemology is evident, first of all, in our discussion of what we take to be four distinctive tensions characteristic of health communication: between the realms of communication and the body; between scientific and humanistic assumptions, values, aspirations and limitations; between idiosyncracy and commonality; and between (un)certainties and values. In developing these themes, we were conscious of their limits, but we pressed on in the hope that the chapter would stimulate further efforts to articulate the essence of health communication. We believe that this focus ultimately will be more fruitful than the typically terse, underelaborated attempts to define health communication that have been offered in the past. In short, we hope to foster the sort of dialogue that will promote discipline building. Indeed, we chose to use Craig’s (1999) analysis of communication theory as a framework because of its focus on communication. This is the second way in which the chapter is communication-rather than epistemology-centered. As we worked our way through Craig’s analysis, we were struck not only by its elegance but also by its unavoidable limitations. Again, the map is not the territory. But in the spirit of his work, we offer our application of Craig’s perspective in the hope that it will foster cross-tradition dialogue and discipline-building. One important aspect of his work that we have mentioned fleetingly in this chapter is his analysis of topoi for argumentation across traditions. Such dialogue about health communication, whether or not it takes the specific forms outlined by Craig, will be essential to synthesis of diversity and unity that must constitute the future of health communication theory. Finally, we hope that this chapter on theory will also foster application. As we said earlier, concerns about the contributions of health communication theory to practice have little to do with the nature of theory and more to do with the activities of theorists who fail to complete the circle in which theory and practice interpenetrate. The discussion of various traditions provides some indication of the sorts of practical implications that theories provide. Although the different traditions give rise to very different stances on the social significance of theory (see Anderson, 1996, chap. 8), ultimately the worth of what we do as theorists will be determined by how our theories are applied in practice. REFERENCES Abramson, L. Y., Garber, J., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1980). Learned helplessness in humans: An attributional analysis. In J. Garber & M. E. P. Seligman (Eds.), Human helplessness: Theory and applications (pp. 3–57). New York: Academic Press.

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

55

Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E. P., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: A critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 49–74. Airhihenbuwa, C. O. (1995). Health and culture: Beyond the western paradigm. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Albrecht, T. A., & Adelman, M. B. (1987). Communicating social support. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Allen, R. F., & Allen, J. (1987). A sense of community, a shared vision and a positive culture: Core enabling factors in successful culture-based health promotion. American Journal of Health Promotion, 2, 40–47. Anderson, J. A. (1996). Communication theory: Epistemological foundations. New York: Guilford. Ari`es, P. (1981). The hour of our death. New York: Vintage. Aronowitz, R. A. (1998). Making sense of illness: Science, society, and disease. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Atkinson, P. (1995). Medical talk and medical work. London: Sage. Babrow, A. S. (1992). Communication and problematic integration: Understanding diverging probability and value, ambiguity, ambivalence, and impossibility. Communication Theory, 2, 95–130. Babrow, A. S. (1993). The advent of multiple process theories of communication. Journal of Communication, 43, 110–118. Babrow, A. S. (1995). Communication and problematic integration: Milan Kundera’s “Lost Letters” in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Communication Monographs, 62, 283–300. Babrow, A. S. (1998). Colloquy: Developing multiple-process theories of communication. Human Communication Research, 25, 152–155. Babrow, A. S. (2001). Uncertainty, value, communication, and problematic integration. Journal of Communication, 51, 553–573. Babrow, A. S. (in press). Problematic integration theory. In B. B. Whaley & W. Samter (Eds.), Explaining communication: Contemporary theories and exemplars. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Babrow, A. S., Hines, S. C., Glover, J., Badzek, L., Holley, J., & Moss, A. (1998, May). Do dialysis patients want autonomy and control in advance medical care planning? An examination of patient views about communication and decision making. Presented at the Kentucky Conference on Health Communication, Lexington, KY. Babrow, A. S., Hines, S. C., & Kasch, C. R. (2000). Illness and uncertainty: Problematic integration and strategies for communicating about medical uncertainty and ambiguity. In B. B. Whaley (Ed.), Explaining illness: Messages, strategies and contexts (pp. 41–67). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Babrow, A. S., Kasch, C. R., & Ford, L. A. (1998). The many meanings of “uncertainty” in illness: Toward a systematic accounting. Health Communication, 10, 1–24. Babrow, A. S., & Kline, K. N. (2000). From “reducing” to “coping with” uncertainty: Reconceptualizing the central challenge in breast self-exams. Social Science & Medicine, 51, 1805–1816. Bandura, A. (1982). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American Psychologist, 37, 122–147. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine. Baxter, L. A., & Montgomery, B. M. (1996). Relating: Dialogues and dialectics. New York: Guilford. Beach, W. A. (in press). Managing optimism. In P. J. Glenn, C. D. LeBaron, & J. S. Mandelbaum

56

BABROW AND MATTSON

(Eds.), Unearthing the taken-for-granted: Studies in language and social interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress, J. F. (1994). Principles of biomedical ethics (4th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Berger, C. R. (1991). Communication theories and other curios. Communication Monographs, 58, 101–113. Berger, C. R. (1998). Processing quantitative data about risk and threat in news reports. Journal of Communication, 48, 87–106. Bitzer, L. (1981). Political rhetoric. In D. D. Nimmo & K. R. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of political communication (pp. 225–248). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bizzell, P., & Herzberg, B. (Eds.). (1990). The rhetorical tradition: Readings from classical times to the present. Boston: Bedford. Blum, H. L. (1981). Planning for health: Generics for the eighties. New York: Human Sciences Press. Bochner, A. P. (1985). Perpsectives on inquiry: Representation, conversation, and reflection. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 27–58). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bochner, A. P. (1994). Perspectives on inquiry II: Theories and stories. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (2nd ed., pp. 21–41). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bochner, A. P., & Eisenberg, E. M. (1987). Family process: Systems perspectives. In C. R. Berger & S. H. Chaffee (Eds.), Handbook of communication science (pp. 540–563). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bradac, J. J. (2001). Theory comparison: Uncertainty reduction, problematic integration, uncertainty management and other curious constructs. Journal of Communication, 51, 456–476. Brashers, D. E. (2001). Communication and uncertainty management. Journal of Communication, 51, 477–497. Brashers, D. E., & Babrow, A. S. (1996). Theorizing health commuincation. Communication Studies, 47, 243–251. Brashers, D. E., Neidig, J. L., Haas, S. M., Dobbs, L. K., Cardillo, L. W., & Russell, J. A. (2000). Communication in the management of uncertainty: The case of persons living with HIV or AIDS. Communication Monographs, 67, 63–84. Breggin, P. R. (1991). Toxic psychiatry. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Breggin, P. R., & Breggin, G. R. (1994). Talking back to Prozac: What doctors won’t tell you about today’s most controversial drug. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Brenders, D. A. (1987). Perceived control: Foundations and directions for communication research. In M. McLaughlin (Ed.), Communication yearbook 10 (pp. 86–116). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Brenders, D. A. (1989). Perceived control and the interpersonal dimension of health care. Health Communication, 1, 117–135. Bullis, C., & Bach, B. W. (1996). Feminism and the disenfranchised: Listening beyond the “other.” In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. 3–28). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Burgoon, M. (1995). A kinder, gentler discipline: Feeling good about being mediocre. In B. R. Burleson (Ed.), Communication yearbook 18 (pp. 464–479). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Burgoon, M., Birk, T. S., & Hall, J. R. (1991). Compliance and satisfaction with physicianpatient communication: An expectancy theory interpretation of gender differences. Human Communication Research, 18, 177–208.

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

57

Burke, K. (1969). A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Callahan, D. (1993). The troubled dream of life: In search of a peaceful death. New York: Simon & Schuster. Cassata, D. M. (1980). Health communication theory and research: A definitional overview. In D. Nimmo (Ed.), Communication yearbook 4 (pp. 583–589). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Cassell, E. J. (1985). Talking with patients: Vol. 1. The theory of doctor-patient communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chesebro, J. W. (1982). Illness as a rhetorical act: A cross-cultural perspective. Communication Quarterly, 30, 321–331. Clift, E. (1997). What do you say you do? Health communicators and where we fit in. Journal of Health Communication, 2, 65–67. Clift, E., & Freimuth, V. (1995). Health communication: What is it and what can it do for you? Journal of Health Education, 26, 68–74. Cohen, M. H. (1993). The unknown and the unknowable: Managing sustained uncertainty. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 15, 77–96. Condit, C. M. (1990). Decoding abortion rhetoric: Communicating social change. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Craig, R. T. (1989). Communication as a practical discipline. In B. Dervin, L. Grossberg, B. J. O’Keefe, & E. Wartella (Eds.), Rethinking communication: Paradigm issues (pp. 97–122). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Craig, R. T. (1993). Why are there so many communication theories? Journal of Communication, 43, 26–33. Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9, 119–161. Culler, J. (1986). Ferdinand de Saussure (rev. ed.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Deetz, S. (1996). Describing differences in approaches to organization science: Rethinking Burrell and Morgan and their legacy. Organization Science, 7, 191–207. Dervin, B., Grossberg, L., O’Keefe, B. J., & Wartella, E. (Eds.). (1989a). Rethinking communication: Paradigm issues. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Dervin, B., Grossberg, L., O’Keefe, B. J., & Wartella, E. (Eds.). (1989b). Rethinking communication: Paradigm exemplars. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Donohew, L., & Ray, E. B. (1990). Introduction: Systems perspectives on health communication. In E. B. Ray & L. Donohew (Eds.), Communication and health: Systems and applications (pp. 3–8). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Doukas, D. J., & Reichel, W. (1993). Planning for uncertainty: A guide to living wills and other advance directives for health care. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196, 129–136. Fadiman, A. (1997). The spirit catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Finnegan, J. R., & Viswanath, K. (1990). Health communication: Medical and public health influences on the research agenda. In E. B. Ray & L. Donohew (Eds.), Communication and health: Systems and applications (pp. 9–24). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fogarty, J. S. (1997). Reactance theory and patient noncompliance. Social Science and Medicine, 45, 1277–1288. Ford, L. A., Babrow, A. S., & Stohl, C. (1996). Social support messages and the management of uncertainty in the experience of breast cancer: An application of problematic integration theory. Communication Monographs, 63, 189–207. Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic. London: Tavistock.

58

BABROW AND MATTSON

Fox, R. (1980). The evolution of medical uncertainty. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly: Health and Society, 58(1), 1–49. Friedman, S. M., Dunwoody, S., & Rogers, C. L. (1999). Communicating uncertainty: Media coverage of new and controversial science. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Geist, P. (1994). Negotiating cultural understanding in health care communication. In L. A. Samovar & R. E. Porter (Eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader (7th ed., pp. 311–321). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Gemin, J. (1997). Dangerous liaisons: On the systemic self-production of codependent identities. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 25, 132–149. Gorer, G. (1965). Death, grief and mourning. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Harter, L. M., Stephens, R. J., & Japp, P. M. (2000). President Clinton’s apology for the Tuskegee syphilis experiment: A narrative of rememberence, redefinition, and reconciliation. Howard Journal of Communication, 11, 19–34. Hepburn, S. J. (1988). Western minds, foreign bodies. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2, 59–74. Hines, S. C. (2001). Coping with uncertainties in advance care planning. Journal of Communication, 51, 498–513. Hines, S. C., Babrow, A. S., Badzek, L., & Moss, A. (1997). Communication and problematic integration in end-of-life decisions: Dialysis decisions among the elderly. Health Communication, 9, 199–217. Hines, S. C., Babrow, A. S., Badzek, L., & Moss, A. (2001). From coping with life to coping with death: Problematic integration for the seriously ill elderly. Health Communication, 13, 327–342. Hines, S. C., Moss, A. H., & McKenzie, J. (1997). Prolonging life or prolonging death: Communication’s role in difficult dialysis decisions. Health Communication, 9, 367–386. Howell, W. S. (1956). Logic and rhetoric in England, 1500–1700. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Janz, N. K., & Becker, M. H. (1984). The health belief model: A decade later. Health Education Quarterly, 11, 1–47. Jenkins, D. J. A. (1998). Review of the book Making sense of illness: Science, society, and disease. New England Journal of Medicine, 339, 354. Jones, R. A. (1982). Expectations and illness. In M. S. Friedman & M. R. DiMatteo (Eds.), Interpersonal issues in health care (pp. 145–167). New York: Academic Press. Katz, J. (1984). The silent world of doctor and patient. New York: The Free Press. Kearl, M. C. (1996). Dying well: The unspoken dimension of aging well. American Behavioral Scientist, 39, 336–360. Knuf, J., & Caughlin, J. (1993). Weighty issues: Semiotic notes on dieting as a secular ritual. Health Communication, 5, 161–179. Kramer, P. D. (1993). Listening to Prozac. New York: Viking. Kreps, G. L., & Thornton, B. C. (1992). Health communication theory and practice (2nd ed.). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Lammers, J. C., & Geist, P. (1997). The transformation of caring in the light and shadow of “managed care.” Health Communication, 9, 45–60. Lazarus, R. S. (1983). The costs and benefits of denial. In S. Breznitz (Ed.), The denial of stress (pp. 1–30). New York: International Universities Press. Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press. Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. New York: Springer. Levy, M. R., & Gurevitch, M. (Eds.). (1993a). The future of the field: I. Between fragmentation and cohesion [Special issue]. Journal of Communication, 33(3).

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

59

Levy, M. R., & Gurevitch, M. (Eds.). (1993b). The future of the field: II. Between fragmentation and cohesion [Special issue]. Journal of Communication, 33(4). Littlejohn, S. W. (2002). Theories of human communication (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Loeser, J. D., & Melzack, R. (1999). Pain: An overview. Lancet, 353, 1607–1609. Luhrmann, T. M. (2000). Of two minds: The growing disorder in American psychiatry. New York: Knopf. Lupton, D. (1994). Toward the development of a critical health communication praxis. Health Communication, 6, 55–67. Martin, E. (1994). Flexible bodies: Tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon. Mattson, M. (1999). Toward a reconceptualization of communication cues to action in the health belief model: HIV test counseling. Communication Monographs, 66, 240–265. Mattson, M. (2000). Empowerment through agency-promoting discourse: An explicit application of harm reduction theory to reframe HIV test counseling. Journal of Health Communication, 5, 333–347. Mattson, M., & Brann, M. (2002). Managed care and the paradox of patient confidentiality: A cause study analysis from a communication boundary management perspective. Communication Studies, 53, 337–357. Mattson, M., Clair, R., Sanger, P. A. C., & Kunkel, A. W. (2000). A feminist reframing of stress: Rose’s story. In P. M. Buzzanell (Ed.), Rethinking organizational communication from feminist perspectives (pp. 157–174). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Melzack, R. (1999). From the gate to the neuromatrix. Pain, 6, S121–S126. Miller, K. (Ed.). (2001). Communication in the age of managed care [Special issue]. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 29(2). Miller, K. (2002). Communication theories: Perspectives, processes, and contexts. New York: McGraw-Hill. Minuchin, S. (1974). Family and family therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mishel, M. H. (1988). Uncertainty in illness. Image: Journal of Nursing Research, 20, 225–232. Mishel, M. H. (1990). Reconceptualization of the uncertainty in illness theory. Image: Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 22, 256–262. Mishler, E. G. (1984). The discourse of medicine: Dialectics of medical interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Northouse, L. L., & Northouse, P. G. (1998). Health communication: Strategies for health professionals (3rd ed.). Stamford, CT: Appleton & Lange. Nuland, S. B. (1993). How we die: Reflections on life’s final chapter. New York: Knopf. Nussbaum, J. F. (1989). Directions for research within health communication. Health Communication, 1, 35–40. Nzyuko, S. (1996). Does research have any role in information/education/communication programs in Africa? An insider’s view. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 227–229. Orbe, M. P., & King, G. (2000). Negotiating the tension between policy and reality: Exploring nurses’ communication about organizational wrongdoing. Health Communication, 12, 41–61. Parrott, R., Stuart, T., & Cairns, A. B. (2000). The reduction of uncertainty through communication during adjustment to spinal cord injury. In D. O. Braithwaite & T. L. Thompson (Eds.), Handbook of communication and people with disabilities: Research and application (pp. 339–352). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

60

BABROW AND MATTSON

Peterson, E. E. (1987). The stories of pregnancy: On interpretation of small-group cultures. Communication Quarterly, 35, 39–47. Pettegrew, L. S., & Logan, R. (1987). The health care context. In C. R. Berger & S. H. Chaffee (Eds.), Handbook of communication science (pp. 675–709). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Procter, R. (1992). Preserving the tie that binds: A response to Berger’s essay. Communication Monographs, 59, 98–100. Purcell, B. (1992). Are there so few communication theories? Communication Monographs, 59, 94–97. Ratzan, S., Payne, J. G., & Bishop, C. (1996). The status and scope of health communication. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 25–41. Ray, E. B. (1996). Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Reynolds, P. D. (1971). A primer in theory construction. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Rogers, E. M. (1996). The field of health communication today: An up-to-date report. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 15–23. Ross, L. M., & Pollio, H.R. (1991). Metaphors of death: A thematic analysis of personal meanings. Omega, 23, 291–307. Rothbaum, F. M., Weisz, J. R., & Snyder, S. S. (1982). Changing the world and changing the self: A two process model of perceived control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 5–37. Sharf, B. F. (1990). Physician-patient communication as interpersonal rhetoric: A narrative approach. Health Communication, 2, 217–231. Sharf, B. F. (1993). Reading the vital signs: Research in health care communication. Communication Monographs, 60, 35–41. Sheer, V. C., & Cline, R. J. (1995). Testing a model of perceived information adequacy and uncertainty reduction in physician-patient interactions. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 23, 44–59. Singleton, R. A., & Straits, B. C. (1999). Approaches to social research (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, D. H. (1989). Studying health communication: An agenda for the future. Health Communication, 1, 17–28. Smith, D. H. (1996). Ethics in the doctor-patient relationship. Medical Ethics, 12, 179–197. Solomon, M. (1985). The rhetoric of dehumanization: An analysis of medical reports of the Tuskegee syphilis project. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 49, 233–247. Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sontag, S. (1989). AIDS and its metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Stevenson, H. M., & Burke, M. (1991). Bureaucratic logic in new social movement clothing: The limits of health promotion research. Health Promotion International, 6, 281–289. Stewart, J. (1995). Language as articulate contact: Toward a post-semiotic philosophy of communication. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Stewart, J. (Ed.). (1996). Beyond the symbol model: Reflections on the representational nature of language. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Stroebe, W., & Stroebe, M. S. (1995). Social psychology and health. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Taylor, S. E. (1983). Adjustment to threatening events: A theory of cognitive adaptation. American Psychologist, 38, 1161–1173. Thayer, L. (1982). What would a theory of communication be for? Journal of Applied Communication Research, 10, 21–28.

3. THEORIZING ABOUT HEALTH COMMUNICATION

61

Valenstein, E. (1998). Blaming the brain: The truth about drugs and mental health. New York: The Free Press. Waitzkin, H. (1991). The politics of medical encounters. New Haven: Yale University Press. Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H., & Jackson, D. D. (1967). Pragmatics of human communication: A study of interpersonal patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes. New York: Norton. Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J., & Fisch, R. (1974). Change: Principles of problem formation and problem resolution. New York: Norton. Whaley, B. B. (Ed.). (2000). Explaining illness: Research, theory, and strategies. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Whitchurch, G. G., & Constantine, L. L. (1993). Systems theory. In P. G. Boss, W. J. Doherty, R. LaRossa, W. R. Schumm, & S. K. Steinmetz (Eds.), Sourcebook of family theories and methods: A contextual approach (pp. 325–352). New York: Plenum. Witte, K. (1992). Putting the fear back into fear appeals: The extended parallel process model. Communication Monographs, 59, 329–349. Witte, K. (1996). Notes from the field: Does publishing in academic journals make a difference? Journal of Health Communication, 2, 221–226. Zborowski, M. (1969). People in pain. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Zook, E. G. (1994). Embodied health and constitutive communication: Toward an authentic conceptualization of health communication. In S. Deetz (Ed.), Communication yearbook 17 (pp. 344–377). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

4 Communication in Medical Encounters: An Ecological Perspective Richard L. Street, Jr. Texas A&M University

Has managed care made it harder for patients and physicians to talk openly and honestly with one another? Has the Internet changed the way patients communicate with their doctors? What effect are new state and federal health policies (e.g., patient bills of rights) having on the health care provider–patient relationship? To what extent do race and ethnicity affect decisions made during medical consultations? These are but a few of the questions currently being asked by a variety of stakeholders of the health care system, including policymakers, managed care corporations, health care providers, patients, and media pundits, to name a few. Those of us who study health communication should be both encouraged and troubled by these questions. On the one hand, they highlight the centrality of communication in the delivery of quality health care. On the other hand, despite over 40 years of research, we still do not know enough to adequately explain how a changing health care landscape is transforming the communicative dynamics of medical consultations. The primary shortcoming in our work is that, whereas we have examined provider–patient communication with respect to the participants’ characteristics and skills, we have done relatively little to develop and test theoretical models of the processes underlying these interactions, nor have we directed sufficient attention toward explaining the role of context in the medical encounter (Thorne & Paterson, 2001). In this chapter, I present an ecological perspective for the study of communication in medical encounters. Ecology, simply defined, is the study of interrelationships between organisms and their environments. An ecological perspective on communication in the medical consultation, then, looks at the interaction between health care providers and patients as situated within and affected by a variety of social contexts. This chapter places extant research within the framework of an ecological model in an effort to explain key

63

64

STREET

processes germane to provider-patient interactions and to point to gaps in our understanding of these processes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of this model for future research. AN ECOLOGICAL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

Figure 4.1 presents an ecological model of communication in medical consultations. Before elaborating on the model, I will highlight several features of my analysis. First, although the medical encounter may be contextualized in a number of ways, I focus on how communication in these interactions is (or can be) affected by the interpersonal, organizational, media, political-legal, and cultural environments within which they take place. Second, whereas any of these contexts may influence the course of a communicative event, the one within which the consultation is most fundamentally embedded is the interpersonal context (see Fig. 4.1). In other words, what unfolds during the encounter ultimately depends on the communicative actions that emerge directly from interactants’ goals, linguistic skills, perceptions, emotions, and knowledge as well as from the constraints and opportunities created by the responses of their partners (Street, 1991, 1992b). Third, the primacy of individual and partner influences on communication should not imply that broader noninterpersonal factors do not affect the interaction. However, these influences will have an impact to the extent that they can be linked to affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes affecting the production and perception of talk. Finally, because these noninterpersonal contexts are broad, complex, and multifaceted, I examine their potential impact on medical encounters with respect to current societal concerns. For the purposes of this chapter, these include managed care (the organizational context), the Internet (the media environment), malpractice and patient bills of rights (the political-legal context), and race and ethnicity (the cultural context). THE INTERPERSONAL CONTEXT

To date, the medical encounter has primarily been studied as an interpersonal communication event. One line of inquiry examines how patterns of provider-patient communication are related to the attributes of the patient (e.g., education, age, health status), the provider (gender, medical specialty), and their relationship (rapport, trust) (for reviews, see Ong, De Haes, Hoos, & Lammes, 1995; Roter & Hall, 1993; Roter, Hall, & Katz, 1988; Street, 2001; Thompson, 1994). A second area of research examines relationships between providers’ and patients’ communicative actions and the various outcomes (mostly patient focused) resulting from the consultation (e.g., satisfaction with care, commitment to treatment, health improvement) (for reviews, see Roter & Hall, 1993; Stewart, 1995; Street, 2001). Although these studies have identified sources of variability in the communicative content, structure, and outcomes of medical encounters, they do little to explain processes accounting for these phenomena. Such an understanding is crucial if we are to discover ways in which medical consultations are affected by the contexts in which they are situated. The Communicative Ontology of Medical Encounters

Like other types of social interaction, the medical consultation is a dynamic, creative, and socially constructed event. Although certain technical activities may take place

65

Goals Perception of partner Perception of relationship Communicative strategies Emotional state

Goals Perception of partner Perception of relationship Communicative strategies Emotional state

Race/ethnicity Socioeconomic status Religion, etc.

CULTURAL CONTEXT

Cognitive-affective influences

Cognitive-affective influences

Figure 4.1 An ecological model of communication in medical encounters.

Internet Telemedicine Mass media, etc.

MEDIA CONTEXT

Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior

Communication style Self-concept (attitudes, beliefs, personality) Linguistic resources

Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior

Predisposing influences

Communication style Self-concept (attitudes, beliefs, personality) Linguistic resources

The Patient

Predisposing influences

The Health Care Provider

INTERPERSONAL CONTEXT

Managed care Services offered, Standards of care, etc

ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

Malpractice litigation Patient bill of rights Medicaid/Medicare coverage etc.

POLITICALLEGAL CONTEXT

66

STREET

(e.g., a physical examination, a hypodermic injection), the primary activity is talk as the provider and patient exchange information about health-related concerns; make decisions about medical care; and, in the best of cases, establish or maintain a relationship characterized by rapport, trust, and respect. How the interaction unfolds depends on how the participants select, adapt, and coordinate their responses to accomplish their individual and mutual goals. Although each medical encounter has its own unique and idiosyncratic characteristics, it is not a random or chaotic event. In fact, medical encounters reveal a variety of recurring patterns of communicative exchange. To describe processes within the interpersonal context that affect communicative action, I have drawn heavily from social-cognitive models of interpersonal communication (see, e.g., Giles & Street, 1994; Greene, 1984; Patterson, 1983) as well as from previous conceptual work on provider-patient communication (Ong et al., 1995; Pendleton & Bochner, 1980; Roter, 1977; Street, 2001). To understand the communicative dynamics of medical consultations, one must recognize that communication reveals both consistency and adaptation. For example, most people tend to use certain verbal and nonverbal responses across a wide variety of interactions. A doctor who has a friendly and animated communication style may be inclined to be facially expressive and talkative and use humor in most of his or her interactions with patients. However, communication is also adaptive, as interactants adjust their responses in light of their situation-specific goals, their perceptions of their partners, the purpose of the interaction, and the actions of their partner. Thus, this animated, friendly doctor will be more reserved and serious when consoling a patient who is emotionally distraught or who has just been diagnosed with a serious disease. In the model presented in Fig. 4.1, processes related to communicative consistency and adaptation fall within one of three categories: predispositional influences, cognitive-affective mediators, and adaptations in response to a partner’s communicative actions. Predispositional Influences

When researchers try to identify individual differences in the way health care providers and patients talk with one another, they are in essence assuming that people are rather consistent in their communication across different situations and that certain kinds of people (e.g., women, the elderly) communicate in similar ways. Communicative predispositions are reflected in one’s individual communication or self-presentation style (Giles & Street, 1994). Norton (1983) has identified a number of communication styles (e.g., expressive, dominant, open, attentive) and treats them as relatively stable features of a person’s social behavior. As shown in Fig. 4.1, communication style is often related to personal factors that are objective (e.g., age, sex, level of education) and subjective (e.g., self-concept, personality) features of ourselves and our socialization (Giles & Street, 1994). Communication style is also linked to one’s linguistic repertoire. For example, a person who has a dominant and fluent communication style not only has the inclination to be assertive but also has access to an array of linguistic resources that can be quickly and efficiently assembled to produce utterances (see, e.g., Greene & Geddes, 1993; Street, in press). Health Care Providers. The communication styles of health care providers has been examined in two ways. First, some studies have studied how individual clinicians interact with different patients. Byrne and Long (1976) observed that some doctors have rather intractable, controlling communication styles that they use in most of their consultations. Roter and Hall (1993) observed that doctors in their investigations tend to have either a “patient-centered” style or a “doctor-centered” style. The former is characterized

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

67

by responses designed to elicit and accommodate the patient’s perspective in the consultation (e.g., open-ended questions, requesting opinions and concerns, counseling, offering support) whereas the latter style is focused primarily on maintaining clinician control (e.g., close-ended questions, giving directions, attention to the patient’s physical functions, interruptions) and efficiently completing the tasks of the consultation. Finally, Street (1992b) reported that, even after controlling for the patients’ demographic characteristics and degree of participation in the consultation, individual physicians varied in how often they provided information, used partnership-building, and displayed positive socioemotional behavior (e.g., reassurance, encouragement). A second line of research tries to identify whether certain types of health care providers have different styles of communicating. By far the most widely studied individual difference variable has been gender. Compared to male doctors, female doctors generally have longer consultations, give more information, engage in more partnership-building, express more interest in psychosocial aspects of health (e.g., emotions, lifestyle, family), are less directive, do less history taking, and are more explicitly reassuring and encouraging (Bernzweig, Takayama, Phibbs, Lewis, & Pantell, 1997; Bertakis, Helms, Callahan, Azari, & Robbins, 1995; Elderkin-Thompson & Waitzkin, 1999; Hall, Irish, Roter, Ehrlich, & Miller, 1994; Meeuwesen, Schaap, & van der Staak, 1991; Roter, Lipkin, & Korsgaard, 1991). Others have investigated whether a clinician’s communicative predispositions are related to certain beliefs and ideologies. For example, physicians with more positive attitudes toward psychosocial aspects of care use more open-ended questions and make more statements of empathy and reassurance than do physicians less interested in psychosocial issues (Levinson & Roter, 1995). Even a physician’s political leanings may affect communication. As Waitzkin (1985) reported, physicians who consider themselves “liberal” spend more time giving information to patients than do “conservative” doctors. Patients. With respect to patients’ communicative styles, research generally has focused on individual differences. For example, a number of studies have shown that patients with more formal education are more expressive and opinionated than are less educated patients (Bain, 1979; Beisecker & Beisecker, 1990; Stewart, 1984; Street, 1991, 1992b; Street, Voigt, Geyer, Manning, & Swanson, 1995). These findings are likely attributable to several predisposing factors: patients with more formal education (e.g., college educated) generally believe more strongly in patient involvement in health care (Cassileth, Zupkis, Sutton-Smith, & March, 1980; Degner & Sloan, 1992), have more knowledge about health issues (Bertakis, 1977; Street, Voigt et al., 1995), are more familiar with medical terminology (Spiro & Heidrich, 1983), and are more inclined to be verbally expressive (Waitzkin, 1985) than are less educated patients. Communication differences related to other personal and sociodemographic characteristics of patients are less clear-cut. Although some studies show that female patients are more likely than male patients to express their feelings and talk about health in relation to family, friends, and colleagues (Elderkin-Thompson & Waitzkin, 1999; Meeuwesen et al., 1991; Stewart, 1984), other studies report few differences in the communication of male and female patients (Roter et al., 1991). With respect to the patient’s age, some have found that older patients are more likely than younger ones to believe that the clinician is in charge of the consultation and is primarily responsible for medical decisions (Cassileth et al., 1980; Degner & Sloan, 1992; Haug, 1979). However, whereas older patients may be less assertive and verbally active in medical encounters (Haug & Lavin, 1981; Street, Voigt, et al., 1995), some researchers have reported few differences in how younger and

68

STREET

older patients communicate with their providers (Greene, Adelman, Charon, & Hoffman, 1986). Finally, personality factors also may influence a patient’s style of communication. In pediatric settings, two studies found that mothers who were more open and extroverted and had a internal locus of control asked more questions, gave more information, and more frequently asked for reassurance than did mothers scoring lower on these personality dimensions (Eaton & Tinsley, 1999; Howell-Koran & Tinsley, 1990). To actively participate in the medical encounter, a patient also must have a sufficiently developed repertoire of linguistic and informational resources for communicating with providers so that talk can be produced in a smooth and effortless manner (Street, 2001). For example, a patient will have difficulty discussing a particular health issue if he or she lacks knowledge about the topic or its terminology (Street, Voigt, et al., 1995). Thus, it is not surprising that health care comsumers who have more skill and confidence in their ability to talk to doctors tend to provide more information, ask more questions, and generally speak longer in their consultation than patients with less skill and self-efficacy (Eaton & Tinsley, 1999; Kroll et al., 2000). In this section, I have described how providers’ and patients’ communicative actions are related to various predispositional influences. However, many would argue that how one communicates in large part depends on the situation. That is, providers and patients will adapt their behavior to different partners, in different types of interactions, and for different purposes. Below I discuss two types of situation-specific influences: (a) cognitiveaffective factors related to how one communicates within a specific interaction and (b) the opportunities and constraints created by a partner’s communicative actions. Cognitive-Affective Influences

For any interaction, communicators typically have a cognitive representation of the encounter that includes their goals, perceptions of their partner, expectations about what behaviors are appropriate, and possible trajectories in which the interaction will unfold (Giles & Street, 1994; Greene, 1984; Patterson, 1983). Such representations help guide us through the interaction and partially determine how we behave and how we interpret the behavior of others. I have labeled these types of situational influences as cognitive-affective influences to show how communication is related to strategic (e.g., goals, purpose), attributional (e.g., stereotypes, impressions), and relational (e.g., trust, familiarity) considerations. For example, a doctor may use more or less medical terminology depending on whether he or she thought the patient could understand technical explanations. Or a patient might be more willing to talk about sexual dysfunction with a physician he or she knows and trusts than with a doctor who is a stranger. Health Care Providers. Although health care providers may have distinctive styles of communicating, they also will talk differently to different types of patients. One explanation for these findings is that a clinician’s goals and attitudes toward different patients influence his or her behavior during the consultation (Roter & Hall, 1993). For example, when interacting with patients who are sicker or in poorer health, health care providers may conduct their consultations in a more serious and concerned manner (Bertakis, Callahan, Helms, Azari, & Robbins, 1995; Hall, Roter, Milburn, & Daltroy, 1996), focus more on the physical aspects of health (as opposed to asking about lifestyle and emotional well-being; Roter et al., 1997), and assume more control over the consultation (Kaplan, Gandek, Greenfield, Rogers, & Ware, 1995). Clinicians’ communicative

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

69

adaptations in response to the patient’s health status may be due to several factors, including their attitudes about sicker patients, their frustration in dealing with complicated health conditions, and a perceived need to focus more on the physiological causes and consequences of poor health (Hall, Epstein, DeCiantis, & McNeil, 1993; John, Schwenk, Roi, & Cohen, 1987). Providers also vary their behavior depending on the patient’s age. If a clinician has a stereotype of the elderly as having diminished cognitive capacity, then he or she may use simplistic or exaggerated speech forms (e.g., “baby talk”; see Sachweh, 1998) or exert more control during the consultation (Kaplan et al., 1995). On the other hand, people also believe the elderly should be shown respect. This may explain why Hooper, Comstock, Goodwin, and Goodwin (1982) found that physicians showed more courtesy to patients over 70 years of age than to younger patients. Conversely, clinicians communicate differently to a juvenile patient than they do to the child’s parents. Pantell, Stewart, Dias, Wells, and Ross (1982) observed that the pediatricians in their study used mostly social conversation, reassurance, and encouragement when visiting with children and were more informative and problem-focused when talking to the parents. Not surprisingly, their study also reported that as children became older, doctors were more likely to discuss substantive issues with them. Finally, a number of studies have investigated whether providers communicate differently depending on the patient’s gender and ethnicity. These issues will be examined later in this essay. Patients. Research on patients’ communication also points to a number of situationspecific influences related to patients’ motivations and perceptions. For example, patients who are quite sick or who are worried about their health are probably highly motivated to express their feelings and talk about their needs and concerns, a claim supported by several studies (Hall et al., 1996; Street, 1992b; Wasserman, Inui, Barriatua, Carter, & Lippincott, 1983). However, health status alone does not necessarily predict what patients will talk about. In Street, Cauthen, Buchwald, and Wiprud’s (1995) study, patients who were experiencing some degree of emotional distress or social dysfunction were more willing to discuss these issues if they believed such topics were part of the doctor’s role responsibilities or if they had seen that doctor on previous visits. Similarly, Agne, Thompson, and Cusella (2000) found that patients were more willing to disclose their HIV status to a health care provider when they perceived a need to do so and when they were more comfortable with the provider. How patients respond to a provider’s personal characteristics (e.g., sex, age, ethnicity) has received little research attention, but anecdotes abound. The issue of gender bias in gynecology is an excellent example. Many women prefer female gynecologists (Schmittdiel, Selby, Grumbach, & Quesenberry, 1999) because they believe male doctors are not capable of understanding issues related to women’s reproductive concerns and sexuality. In my own work, patients on several occasions have made reference to a doctor’s “youthfulness” or revealed their preferences regarding different types of clinicians (e.g., nurse practitioner, family doctor, subspecialists). Although patients may have gender, age, and training biases for or against certain providers, the extent to which these biases manifest themselves in medical consultations remains unclear. Thus far, I have talked about providers’ and patients’ communication in relation to their goals, needs, purposes, and perceptions of their partners. However, the way in which clinicians and patients talk with one another is perhaps most strongly affected by the communicative actions of the other.

70

STREET

Partner’s Communication Influences

Because interactants must cooperate and coordinate their responses to create a coherent and successful exchange, both the provider and the patient have the potential to exert considerable influence over the behavior of the other. On the one hand, a partner’s conversational contributions provide personal or topical information that one can use in formulating a response. However, a partner’s communicative actions are also constraining. For example, because there is a strong expectation that an “answer” should follow a “question” (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), an interactant may feel obligated to answer another’s question even if reluctant to or uninterested in doing so (Street, 1991). Also, because conversational contributions are expected to be topically connected (Tracy, 1985), an interactant who asks a question, offers an opinion, or makes some other substantive remark has introduced topical content that his or her partner is expected to incorporate into his or her forthcoming response. Health Care Providers. Because clinicians typically assume and are granted considerable control over the interaction, it is not surprising that the clinician’s communication will have a strong impact on the patient’s responses. Further, because the clinician will likely ask questions about biomedical issues and comment on these issues and because the patient will respond so as to satisfy the topical obligations raised by the clinician’s utterances, the consultation will often focus on biomedical aspects of health (Campbell, 1998). However, health care providers also can act in ways that encourage greater patient participation and a broader discussion of health issues. Many patients are unsure about their role in the encounter and the appropriateness of their participation (Roter & Hall, 1993). A provider who shows interest in what the patient is saying and solicits opinions or questions is in effect legitimizing the patient’s involvement as well as creating opportunities and expectations for the patient to elaborate on issues of concern (Street, Voigt, et al., 1995). A number of studies have found that patients tend to ask more questions, express their opinions more freely, provide more psychosocial information, and discuss their concerns more openly when clinicians use partnership-building and other types of patient-centered responses (Cox, 1989; Street, 1991, 1992b; Street & Millay, 2001; Thompson, Nanni, & Schwankovsky, 1990; Wissow, Roter, & Wilson, 1994; Wissow et al., 1998). Patients. Conversely, by being an active participant in the consultation, a patient helps shape the content and flow of the interaction, thereby attenuating the clinician’s control over the encounter. For example, by asking questions, expressing concerns, and telling their health “stories,” patients are providing valuable information about their healthrelated needs, beliefs, and behavior (Sharf, 1990; Street, 1991) that in turn the health care provider can use to make more personalized treatment recommendations (Henbest & Stewart, 1990). However, through their communicative actions, patients are also invoking conversational norms that may obligate clinicians to talk about a particular health issue. Several studies have reported that, compared with more passive patients, those who frequently ask questions, express their concerns, and offer opinions generally receive more information (Greenfield, Kaplan, & Ware, 1985; Street, 1991, 1992b), elicit more support and reassurance (Street, 1992b; Street & Millay, 2001), and are more likely to have doctors accommodate their treatment preferences (Schwatrz, Soumerai, & Avorn, 1989).

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

71

The Interplay of Processes Affecting Health Care Provider-Patient Communication

Thus far, I have discussed predispositional influences, cognitive-affective influences, and partner’s communication influences as though each set of factors operated independently in shaping communication in medical consultations. They do not, of course, and this poses challenges for researchers trying to understand the communicative dynamics of medical encounters. A good example is found in research on the effect of gender in medical care. Although some argue that (male) doctors are more patronizing and domineering with female patients (Todd, 1989; West, 1984), the majority of evidence indicates that in general women patients are given more information (Waitzkin, 1985), receive more encouragement to express their feelings and opinions (Kaplan et al., 1995, Stewart, 1984), and have longer consultations (Meeuwesen et al., 1991) than do male patients. Although this may reflect the clinicians’ attitudes toward female patients or their beliefs about women’s health needs (see, e.g., Wallen, Waitzkin, & Stoeckle, 1979), other evidence suggests that it may be a partner’s communication effect given that women tend to ask more questions (Pendleton & Bochner, 1980; Wallen et al., 1979) and are more inclined to talk about psychosocial aspects of health (Meeuwesen et al., 1991) than are men. Relatedly, patients generally give more information, more freely express opinions, ask more questions, and engage in more positive talk with female physicians than they do with male physicians (Roter et al., 1991). Is this because of patients’ attitudes and their belief that women have less power and are easier to talk to than are male clinicians (see, e.g., West, 1993)? Or is it because female physicians tend to use more partnership-building behavior, are less controlling, ask more about psychosocial aspects of health, and engage in more social conversation with their patients (Meeuwesen et al., 1991; Roter et al., 1991)? In an effort to sort out these influences, Street (1992b) examined the extent to which physician and patient communicative behaviors were related uniquely to their personal characteristics, their partner’s characteristics, and their partner’s communication. Because the seven physicians in that study interacted with multiple patients, each was treated as a level of an independent “doctor” variable. Other predictors included patient characteristics (education, anxiety, and relational history with the doctor) as well as measures of patient question asking, expressions of concern, and opinion giving. The most consistent significant effect was attributed to the “doctor” variable in that the degree to which a doctor gave information, issued directives, engaged in partnership building, and provided positive socioemotional responses was to some extent unique to the doctor’s style (a predispositional influence). However, there were also significant effects related to the patient’s communication, as doctors gave more information and offered more support and encouragement to patients who asked questions and expressed concerns. Interestingly, of the patient characteristics variables, only level of education uniquely explained variation in the physicians’ communication, as doctors engaged in more partnership-building with the more educated patients (see also Kaplan et al., 1995). This study also found that patients did not talk differently to individual doctors per se, but they did ask more questions and offer more opinions when physicians more frequently used partnership-building behaviors. In addition, patients’ communication to some extent was uniquely related to their personal characteristics, as more educated patients asked more questions and offered more opinions, and more worried patients expressed more concerns. In short, if we are to discover how other organizational, media, political-legal,

72

STREET

and cultural contexts affect communication in medical consultations, scholars must continue to unravel the fundamental interpersonal processes affecting the way health care providers and patients talk with one another. THE ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT: IMPACT OF MANAGED CARE

The organizational context of health care is quite complex, and provider-patient communication could be affected by any number of organizational features—the size of the health care facility, types of services offered, location, clientele, standards of care, and so forth. However, over the last 2 decades, perhaps the most talked about and publicly debated health topic has been the growth of managed care as a system of financing and delivering medical care. Below I examine the potential impact of managed care on provider-patient communication in medical consultations. Managed Care: An Overview

It is important to recognize that managed care is not monolithic. In the 1980s, managed care generally meant care provided by HMOs (health maintenance organizations) or prepaid health plans. However, as we enter the 21st century, managed care has grown into a complex and multifaceted phenomenon with no singular identity. Wagner (1997) offers a simple but useful continuum of managed care. At one end is managed indemnity, which may be little more than precertification for elective services and case management of catastrophic conditions within a traditional indemnity plan. At the other end are the staff and group model HMOs that provide care for a fixed amount per person per year. Between these two extremes are a variety of other models of managed care (e.g., independent practice associations, preferred provider organizations), most of which are hybrids of prepaid plans, indemnity coverage, and contracts for services at a fixed or reduced cost. Hence, practically all medical care is “managed” in some way, shape, or form. Public and scholarly opinion is strongly divided on the merits of managed care. On the one hand, managed care organizations have been criticized for creating policies that restrict a patient’s choice of physician, reduce the time physicians can spend with patients, restrict access to care, and place medical decisions in the hands of business managers rather than patients and providers (Birenbaum, 1997; Ginzberg, 1997; Lammers & Geist, 1997). Many physicians believe managed care has pressured them to see more patients per day, limited their autonomy, and made it more difficult to support patient involvement in the consultation (Feldman, Novack, & Gracely, 1998; Grumbach, Osmond, Vranizan, Jaffe, & Bindman, 1998). On the other hand, proponents argue that managed care actually can improve quality of care and even strengthen the provider-patient relationship if the organization facilitates patient access to specialists and other services, encourages and rewards clinicians for patient-centered care (as measured by patient satisfaction scores), and provides patients with health education and disease management resources (Goold & Lipkin, 1999; Lo, 1999; Saxton & Leamon, 1998). Managed Care and Provider-Patient Communication

Within the framework of the ecological model, the policies, practices, and culture of managed care will most likely have their biggest impact on the provider’s and patient’s consultation goals as well as their perceptions of one another (i.e., cognitive-affective factors). In particular, the influence of managed care could (but not necessarily will) result

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

73

in greater clinician control of the interaction, less trust between provider and patient, and more frequent discussion of topics related to health promotion. Control. As mentioned earlier, a provider and a patient generally communicate in a way that reflects and reinforces the provider’s dominance. Under managed care, control may shift even more toward the provider. For example, many managed care physicians see their role as gatekeepers to expensive procedures and specialists as interfering with their ability to respect patient autonomy (Feldman et al., 1998). Many physicians also feel pressured to see more patients for shorter periods of time (Grumbach et al., 1998). Thus, under the constraints of managed care, providers may have a stronger motivation to control the consultation by talking more, interrupting, rejecting the patient’s requests, and issuing more directives. Greater clinician control in turn will reduce patient participation (Biesecker & Biesecker, 1990; Street et al., 1993). However, to say that managed care necessarily results in greater clinician control greatly oversimplifies other factors operating within the interpersonal context of the consultation. For one thing, providers have multiple motivations during patient visits, some of which will mitigate organizational constraints. For example, although providers may feel obligated to adhere to their gatekeeping responsibilities and time constraints, they also try to accommodate the patient’s individual needs and preferences (Feldman et al., 1998). Also, as discussed earlier, it will be hard for a provider to rush through or dominate the interaction if the patient chooses to actively participate in the consultation by asking questions, expressing opinions, and responding in other ways to influence the course of the consultation (Street, 1991, 1992b). A recent study by Gallagher, Lo, Chesney, and Christensen, (1997) highlights the complex interplay of organizational practices, the doctor’s multiple goals, and the patient’s communicative actions. In a study involving 39 internists, a standardized patient (unknown to the physicians) asked for an MRI, an expensive and in this case an unindicated procedure. At one extreme were 3 physicians who immediately agreed to perform the test. At the other extreme were several doctors who refused the request and criticized the patient for being paranoid. Most of the physicians did discuss the patient’s reasons for wanting the test and explained why they thought the test was not necessary. Importantly, over half of the doctors (n = 20) did agree to refer the patient to a neurologist. Trust. On the one hand, managed care may diminish patients’ trust in their health care providers. Compared with fee-for-service patients, those enrolled in managed care plans are more likely to have had a disruption in their primary care because their employers changed health plans. Discontinuity of care in turn threatens trust because of the breakup of an established provider-patient relationship (Flocke, Stange, & Zyzanski, 1997). Also, media attention to managed care “horror” stories involving medical errors and withheld services fosters the belief that doctors put profit above patient care (Freidson, 1989; Mechanic & Schlesinger, 1996). When there is a climate of mistrust or uncertainty, patients are less willing to discuss personal, sensitive, and potentially embarrassing topics with their doctors (Street, Cauthen, et al., 1995). Patients also become suspicious of their doctors’ motives for recommending against referrals or tests no matter how sound the recommendations (Gold, 1999; Lo, 1999; Saxton & Leamon, 1998). Physicians, too, may become overly cautious in their consultations because of their own concerns about patient trust (Levinson et al., 1999). On the other hand, trust between providers and patients is strongly influenced by what happens during consultations. For example, Thom and Campbell (1997) reported that most

74

STREET

of the people in their focus groups believed that trust was primarily related to the physician’s behavior (e.g., thoroughness of the evaluation, expressing caring, understanding the patient’s experience) and secondarily to external factors (e.g., structural or staffing issues). In a related study, Holloway, Matson, and Zismer (1989) found that patient satisfaction with care (which is often linked to trust) was more strongly predicted by perceptions of the doctor’s sensitivity and provision of personalized medical care, factors that emerge during the consultation, than by whether the doctor was practicing in an HMO or a feefor-service setting. Hence, the patient’s initial sense of trust (or mistrust) upon entering the consultation may be dramatically changed, positively or negatively, depending on the doctor’s communicative performance during the interaction. Promoting Health and Disease Management. Thus far, I have discussed how managed care could have deleterious effects on provider-patient communication and quality of care. On the positive side, managed care does place an emphasis on disease prevention, disease management, and early diagnosis of life-threatening conditions. An organizational emphasis on health promotion could motivate providers to spend more time talking to patients about health maintenance and wellness. Moreover, regardless of whether the organization’s motives are pure (profits are enhanced when people are healthy), patients tend to be more satisfied with their health care when their health plans offer programs for weight control, smoking cessation, cholesterol screening, and other types of health promotion (Schauffler, Rodriguez, & Milstein, 1996). On the other hand, many physicians are not comfortable talking to patients about lifestyle and health-related quality of life unless such discussion is tied to a specific medical condition (Freeman, 1987). Others steer away from these topics, believing that they are too time consuming (Campbell, 1998). In short, although the organization may promote the importance of health maintenance and disease prevention, providers may have other competing goals that cause them to give little more than lip service to these issues. Summary

Given the many forms of managed care and the variety of clinicians’ and patients’ goals for medical consultations, it is not surprising that research to date has not revealed a clear, definable effect of managed care on communication in medical encounters. Some studies have found that quality of care and provider-patient communication are better in fee-for-service than in managed care organizations. For example, Rubin et al. (1993) reported that patients seeing physicians in solo fee-for-service practices tended to rate their interactions with physicians more favorably than did patients seeking care in solo prepaid, multispecialty group, and HMO settings. In a study of Medicare beneficiaries having either HMO or indemnity coverage, patients expressed satisfaction with their care regardless of the system, but fee-for-service patients were more likely than HMO enrollees to indicate higher satisfaction with the quality of interaction with their physicians (Tudor, Riley, & Ingber, 1998). On the other hand, Callahan and Bertakis (1993) found that physician-patient interactions in the managed care environment they studied were actually longer, characterized by more questions from patients, and had more discussion of preventive care, disease management, and substance abuse than did consultations in the fee-for-service practice. These findings are consistent with those of Mechanic, McAlpine, and Rosenthal (2001), who reported that, contrary to popular belief, the growth of managed care between 1989 and 1998 has not led to shorter office visits. Therefore, to understand the impact of managed

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

75

care (and other features of health care organizations) on medical consultations, researchers must account for how the complexity and structural features of these organizations affect the basic interpersonal processes underlying communicative action. THE MEDIA CONTEXT: IMPACT OF THE INTERNET

From the information we consume to the interactions we have with others, media technologies (e.g., printing and telecommunications) have become an essential part of everyday living. Health care providers and patients do not exist independent of these technologies. Using the telephone to triage a patient’s health concern, faxing medical information to a clinic, and watching health news coverage on television are but some of the many ways clinicians and patients use and depend on various media for health-related purposes. Although any type of media may serve in this capacity, the one that has received the most attention recently, and the one examined within the framework of the ecological model, is the Internet. The Internet is different from other media technologies because of the sheer amount of information that users have access to, the speed with which they can access it, and the capability it gives users of interacting with anyone in the world who also has Internet access. Because 40 to 70% of Internet users go online for health information, support, and services (Aspden & Katz, 2001; Brown, 1998; Mittman & Cain, 2001), the Internet has the potential to significantly alter the way health providers and patients interact with one another. The Internet and Provider-Patient Communication

Increasing Patient Participation. For the patient, the ability to gather information through Internet searches and e-mail transactions could facilitate greater participation in medical care by expanding the patient’s knowledge base and perhaps giving the patient a stronger sense of control in managing his or her health. In this respect, the Internet may hasten the transformation of the provider-patient relationship from one of paternalism to one of shared decision-making and partnership (Bauer, 2000; Winker et al., 2000). Although I am not aware of any study testing this hypothesis, anecdotal evidence abounds. For example, in my own discussions with physicians, many have stories about patients who come in with a “stack of Internet printouts” related to their health concerns (see also Rice, 2001). In their survey of 220 New Jersey physicians, Aspden, Katz, and Bemis (2001) reported that most of the physicians had recently interacted with patients who wanted to discuss information gathered from the Internet. On the other hand, the Internet may have little effect on patient participation in light of other factors operating within the interpersonal context of medical care. For example, regardless of how informed they are, many patients may be reluctant to discuss their concerns with doctors if they think they are wasting the doctor’s time, are afraid of what the treatment may entail, or think the health issue is not within the doctor’s expertise (Rice, 2001; Roter & Hall, 1993; Street, Cauthen, et al., 1995). In their national survey of over 2000 respondents, Aspden and Katz (2001) found that, of patients who had recently gone online to seek health information, only 37% said they discussed the information with their doctors. Clinicians’ Attitudes Toward Information on the Internet. Health care providers vary greatly in their attitudes toward patients who have collected health information from the Internet. Some clinicians are threatened by highly motivated patients who might

76

STREET

use the Internet to gain more knowledge about a health topic than a typical doctor possesses (Beck, 2001). Many physicians and health care organizations also are greatly concerned about the quality of health information on the Internet (e.g., Winker et al., 2000) and fear that patients’ health beliefs may be influenced by quacks or that patients may be duped into buying unnecessary or even dangerous products. On the other hand, some health care providers see the Internet as having a desirable effect on their interactions with patients. Aspden et al. (2001) reported that one-third of the doctors in their survey believed their patients’ use of the Internet had led to more productive consultations whereas only 14% thought it had a negative influence. These findings are consistent with a larger survey of Norwegian doctors who felt that patients’ use of the Internet was either unobtrusive or had a positive impact on doctor-patient interactions (Hjortdahl, Nylenna, & Aasland, 1999). Virtual Consultations. The increasingly widespread use of e-mail for personal and business purposes is also creating opportunities for providers and patients to interact in cyberspace, either in addition to or in lieu of face-to-face meetings. Although many clinicians are cautious in their use of the technology, a growing number are e-mailing patients to answer questions, offer advice, schedule appointments, and follow up on treatment (Borowitz & Wyatt, 1998; Rice, 2001). The irony of e-mail interaction is that e-mail is both a limiting and an empowering medium. On the one hand, e-mail is restrictive in that the interactants can only type words and symbols to communicate. It also lacks the spontaneity of face-to-face interactions in that messages may not be responded to for minutes, hours, days, or weeks. However, e-mail may not have the sensory richness and immediacy of a face-to-face exchange, yet it does provide opportunities for providers and patients to communicate more frequently, more efficiently, and perhaps even more effectively because the participants need not share the same location or time frame to interact with one another (Mandl, Kohane, & Brandt, 1998). Moreover, when individuals perceive a need to communicate with others and maintain productive relationships, they will work to overcome the constraints of the medium in order to accomplish their objectives (Walther, 1996). Thus, in the absence of nonverbal behavior, e-mail users have developed a number of symbols (emoticons) to signal affect, such as , !, :>, and ;). What research has been conducted on provider-patient e-mail exchanges indicates that most e-mail contact is initiated by patients who, in the large majority of cases, are providing information about their health or are requesting information about a diagnosis or treatment (Borowitz & Wyatt, 1998; Widman & Tong, 1997). Interestingly, e-mail may contribute to more egalitarian interactions, as online patients tend to be more assertive than face-toface patients and are more willing to use e-mail to seek second opinions (Rice, 2001). How clinicians respond (if at all) to e-mail requests varies considerably. In Eysenbach and Diepgen’s (1998) study, doctors’ responses to a fictitious patient’s request for information on a dermatological condition ranged from a simple acknowledgment of the receipt of the message to advice to see a doctor to actual diagnoses. In short, the Internet is beginning to have a noticeable and potentially transforming effect on the ways providers and patients communicate with one another. However, it is still unclear whether virtual consultations will replace the traditional face-to-face consultation or will simply expand the opportunities for provider-patient interaction. The medium has considerable potential for enhancing quality of care, but there remain a number of medical issues (e.g., the kinds of health problems that can be appropriately managed via the Internet), legal concerns (e.g., confidentiality), social issues (e.g., access by economically

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

77

disadvantaged groups), and attitudinal obstacles (e.g., resistance to change) that must be addressed (Mandl et al., 1998; Winker et al., 2000). THE POLITICAL-LEGAL CONTEXT

The political-legal context of the medical consultation encompasses legislative and judicial actions pertinent to the delivery of medical care. Of all the contexts identified in the ecological model, this is the one least studied. Some investigators have examined malpractice claims resulting from communicative action (or inaction) in medical consultations. For example, in Levinson, Roter, Mullooly, Dull, and Frankel’s (1997) study, physicians who had at least two previous malpractice claims conducted shorter visits, spent less time orienting patients to the visit, and used less partnership building than did physicians who had never had a claim against them. In an analysis of plaintiffs’ depositions, Beckman, Markakis, Suchman, and Frankel (1994) found that many complaints focused on communication-related issues, such as deserting the patient, delivering information poorly, and failing to understand the patient’s and family’s perspective. However, the question addressed here is this: in what way does the political-legal context of medical care affect providers’ and patients’ communication during the consultation? With respect to legislation, several states recently have passed a “patient bill of rights” and related laws aimed at ensuring that health care organizations, particularly managed care organizations, provide fair and necessary medical care (Lare, 1997). Typically, these laws require that physicians provide full disclosure of medical options for patients, obtain informed consent before performing medical procedures, discuss reasonable alternative treatments, and provide timely services to patients in need (Ellis, 1997). On the one hand, patient protection laws might encourage (or pressure) health care providers to give more information, offer a more thorough discussion of treatment options, and use more partnership building. However, because of the clinicians’ other goals and motivations (e.g., to stay on schedule), state laws may have little impact beyond causing the distribution of more printed educational materials and increasing paperwork as patients sign informed consent documents. Relatedly, a clinician’s experience, directly or indirectly, with malpractice claims could influence his or her attitudes toward patients. For example, many physicians worry about lawsuits, which may contribute to a general distrust of patients (Shapiro et al., 1989). Will the shadow of litigation pressure clinicians to adopt a more cautious and guarded style of communicating with patients? Or will they instead use more patient-centered communication (e.g., be more informative, acknowledge patients’ concerns, accommodate patient preferences), as advocated by experts who claim these behaviors can lower malpractice risks (Beckman et al., 1994; Garr & Marsh, 1986; Sommers, 1985)? In short, the political-legal context surrounding the medical encounter is an important yet essentially unstudied topic in health communication. More research will be needed before we have a clear understanding of how clinicians’ experiences with the courts and legislatures influence their conduct in the consultation and, conversely, whether patients’ perceptions of legal recourse and rights affect how they interact with health care providers. THE CULTURAL CONTEXT: RACE AND ETHNICITY

Broadly construed, culture may be defined as a system of beliefs, values, actions, and symbols shared by a group of people (Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, & Chua, 1988), and any number of social groups (e.g., teenagers, ranchers, the homeless, organizations) may have

78

STREET

a defining set of cultural beliefs and practices. Of interest here is culture as it relates to race and ethnicity. Specifically, in what ways do race and ethnicity influence communication in medical consultations? This is an important question in light of possible racial disparities in medical care (Schulman et al., 1999) and the growing belief that health care providers need training to improve their intercultural communication competence (Culhane-Pera, Reif, Egli, Baker, & Kassekert, 1997; Morales, Cunningham, Brown, Liu, & Hays, 1999). Ethnicity as a Predispositional Influence on Communication

Ethnicity may be related to providers’ and patients’ communicative predispositions in at least three ways. First, and perhaps most obvious, providers and patients from different ethnic backgrounds often speak different languages or dialects (e.g., Spanish vs. English), making effective communication difficult (Morales et al., 1999; Rothschild, 1998). However, even when both parties technically speak the same language, there may be other problems related to culture-specific usages, metaphors, idioms, and stories (GeistMartin, Ray, & Sharf, 2003). For example, “hearing voices” might be considered a sign of insanity by Anglos but interpreted as a religious experience by Mexican-Americans (Quesada, 1976). Hypertension may mean high blood pressure to upper middle-class America, but to many poor, urban dwellers “hyper-tension” is the name of an acute illness caused by nervousness and stress (Blumhagen, 1980). In short, people will use language in the way they understand it to convey meanings that may not be shared by those from different ethnic groups. Second, preferred styles of communicating may vary across different ethnic groups, particularly with respect to assertiveness and expressiveness. In their cultural model of factors affecting patients’ willingness to participate in medical consultations, Kim et al. (2000) proposed that people from individualistic cultures (e.g., Anglos in the United States, native Western and Northern Europeans) tend to have independent self-construals that promote more direct, assertive, and expressive communicative styles. However, people from collectivist cultures (e.g., Asians) have interdependent self-construals that lead to communicative styles characterized by indirectness, respect for authority, and accommodation to others. The authors hypothesized that patients from individualistic cultures would be more willing to actively participate in medical encounters than would patients from collectivist cultures. Kim et al. indeed found that Chinese (Hong Kong) respondents had less positive beliefs about patient participation, were more apprehensive about communicating with doctors, and expressed less willingness to be assertive during medical consultations than did respondents from the United States. Third, people from different ethnic backgrounds often have different explanatory (Kleinman, 1988) or personal (Hampson, Glasgow, & Toobert, 1990) models of health and illness. A person’s model of health represents the person’s understanding of health, including beliefs about the cause of an illness, degree of personal control over health, and best ways to manage health problems. Such a model is considered a predisposing influence on communication in medical consultations because it represents the person’s view of what issues are relevant to a particular health condition. With respect to ethnicity, Fadiman (1997) provides an in-depth account of the experience of Laotian immigrants seeking health care for their child within the American medical system. What the family perceived as spirits capturing the child’s soul, the doctors understood as epilepsy. What the doctors saw as the necessary diagnostic tests, the family saw as foolish uses of technology that have nothing to do with the soul. Clearly, ethnic differences in health beliefs pose

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

79

challenges for quality of care as providers and patients try to agree on what health issues should be discussed and how should they be managed. It is important to emphasize, however, that it is the cultural beliefs and practices associated with ethnicity and not ethnicity per se that account for differences in communicative predispositions. Thus, one may find few differences in the communication styles of patients of Japanese, Mexican, or Irish descent if they have been acculturated into the values and behaviors of a particular culture. For example, in Kim et al.’s (2000) study, Hawaiians, arguably at the crossroads of East and West, scored in between the Americans and Chinese with respect to their willingness to actively participate in medical encounters. Attitudes and Stereotypes Related to Ethnicity

Yet another way the cultural context may have an impact on communication in a consultation is with respect to ethnicity-related attitudes and stereotypes possessed by clinicians and patients. For example, some physicians have less favorable views of African-American patients than European American patients, seeing them as less likeable or more apt to abuse alcohol or not comply with medical advice (Van Ryn & Burke, 2000). In a study where physicians reviewed a medical record of a patient pictured as White or Black and as male or female, Schulman et al. (1999) found that doctors were less likely to recommended cardiac catheterization for the Black patient. In a study of patients’ perceptions of care, Kaplan et al. (1995) reported that minority patients perceived their physicians as engaging in less partnership building than did White patients, a disparity that may be attenuated when patients visit doctors of their own race (Cooper-Patrick et al., 1999). Other studies, however, found modest or no differences in provider-patient communication strictly in relation to ethnicity (see, e.g., Roter et al., 1988). Moreover, some findings are contradictory. Whereas Thompson, Lawson, Croughan-Minihane, and Cooke (1999) found that non-Whites were more likely to have do-not-resuscitate orders, Garcia, Romano, Chan, Kass, and Robbins (2000) reported just the opposite. The ecological model can provide some insight into the inconsistency of these findings. As mentioned earlier, health care providers assume and are typically granted greater control of the consultation. Thus, their stereotypes, whether related to race or other factors (e.g., age, sex, social class), will to some extent shape their strategies, communicative routines, and expectations. If the patient is passive, then the consultation will likely unfold in ways consistent with the clinician’s initial perception of the patient, which may be based on a stereotype. However, if the patient actively participates in the consultation, or if he or she has other attributes that negate the stereotype (e.g., a college education), then the health care provider will likely modify his or her behavior in light of the patient’s communicative action and other personal characteristics (see, e.g., Street, 1992b). To switch perspectives, very little research has examined how the patient’s perceptions of the provider’s ethnicity affect communication in a consultation. Because many Blacks have a general distrust of the White-dominated health care system (Corbie-Smith, Thomas, Williams, & Moody-Ayers, 1999), one might expect people of color to be less open and trusting of White clinicians than doctors of their own ethnicity. Also, some of my colleagues have shared stories about how U.S. veterans refused medical care because the doctor was “Asian.” In summary, ethnic differences between a provider and a patient can pose serious challenges to effective communication, especially if one holds negative attitudes toward the other’s ethnicity or if the two differ in their communicative preferences and expectations for the consultation. However, as highlighted in the ecological model, ethnicity is but one of

80

STREET

many factors that make up the interpersonal context of the consultation. Thus, researchers interested in understanding the role of race in medical care should strive to identify and study those situations where ethnicity, as well as other features of culture, appears to play a significant role in the communication process. EXPANDING OUR RESEARCH AGENDA

Thus far, I have used the ecological model as a framework for reviewing extant research on provider-patient communication and for highlighting ways in which the communication in medical consultations is or can be influenced by the interpersonal, organizational, political, legal, and cultural contexts within which these encounters take place. In closing, I discuss some of the implications of this analysis for future research. Attention to Cognitive-Affective Influences

As theorists and researchers, we need to work harder on understanding how the communicative events of medical encounters are shaped by processes within the cognitiveaffective domain. Although we have some understanding of how provider-patient communication is related to sociodemographic factors (e.g., age, education) and to a partner’s communicative action, we know much less about how the interactants’ goals, expectations, and perceptions of their partners affect what unfolds during the consultation. Yet, it is through the cognitive-affective influences that broader contextual influences will often emerge. Although an in-depth discussion of measurement strategies for tapping into these processes is beyond the scope of this chapter, several investigators have taken steps toward assessing patients’ expectations for care (see, e.g., Kravitz, Callahan, Azari, Antonius, & Lewis, 1997), patients’ beliefs about physicians’ role responsibilities (Larson & Rootman, 1976, Street, Cauthen, et al., 1995), physicians’ attitudes toward patients (Harris, Rich, & Crowson, 1985; Levinson, Stiles, Inui, & Engle, 1993), patients’ personal models of health (Hampson et al., 1990), and patients’ emotional states (e.g., anxiety; Gerdes & Guidi, 1987). However, few studies have linked these constructs to patterns of communication in medical consultations. In addition, hardly any research has explored the communicative consequences of the provider’s and patient’s goals for the encounter, the patient’s attitudes toward the provider’s attributes (e.g., age, ethnicity, medical specialty), the degree of trust in the provider-patient relationship, and the provider’s emotional state (e.g., fatigue, frustration) during the encounter. We must better our understanding of these processes if we are to answer the questions raised at the outset of this chapter. Use of Multiple Measures and Analytical Frameworks

Because communication is a complex phenomenon that can be studied from multiple perspectives, health communication researchers could benefit from using multiple modes of assessment and analytical frameworks (Roter & Frankel, 1992; Street, 1992a). Qualitative versus Quantitative Analyses. Traditionally, research on communication in medical consultations has fallen within two methodological camps. One camp examines statistical relationships between communication behavior, variables affecting the communication process, and outcomes following the interaction. Quantitative analyses allow investigators to discover trends within a sample or a population of medical

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

81

encounters and determine what variables account for particular patterns of interaction (e.g., under what conditions are doctors more informative?) and outcomes (e.g., what patterns of communication predict a patient’s commitment to treatment?). The other camp takes a more qualitative approach, conducting discourse analysis, ethnographies, and interviews of individuals and focus groups. As Waitzkin (1991) has noted, qualitative analyses provide valuable insight into the complexities of discourse, the nuances of meaning, the human experience of health, and the ways in which social, political, and historical contexts impinge upon parts of the medical interaction. Given the advantages and limitations of each approach, a number of researchers have advocated using multiple methods of data analysis (Roter & Frankel, 1992). For example, in my own work, I have discovered that selected segments of medical discourse not only serve as exemplars to help contextualize statistically significant relationships (e.g., between partnership building and patient participation), but can be used to account for the negative cases, that is, where the predicted relationship did not emerge (Street, Gold, & McDowell, 1995; Street & Millay, 2001). Perceptual versus Behavioral Measures. Studies of health care providerpatient communication typically rely on either perceptual or behavioral measures of communication. Although measures of patients’ perceptions of clinicians’ communication (see, e.g., Buller & Buller, 1987; Lerman et al., 1990; Street, 1991) and the much less studied measures of clinicians’ perceptions of patients are easy to score and provide a subjective assessment of communication, they do not typically identify what behaviors created the perception and may be susceptible to perceptual biases (e.g., the halo effect). Behavioral measures, on the other hand, provide detailed information on the frequency and duration of certain communicative acts but often are laborious to gather and fail to fully capture the interpretive significance of different messages. Because there may be little correspondence between a behavioral measure (e.g., amount of information given) and its perceptual analogue (e.g., perceived informativeness) (Street, 1992a), researchers could employ both perceptual and behavioral measures or use measurement techniques that combine both methods (e.g., stimulated recall; see Frankel & Beckman, 1989) to capture both the subjective and objective elements of the communication process. Adopting a Contextual Approach to the Medical Consultation

The ecological model presented in this chapter highlights the importance of looking at a medical encounter not as an isolated event but as embedded within a number of contexts. Hence, not only should researchers examine how context impinges upon interpersonal processes affecting communicative action, they can also examine various health-related interactions that occur within a particular context. For example, health care consumers have considerably more communicative experiences within the health care system than simply talking to doctors. The telephone call to set up on appointment, talking to the triage nurse about whether a concern warrants medical attention, the encounter at the receptionist desk, the waiting time, and the follow-up (if any) to the consultation (e.g., reporting screening results, patient education) are all “peri-consultation” interactions that can affect a patient’s utilization of services, satisfaction with care, commitment to treatment, and use of alternative medicine, among other things. Moreover, what I have described so far could be the interactions associated with one trip to the clinic. Because most consultations deal with the management of chronic conditions, we also need to investigate the consequences of patients’ experiences as they make multiple passes through the health care system.

82

STREET

In closing, the encounters people have with health care providers—whether doctors, psychologists, shamans, or curenderas—form an important part of human experience. Moreover, these encounters have direct implications for both subjective and objective dimensions of health and well-being. Thus, my appeal is not to do less with the providerpatient relationship; it is to expand our thinking in order to ground our analysis in the setting in which these encounters have relevance and meaning. The contextual approach advocated here presents a viable perspective for doing so. REFERENCES Agne, R. R., Thompson, T. L., & Cusella, L. P. (2000). Stigma in the line of face: Self-disclosure of patients’ HIV status to health care providers. Journal of Applied Communication, 28, 235–261. Aspden, P., & Katz, J. E. (2001). Assessments of quality of health care information and referrals to physicians: A nationwide study. In R. E. Rice & J. E. Katz (Eds.), The Internet and health communication: Experiences and expectations (pp. 99–106). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Aspden, P., Katz, J. E., & Bemis, A. E. (2001). Use of the Internet for professional purposes. In R. E. Rice & J. E. Katz (eds.), The Internet and health communication: Experiences and expectations (pp. 107–120). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bain, D. J. (1979). The content of physician/patient communication in family practice. Journal of Family Practice, 8, 745–753. Bauer, C. (2000). Limiting factors on the transformative powers of e-mail in patient-physician relationships: A critical analysis. Health Communication, 12, 239–259. Beck, C. S. (2001). Communicating for better health: A guide through medical mazes. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Beckman, H. B., Markakis, K. M., Suchman, A. L., & Frankel, R. M. (1994). The doctorpatient relationship and malpractice: Lessons from plaintiff depositions. Archives of Internal Medicine, 154, 1365–1370. Beisecker, A. E., & Beisecker, T. D. (1990). Patient information-seeking behaviors when communicating with doctors. Medical Care, 28, 19–28. Bernzweig, J., Takayama, J. I., Phibbs, C., Lewis, C., & Pantell, R. H. (1997). Gender differences in physician-patient communication. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 151, 586–591. Bertakis, K. D. (1977). The communication of information from physician to patient: A method of increasing patient retention and satisfaction. Journal of Family Practice, 5, 217– 222. Bertakis, K. D., Callahan, E. J., Helms, L. J., Azari, R., & Robbins, J. A. (1995). The effect of patient health status on physician practice style. Family Medicine, 25, 530–535. Bertakis, K. D., Helms, L. J., Callahan, E. J., Azari, R., & Robbins, J. A. (1995). The influence of gender on physician practice style. Medical Care, 33, 407–416. Birenbaum, A. (1997). Managed care: Made in America. Westport, CT: Praeger. Blumhagen, D. (1980). Hyper-tension: A folk illness with a medical name. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 4, 197–224. Borowitz, S. M., & Wyatt, J. C. (1998). The origin, content, and workload of e-mail consultations. Journal of the American Medical Association, 280, 1321–1324. Brown, M. S. (1998). Healthcare information seekers aren’t typical Internet users. Medicine on the Net, 4, 17–18. Buller, M. K., & Buller, D. B. (1987). Physician communication style and health care satisfaction. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 28, 375–387.

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

83

Byrne, P. S., & Long, B. E. L. (1976). Doctors talking to patients. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Callahan, E. J., & Bertakis, K. D. (1993). A comparison of physician-patient interaction at fee-for-service and HMO sites. Family Practice Research Journal, 13, 171–178. Campbell, T. L. (1998). Medical interviewing and the biopsychosocial model. Journal of Family Practice, 47, 339–340. Cassileth, B. R., Zupkis, R. V., Sutton-Smith, K., & March, V. (1980). Information and participation preferences among cancer patients. Annals of Internal Medicine, 92, 832–836. Cooper-Patrick, L., Gallo, J. J., Gonzales, J. J., Vu, H. T., Powe, N. R., & Ford, D. E. (1999). Race, gender, and partnership in the physician-patient relationship. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 583–589. Corbie-Smith, G., Thomas, S. B., Williams, M. V., & Moody-Ayers, S. (1999). Attitudes and beliefs of African Americans toward participation in medical research. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 14, 537–546. Cox, A. (1989). Eliciting patients’ feelings. In M. Stewart & D. Roter (Eds.), Communicating with medical patients (pp. 99–106). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Culhane-Pera, K. A., Reif, C., Egli, E., Baker, N. J., & Kassekert, R. (1997). A curriculum for multicultural education in family medicine. Family Medicine, 29, 719–723. Degner, L. F., & Sloan, J. A. (1992). Decision-making during serious illness: What role do patients really want to play? Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 45, 941–950. Eaton, L. G., & Tinsley, B. J. (1999). Maternal personality and health communication in the pediatric context. Health Communication, 11, 75–96. Elderkin-Thompson, V., & Wiatzkin, H. (1999). Differences in clinical communication by gender. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 14, 112–121. Ellis, M. S. (1997). Liability issues in managed care. Journal of the Louisiana State Medical Association, 149, 151–158. Eysenbach, G., & Diepgen, D. L. (1998). Responses to unsolicited patient e-mail requests for medical advice on the World Wide Web. Journal of the American Medical Association, 280, 1333–1335. Fadiman, A. (1997). The spirit catches you and you fell down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Feldman, D. S., Novack, D. H., Gracely, E. (1998). Effects of managed care on physicianpatient relationships, quality of care, and the ethical practice of medicine. Archives of Internal Medicine, 158, 1626–1632. Flocke, S. A., Stange, K. C., & Zyzanski, S. J. (1997). The impact of insurance type and forced discontinuity on the delivery of primary care. Journal of Family Practice, 45, 129–135. Flory, J., & Wayne-Doppke, J. (1997). Internet 20/20: Experts review 1997 and look ahead. Medicine on the Net, 3, 9–14. Frankel, R. M., & Beckman, H. B. (1989). Conversation and compliance with treatment recommendations: An application of micro-interactional analysis of medicine. In B. Dervin, L. Grossberg, B. J. O’Keefe, & E. Wartella (Eds.), Rethinking communication: Paradigm exemplars (Vol. 2, pp. 60–74). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Freeman, S. H. (1987). Health promotion talk in family practice encounters. Social Science and Medicine, 25, 961–966. Freidson, E. (1989). Medical work in America: Essays on health care. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gallagher, T. H., Lo, B., Chesney, M., & Christensen, K. (1997). How do physicians respond to patient’s requests for costly, unindicated services? Journal of General Internal Medicine, 12, 663–668.

84

STREET

Garcia, J. A., Romanao, P. S., Chan, B. K., Kass, P. H., & Robbins, J. A. (2000). Sociodemographic factors and the assignment of do-not-resuscitate orders in patients with acute myocardial infarctions. Medical Care, 38, 670–678. Garr, D. R., & Marsh, F. J. (1986). Medical malpractice and the primary care physician: Lowering the risks. Southern Medical Journal, 79, 1280–1284. Geist-Martin, P., Ray, E. B., & Sharf, B. F. (2003). Communicating health: Communicating personal, political, and cultural complexities. Belmoint, CA: Wadsworth. Gerdes, E. P., & Guidi, E. J. (1987). Anxiety in patients awaiting primary medical care. Medical Care, 25, 913–923. Giles, H., & Street, R. L., Jr. (1994). Communicator characteristics and behavior. In G. R. Miller & M. Knapp (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (2nd ed., pp. 103–161). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Ginzberg, E. (1997). Managed care: A look back and a look ahead. New England Journal of Medicine, 336, 1018–1020. Gold, M. (1999). Financial incentives: Current realities and challenges for physicians. Journal of General and Internal Medicine, 14(Suppl. 1), S6–S12. Goold, S. D., & Lipkin, M., Jr. (1999). The doctor-patient relationship: Challenges, opportunities, and strategies. Journal of General and Internal Medicine, 14(Suppl. 1), S26–S33. Gordon, G. H., Baker, L., & Levinson, W. (1995). Physician-patient communication in managed care. Western Journal of Medicine, 63, 527–536. Greene, J. O. (1984). A cognitive approach to human communication: An action assembly theory. Communication Monographs, 51, 289–306. Greene, J. O., & Geddes, D. (1993). An action assembly perspective on social skill. Communication Theory, 3, 26–49. Greene, M. G., Adelman, R., Charon, R., & Hoffman, S. (1986). Ageism in the medical encounter: An exploratory study of the doctor-elderly patient relationship. Language and Communication, 6, 113–124. Greenfield, S., Kaplan, S., & Ware, J. E., Jr. (1985). Expanding patient involvement in care. Annals of Internal Medicine, 102, 520–528. Grumbach, K., Osmond, D., Vranizan, K., Jaffe, D., & Bindman, A. B. (1998). Primary care physicians’ experience of financial incentives in managed care systems. New England Journal of Medicine, 339, 1516–1521. Gudykunst, W. B., Ting-Toomey, S., & Chua, E. (1988). Culture and interpersonal communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Hall, J. A., Epstein, A. M., DeCiantis, M. L., & McNeil, B. J. (1993). Physicians’ liking for their patients: More evidence for the role of affect in medical care. Health Psychology, 12, 140–146. Hall, J. A., Irish, J. T., Roter, D. L., Ehrlich, C. M., & Miller, L. H. (1994). Gender in medical encounters: An analysis of physician and patient communication in a primary care setting. Health Psychology, 13, 384–392. Hall, J. A., Roter, D. L., Milburn, M. A., & Daltroy, L. H. (1996). Patients’ health as a predictor of physician and patient behavior in medical visits. Medical Care, 34, 1205–1218. Hampson, S. E., Glasgow, R. E., & Toobert, D. J. (1990). Personal models of diabetes and their relations to self-care activities. Health Psychology, 9, 632–646. Harris, I. B., Rich, E. C., & Crowson, T. W. (1985) Attitudes of internal medicine residents and staff physicians toward various patient characteristics. Journal of Medical Education, 60, 192–195. Haug, M. (1979). Doctor-patient relationships and the older patient. Journal of Gerontology, 34, 852–860.

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

85

Haug, M., & Lavin, B. (1981). Practitioner or patient: Who’s in charge? Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 22, 212–229. Henbest, R. J., & Stewart, M. A. (1990) Patient-centeredness in the consultation: 2. Does it really make a difference? Family Practice, 7, 28–33. Hjortdahl, P., Nylenna, M., & Aasland, O. G. (1999). Internett og lege-pasient-fotholdet—fra “takk” til “hvorfor”? Tidsskr Nor Laegeforen, 119, 4339–4341. Holloway, R. L., Matson, C. G., & Zismer, D. K. (1989). Patient satisfaction and selected physician behaviors: Does the type of practice make a difference? Journal of the American Board of Family Practice, 2, 87–92. Hooper, E. M., Comstock, L. M., Goodwin, J. M., & Goodwin, J. S. (1982). Patient characteristics that influence physician behavior. Medical Care, 20, 630–638. Howell-Koren, P. R., & Tinsley, B. J. (1990). The relationships among maternal health locus of control beliefs and expectations, pediatrician-mother communication, and maternal satisfaction with well-infant care. Health Communication, 2, 233–253. John, C., Schwenk, T. L., Roi, L. D., & Cohen, M. (1987). Medical care and demographic characteristics of “difficult” patients. Journal of Family Practice, 24, 607–610. Kaplan, S. H., Gandek, B., Greenfield, S., Rogers, W., & Ware, J. E. (1995). Patient and visit characteristics related to physicians’ participatory decision-making style. Medical Care, 33, 1176–1187. Kim, S., Klingle, R. S., Sharkey, W. F., Park, H. S., Smith, D. H., & Cai, D. (2000). A test of a cultural model of patients’ motivation for verbal communication in patient-doctor interactions. Communication Monograph, 67, 262–283. Kleinman, A. (1988). The illness narratives: Suffering, healing, and the human condition. New York: Basic Books. Kravitz, R. L., Callahan, E. J., Azari, R., Antonius, D., & Lewis, C. E. (1997). Assessing patients’ expectations in ambulatory medical practice: Does the measurement approach make a difference? Journal of General Internal Medicine, 12, 67–72. Kroll, J., Rohert, M., Davidson, W. S., II, Schmitt, N., Homles-Rovner, M., Padonu, G., & Reischl, T. M. (2000). Predictors of participation in health care at menopause. Health Communication, 12, 339–360. Lammers, J. C., & Geist, P. (1997). The transformation of caring in the light and shadow of “managed care.” Health Communication, 9, 45–60. Lare, K. M. (1997). Better health care legislation. Michigan Medicine, 96, 26–27. Larson, D. E., & Rootman, I. (1976). Physician role performance and patient satisfaction. Social Science and Medicine, 10, 29–32. Lerman, C., Brody, D. S., Caputo, G. C., Smith, D. G., Lazaro, C. G., & Wolfson, H. G. (1990). Perceived involvement in care scale: Relationship to attitudes about illness and medical care. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 5, 29–33. Levinson, W., Gorawara-Bhat, R., Ducek, R., Egener, B., Kao, A., Kerr, C., Lo, B., Perry, D., Pollitz, K., Reifsteck, S., Stein, T., Santa, J., & Kemp-White, M. (1999). Resolving disagreements in the physician-patient relationship: Tools for improving communication in managed care. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 1477–1483. Levinson, W., & Roter, D. (1995). Physicians’ psychosocial beliefs correlate with their patient communication skills. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 10, 375–379. Levinson, W., Roter, D. L., Mullooly, J. P., Dull, V. T., & Frankel, R. M. (1997). Physicianpatient communication: The relationship with malpractice claims among primary care and surgeons. Journal of the American Medical Association, 277, 553–559. Levinson, W., Stiles, W. B., Inui, T. S., & Engle, R. (1993). Physician frustration in communicating with patients. Medical Care, 31, 285–295.

86

STREET

Lo, B. (1999). The patient-provider relationship: Opportunities as well as problems. Journal of General and Internal Medicine, 14(Suppl. 1), S41–S45. Mandl, K. D., Kohane, I. S., & Brandt, A. M. (1998). Electronic patient-physician communication: Problems and promise. Annals of Internal Medicine, 129, 495–500. Mechanic, D., McAlpine, D. D., & Rosenthal, M. (2001). Are patients’ office visits with physicians getting shorter? New England Journal of Medicine, 344, 198–204. Mechanic, D., & Schlesinger, M. (1996). The impact of managed care on patients’ trust in medical care and their physicians. Journal of the American Medical Association, 275, 1693–1697. Meeuwesen, L., Schaap, C., & van der Staak, C. (1991). Verbal analysis of doctor-patient communication. Social Science and Medicine, 32, 1143–1150. Mittman, R., & Cain, M. (2001). The future of the Internet in health care: A five year forecast. In R. E. Rice & J. E. Katz (Eds.), The Internet and health communication: Experiences and expectations (pp. 47–73). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Morales, L. S., Cunningham, W. E., Brown, J. A., Liu, H., & Hays, R. D. (1999). Are Latinos less satisfied with communication by health care providers? Journal of General Internal Medicine, 14, 409–417. Norton, R. (1983). Communicator style: Theory, application, and measures. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Ong, L. M. L., De Haes, C. J. M., Hoos, A. M., & Lammes, F. B. (1995). Doctor-patient communication: A review of the literature. Social Science and Medicine, 40, 903–918. Pantell, R. H., Stewart, T. J., Dias, J. K., Wells, P., & Ross, A. W. (1982). Physician communication with children and patients. Pediatrics, 70, 396–401. Patterson, M. L. (1983). Nonverbal behavior: A functional perspective. New York: SpringerVerlag. Pendleton, D., & Bochner, S. (1980). The communication of medical information in general practice consultations as a function of patients’ social class. Social Science and Medicine, 14A, 669–673. Quesada, G. M. (1976). Language and communication barriers for health delivery to a minority group. Social Science and Medicine, 10, 323–327. Rice, R. E. (2001). The Internet and health communication: A framework of experiences. In R. E. Rice & J. E. Katz (Eds.), The Internet and health communication: Experiences and expectations (pp. 5–46). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Roter, D. L. (1977). Patient participation in the patient-provider interaction: The effects of patient question asking on the quality of the interaction, satisfaction, and compliance. Health Education Monographs, 5, 281–315. Roter, D. L., & Frankel, R. (1992). Quantitative and qualitative approaches to the evaluation of the medical dialogue. Social Science and Medicine, 34, 1097–1103. Roter, D. L., & Hall, J. A. (1993). Doctors talking to patients/patients talking to doctors: Improving communication in medical visits. Westport, CT: Auburn House. Roter, D. L., Hall, J. A., & Katz, N. R. (1988) Patient-physician communication: A descriptive summary of the literature. Patient Education and Counseling, 12, 99–119. Roter, D., Lipkin, M., & Korsgaard, A. (1991). Sex differences in patients’ and physicians’ communication during primary care medical visits. Medical Care, 29, 1083–1093. Roter, D. L., Stewart, M., Putnam, S. M., Lipkin, M., Stiles, W., & Inui, T. S. (1997). Communication patterns of primary care physicians. Journal of the American Medical Association, 227, 350–356. Rothschild, S. K. (1998). Cross-cultural issues in primary care medicine. Disease of the Month, 44, 293–319.

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

87

Rubin, H. R., Gandek, B., Rogers, W. H., Kosinski, M., McHorney, C. A., & Ware, J. E., Jr. (1993). Patients’ rating of outpatient visits in different practice settings: Results from the Medical Outcomes Study. Journal of the American Medical Association, 270, 835– 840. Sachweh, S. (1998). Granny darling’s nappies: Secondary babytalk in German nursing homes for the aged. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 26, 52–65. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696–735. Saxton, J. W., & Leaman, T. L. (1998). Managed care success: Reducing risk while increasing patient satisfaction. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen. Schauffler, H. H., Rodriguez, T., & Milstein, A. (1996). Health education and patient satisfaction. Journal of Family Practice, 42, 62–68. Schmittdiel, J., Selby, J. V., Grumbach, K., & Quesenberry, C. P., Jr. (1999). Women’s provider preferences for basic gynecological care in a large health maintenance organization. Journal of Women’s Health and Gender-Based Medicine, 8, 825–333. Schulman, K. A., Berline, J. A., Harless, W., Kerner, J. F., Sistrunk, S., Gersh, B. J., Dube, R., Taleghani, C. J., Burke, J. E., Williams, S., Eisenberg, J. M., Escarce, J. J., & Ayers, W. (1999). The effect of race and sex on physicians’ recommendations for cardiac cateterization. New England Journal of Medicine, 340, 618–626. Schwartz, R. K., Soumerai, S. B., & Avorn, J. (1989). Physician motivation for nonscientific drug prescribing, Social Science and Medicine, 28, 577–582. Shapiro, R. S., Simpson, D. E., Lawrence, S. L., Talsky, A. M., Sobocinski, K. A., & Schiedermayer, D. L. (1989). A survey of sued and nonsued physicians and suing patients. Archives of Internal Medicine, 149, 2190–2196. Sharf, B. F. (1990). Physician-patient communication as interpersonal rhetoric: A narrative approach. Health Communication, 2, 217–232. Sharf, B., & Street, R. L., Jr. (1997) The patient as a central construct: Shifting the emphasis. Health Communication, 9, 1–12. Sommers, P. A. (1985). Malpractice risk and patient relations. Journal of Family Practice, 20, 299–301. Spiro, D., & Heidrich, F. (1983) Lay understanding of medical terminology. Journal of Family Practice, 17, 227–279. Stewart, M. (1984). What is a successful doctor-patient interview? A study of interactions and outcomes. Social Science and Medicine, 19, 167–175. Stewart, M. (1995). Effective physician-patient communication and health outcomes: A review. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 152, 1423–1433. Street, R. L., Jr. (1991). Information-giving in medical consultations: The influence of patients’ communicative styles and personal characteristics. Social Science and Medicine, 32, 541– 548. Street, R. L., Jr. (1992a). Analyzing communication in medical consultations: Do behavioral measures correspond with patients’ perceptions? Medical Care, 30, 976–988. Street, R. L., Jr. (1992b). Communicative styles and adaptations in physician-parent consultations. Social Science and Medicine, 34, 1155–1163. Street, R. L., Jr. (2001). Active patients as powerful communicators. In W. P. Robinson & H. Giles (Eds.), The new handbook of language and social psychology (pp. 541–560). Chichester, England: Wiley. Street, R. L., Jr. (in press). Communicative skill development in health care settings. In J. O. Greene & B. R. Burleson (Eds.), Handbook of communication and social interaction skills. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

88

STREET

Street, R. L., Jr., Cauthen, D., Buchwald, E., & Wiprud, R. (1995). Patients’ predispositions to discuss health issues affecting quality of life. Family Medicine, 27, 663–670. Street, R. L., Jr., Gold, W. R., & McDowell, T. (1995). Discussing quality of life in prenatal consultations. In G. H. Morris & R. Chenail (Eds.), Talk of the clinic: Explorations in the analysis of medical and therapeutic discourse (pp. 209–231). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Street, R. L., Jr., & Millay, B. (2001). Analyzing patient participation in medical encounters. Health Communication, 13, 61–73. Street, R. L., Jr., Piziak, V., Carpentier, W., Herzog, J., Hejl, J., Skinner, G., & McLellan, L. (1993). Provider-patient communication and metabolic control. Diabetes Care, 16, 714– 721. Street, R. L., Jr., Voigt, B., Geyer, C., Manning, T., & Swanson, G. P. (1995) Increasing patient involvement in choosing treatment for early breast cancer. Cancer, 76, 2275–2285. Thom, D. H., & Campbell, B. (1997). Patient-physician trust: An exploratory study. Journal of Family Practice, 44, 169–176. Thompson, B. L., Lawson, D., Croughan-Minihane, M., & Cooke, M. (1999). Do patients’ ethnic and social status influence do-not-resuscitate orders? Ethnicity and Disease, 9, 132– 139. Thompson, S. C., Nanni, C., & Schwankovsky, L. (1990). Patient-oriented interventions to improve communication in a medical office visit. Health Psychology, 9, 390–404. Thompson, T. L. (1994). Interpersonal communication and health care. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (2nd ed., pp. 696–725). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Thorne, S. E., & Paterson, B. L. (2001). Health care professional support for self-care management in chronic illness: Insights from diabetes research. Patient Education and Counseling, 42, 81–90. Todd, A. D. (1989). Intimate adversaries: Cultural conflict between doctors and women patients. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tracy, K. (1985). Conversational coherence: A cognitively grounded rules approach. In R. L. Street, Jr. & J. N. Cappella (Eds.), Sequence and pattern in communicative behavior (pp. 30–49). London: Edward Arnold. Tudor, C. G., Riley, G., & Ingber, M. (1998). Satisfaction with care: Do Medicare HMO’s make a difference? Health Affairs, 17, 165–176. Van Ryn, M., & Burke, J. (2000). The effect of patient race and socio-economic status on physicians’ perceptions of patients. Social Science and Medicine, 50, 813–828. Wagner, E. R. (1997). Types of managed care organizations. In P. R. Kongstvedt (Ed.), Essentials of managed health care (2nd ed.). Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen. Waitzkin, H. (1985). Information-giving in medical care. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 26, 81–101. Waitzkin, H. (1991). The politics of medical encounters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wallen, J., Waitzkin, H., & Stoeckle, J. D. (1979). Physician stereotypes about female health and illness. Women and Health, 4, 135–146. Walther, J. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23, 3–43. Wasserman, R. C., Inui, T. S., Barriatua, R. D., Carter, W. B., & Lippincott, P. (1983). Responsiveness to maternal concern in preventive child health visits: An analysis of clinician-parent interactions. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 4, 171–176. West, C. (1984). Routine complications. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.

4. COMMUNICATION IN MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS

89

West, C. (1993). Reconceptualizing gender in physician-patient relationships. Social Science and Medicine, 36, 57–66. Widman, L. E., & Tong, D. A. (1997). Requests for medical advice from patients and families to health care providers who publish on the World Wide Web. Archives of Internal Medicine, 157, 209–212. Winker, M. A., Flanagin, A., Chi-Lum, B., White, J., Andrews, K., Kennet, R. L., & DeAngelis, C. D. (2000). Guidelines for medical and health information on the Internet: Principles governing AMA websites. Journal of the American Medical Association, 283, 1600–1606. Wissow, L. S., Roter, D., Bauman, L. J., Crain, E., Kercsmar, C., Weiss, K., Mitchell, H., & Mohr, B. (1998). Patient-provider communication during emergency department care of children with asthma. Medical Care, 36, 1439–1450. Wissow, L. S., Roter, D., & Wilson, M. E. H. (1994) Pediatrician interview style and mothers’ disclosure of psychosocial issues. Pediatrics, 93, 289–295.

II Provider-Patient Interaction Issues Teresa L. Thompson

Originally, provider-patient interaction was the predominant area of research in the field of health communication. As editor of the journal Health Communication, for which I began accepting submissions in 1987, I found that almost all of the pieces I received in the early years focused on some aspect of the relationship between communication and health care delivery (i.e., the provision of services by health professionals). This emphasis has changed over the years, and researchers have broadened their perspective considerably, but the provider-patient interaction still remains a key area of study. The chapters in this part of the book reflect that emphasis. They focus mostly on what happens when a patient and a health care provider interact with each other. They review and critique the relevant research as well as provide practical suggestions for patients and providers and intriguing suggestions for future research. In essence, they set a research agenda for the study of provider-patient interaction for the 21st century. For a more general overview of provider-patient interaction, the reader is referred to Thompson and Parrott (2002). The first chapter in this part discusses communicative skill development. This topic, for the most part, has been examined by experts in the fields of communication, medicine, nursing, and public health, and its study has yielded rich and interesting insights into the health communication process. In fact, the best work on communicative skill development is theoretically grounded and provides new theoretical insights but also has practical applications. No only does it assess the communicative skills that are most important during provider-patient interaction, it tries to determine ways in which those skills can be improved. Although most of the research in this area has focused on the communicative skills of health care providers, the authors of this chapter, Don Cegala and Stefne Broz, also review studies that have examined the communicative skills of patients as they interact with their providers. Given the dyadic nature of all communication, focusing on either the provider or the patient alone would provide an incomplete picture of provider-patient interaction.

91

92

PART II: PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

To study provider-patient interaction, researchers must be familiar with the various available methods. Debra Roter and Kelly McNeilis review these methods in Chapter 6, appropriately titled “Methods for Studying Provider-Patient Interaction.” This chapter will be of great value to researchers interested in this area of study, as it thoroughly outlines the appropriate research techniques. The early portion describes quantitative methods, especially observational, interaction analysis techniques. It discusses the contexts in which these methods have been used and the data indicating their reliability and validity. It presents enough information to allow researchers to assess the appropriateness of a particular research method for a particular study. The chapter then describes qualitative or discourse analytic approaches that have yielded important insights into how health care providers and patients interact and thus deserve serious consideration by future researchers. In Chapter 7, Judith Belle-Brown, Moira Stewart, and Bridget Ryan examine the impact of provider-patient interaction on various outcomes. They focus on outcomes relevant to both patients and providers, including satisfaction with health care delivery and communication, patient compliance with health care regimens, medical malpractice suits, and health outcomes. The impact of health communication on health outcomes is perhaps the most intriguing topic within the field, although some have argued against our ability to link the two (Stiles, 1989). There are also others who would argue that the impact of health communication on medical malpractice suits is equally intriguing. In any case, there is little doubt of its importance. Another less studied but highly significant outcome is also covered in the chapter—time spent in the provider-patient interaction. The authors discuss research that has examined how different approaches to communication differentially impact this variable. There are several key variables of the communicative process that have not been specifically addressed within this handbook because of their generality. Chapter 4, in Part I, reviewed these variables, but there is one that is of such direct relevance to providerpatient interaction that it was deemed necessary to include a chapter on it—the issue of disclosure. Chapter 8, by Cathy Gilloti, is a fascinating and theoretically grounded treatise on this topic, with an emphasis on how disclosure impacts health communication, health care delivery, and health decision-making. The chapter reviews research on such issues as the disclosure of bad news, personal disclosure between patients and care providers, and informed consent. In the final chapter of this section, Jon Nussbaum, Sandra Ragan, and Bryan Whaley bring the discussion of health communication to a more sophisticated level by looking at some relevant patient characteristics that influence provider-patient interaction. This chapter focuses upon how provider-patient interaction differs when the patient is older, female, or a child. The chapter begins by considering elderly patients, a topic that is particularly relevant to the study of health communication given the graying of the population and the fact that elderly people typically need to seek out health care more frequently than do younger people. Elderly people also make different assumptions about health care delivery, and different assumptions are made about them. These factors and others cause health communication between older patients and their care providers to be different from that between younger patients and their care providers. Just as gender is a variable ofttimes neglected in medical research (Gabbard-Alley, 1995), it is typically not adequately studied in the field of health communication. This is surprising in light of our knowledge that gender impacts many communicative processes, that women experience somewhat different health problems than do men, and that women are more likely than men to seek out health care for themselves and for other family members. Research indicates that the dyadic communicative process operates differently

PART II: PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

93

when either the patient or the provider is a woman (or both are) than it does when both are men. Chapter 9 examines this intriguing fact. The chapter ends with a discussion of the developmental issues that become relevant when children are the recipients of health care. Developmental issues have in general been inadequately examined by researchers in communication, including health communication. What research does exist is reviewed in the final section of Chapter 9. The theoretically grounded discussion provides practical suggestions for communicating with children and promising research directions for those interested in further studying this important topic. Although the chapters in this section focus on different aspects of provider-patient interaction, there are some common themes. The overriding theme is that the providerpatient interaction is essential to health and the health care delivery process. Until recently, health care providers were taught to focus on medical issues only. Paying any attention to interpersonal issues was seen as a concession to salesmanship, and communicative skills were assumed to be intuitive rather than acquired (Korsch, 1989). The research surveyed in this section, however, makes clear that interpersonal issues play a central role in the health care delivery process. After all, the accuracy of a diagnosis, the understanding of a health problem, the likelihood of compliance with treatment regimens, and the probability of recovery are all influenced by the personal interaction between the provider and the patient. These chapters, then, transform the traditional medical model into a much more sophisticated conceptualization combining biological (physiological) and psychosocial factors. In doing so, they highlight the complexity of medical care and the health care delivery process. This complexity is apparent in the multitudinous variables that influence providerpatient interaction as well as in the sophistication of the methods that are required to assess such interaction and its effects. This complexity will also require future researchers to build upon the methods and go beyond the knowledge presented within these chapters. The remainder of this handbook makes apparent that health communication affects and is affected by many variables and processes beyond the provider-patient interaction. Nonetheless, the chapters in this section reveal that health communication processes cannot be understand without a foundational understanding of communication between health care providers and their patients. Communication impacts both health care delivery and health itself. REFERENCES Gabbard-Alley, A. S. (1995). Health communication and gender: A review and critique. Health Communication, 7, 35–54. Korsch, B. M. (1989). Current issues in communication research. Health Communication, 1, 5–9. Stiles, W. B. (1989). Evaluating medical interview process components: Null correlations with outcomes may be misleading. Medical Care, 27, 212–220. Thompson, T. L., & Parrott, R. (2002). Interpersonal communication in health care. In J. D. Daly & M. L. Knapp (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 680–725). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

5 Provider and Patient Communication Skills Training Donald J. Cegala and Stefne Lenzmeier Broz Ohio State University

Research into various aspects of physician-patient communication has been conducted for approximately 30 years, and each year new studies are added to this vast and growing literature (Ong, DeHaes, Hoos, & Lammes, 1995; Pendleton, 1982; Roter, 1989; Thompson, 1994). A subset of this research is devoted to assessing the effects of interventions designed to train providers and patients in communication skills. For the most part, the impetuous for training providers is grounded in the desire to move away from a paternalistic biomedical model of provider-patient communication to a more patient centered biopsychosocial model (Emanuel & Emanuel, 1992). At the same time, patient communication skills training has been stimulated by research suggesting that patients’ active participation in their health care leads to greater satisfaction, increased compliance, and better health outcomes (Kaplan, Greenfield, & Ware, 1989; Leopold, Cooper, & Clancy, 1996). PROVIDER COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING Database Selection

We conducted a Medline search of literature published from 1990 to the present using the keywords communication, skills, training, medical education, instruction, physician, doctor, and patient relations. Additionally, we examined relevant studies from the reference lists of the literature identified by the Medline search. We limited the time span of the database to focus on more recently published research and to make the database more manageable. Only complete studies on provider communication skills training were included here; review pieces, position papers, commentaries, letters, and method development pieces were consulted but are not included.

95

96

CEGALA AND BROZ

We initially intended to examine communication skills training for several types of providers, but due to space limitations ultimately we ended up including only physicians. In particular, we focused on the training of practicing physicians, residents, or other postgraduate providers, thus excluding communication skills training for undergraduates in medicine, nursing, and related health professions. The relevant literature for just medical students and nurses, for example, is quite extensive (Hargie, Dickson, Boohan, & Hughes, 1998; Joos, Hickam, Gordon, & Baker, 1996; Kruijver, Kerkstra, Bensing, & van de Wiel, 2000; Kruijver, Kerkstra, Francke, Bensing, & van de Wiel, 2000; Makoul, 1999). Even within these limitations and exclusions, we cannot claim to have included all of the research on provider communication skills training that was published between 1990 and the present. However, we are confident that what is included is a good representation of what has been done in the area of communication skills training for practicing physicians. Upon reading 26 studies on provider communication skills training and related research, we were immediately struck by the lack of overall coherence and focus in the literature. For example, there appears to be little consistency in what is considered a communication skill, and there are a variety of ways in which communication is assessed across studies. Moreover, little effort has been made to provide an overarching framework for organizing provider communication skills, although some scholars have suggested a classification distinguishing between information exchange and relational development (e.g., SansonFisher & Cockburn, 1997), and others have organized skills according to the stage or component of the medical interview (e.g., Silverman, Kurtz, & Draper, 1998). However, scholars who conduct research into provider communication skills typically do not frame their work along either of these lines or offer an explicit alternative structuring principle. To make matters worse, very little information is typically reported about what specific communication skills were taught, and often when skills are reported, there is incongruity between the stated objectives of the intervention and the instrument used to assess training effects. Overall, making sense of the literature on provider communication skills training and critiquing it beyond issues of method and results is by no means easy or straightforward. Table 5.1 summarizes key aspects of each study we examined. It should be noted that in constructing Table 5.1 we extracted aspects of the studies that were particularly relevant to communication skill issues. There may be other aspects of these studies worth considering that are not addressed here. Many of the studies listed in the table were also reviewed by Hulsman, Ros, Winnubst, and Bensing (1999), and the interested reader is recommended to access their report. Due to space limitations, we have opted not to discuss the details of the studies but rather to report them in table format for the reader to examine. We will limit our comments to observations about general trends and needed areas of research. Overview of Provider Training Research

Less than 30% of the studies reported in Table 5.1 had a design adequate for assessing the effects of training interventions (i.e., randomized control with pre- and posttest). Most of the studies used a pre- and postassessment to examine a single group of participants all of whom were exposed to a communication skills training intervention. Additionally, in most of these studies the participants were either members of a convenience sample (e.g., residents in a rotation) or volunteers (e.g., practicing physicians who agreed to participate). Needed is more research that employs a randomized control group with preand posttesting.

97

TABLE 5.1

Design and Sample a

RC; E n = 24; Cn = 24; primary care residents.

RC; E n = 20; Cn = 14; pediatric residents.

NRC; P-P; E n = 28; Cn = 20; primary care residents.

P-P; single group; 9 GPs.

Source

Roter et al., 1990

Lewis et al., 1991

Smith et al., 1991

Bowman et al., 1992

Focus: psychosocial, data gathering, & interview organization skills. Specific skills: ?

Skillsc

Focus: promote children’s participation in the medical interview. Specific skills: building rapport w/children; checking on children’s understanding of medical information; handling incorrect or inadequate information provision from children; agenda setting with parent and child; facilitating expression of concerns. 4-week rotation in psychosocial Focus: psychosocial skills. Specific skills: ? medicine; partially learner-determined objectives; lecture; discussion; demonstrations/ modeling; role-play w/feedback; supervised interviews w/RPs. 18 weekly 2-hr. sessions; small Focus: psychiatric interviewing skills. group, role-play w/feedback. Specific skills: ? facilitation; checking and clarifying comments, empathic statements, open Qs, establishing eye contact, seeking patient’s views, establishing realistic goals.

Readings; group discussion; role-play; videotaped practice w/feedback with SPs; live interviews w/feedback with RPs; 1 month psychosocial rotation. Instructional videotape; readings; postinterview self-assessments; 1 hr. and 15 min.

Interventionb

Es improved in knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

E physicians addressed more recommendations to child or child and parent.

Es had more open Qs, fewer leading Qs, SPs rated as having better com. skills.

Communication-Specific Results d

continued

Immediate: more open Analysis of video w/RP Qs, less closed Qs; immediately after more social Qs, less intervention and after 2 yrs. psychological Qs; more checking out. Long-term: maintained

Participants’ self-assessment of knowledge, attitudes, and skills associated with psychosocial medicine.

Analysis of video w/RP; self-reported satisfaction.

Analysis of video w/SP, SP report of physician, patient self-reports, physician chart notes.

Assessment

Descriptive Summary of Studies of Health Care Provider Communication Skills Training

98

P-P; single group; 18 GP residents.

RC; P-P; Short: E n = 15; Cn = 15; Long: E n = 20; no C; primary care physicians.

Posttest only, single group; 78 senior registrars, senior house officers, nurses, and others. RC; P-P; E n = 15; Cn = 11 primary care residents.

Kaaya et al., 1992

Levinson & Roter, 1993

Faulkner et al., 1995

Smith, Mettler, Stoffelmayr, et al., 1995

Design and Sample a

Source

Skillsc

Focus: psychological component of 8-week rotation in psychiatry; primary care. instructional video; role-play; group discussion; videotaped Specific skills: taking full history of pain; explore health beliefs; exploring interviews w/ RPs and family and social factors; feedback. acknowledging patient’s symptoms; summarizing physical findings; reframing by connecting psychological to life events. Focus: patient-centered interviewing. Short: 4 hrs.; lecture and Specific skills: eliciting patient’s discussion; Long: 2.5 days, concerns; use more open Qs and less learner-determined closed Qs; giving information about objectives; practice illness and therapy; engaging in interviews w/RPs and psychosocial discussion; asking feedback. patient’s opinion; more listening, less talking; summarizing what patient says; allowing patient to tell story without interruption. Focus: giving distressing information. 2-day program; recorded Specific skills: ? role-play w/SP; group discussion; learner-determined objectives. 4-week rotation in Focus: psychosocial skills psychosocial; partially Specific skills: ? learner-determined objectives; lecture/

Interventionb

TABLE 5.1 (Continued)

more open Qs, less closed Qs; increased social over psychological Qs and checking out. Increase in Qs about pain site; more exploration of health beliefs; more acknowledging of patient symptoms.

Communication-Specific Results d

Residents’ self-reports of confidence in and knowledge of psychosocial matters.

Analysis of recorded role-play w/SP.

E residents scored higher on all measures.

Training effects on 3/6 skills.

No effects from short Analysis of recorded visits intervention; Long: Es with 10 RPs (5 pre, 5 post); used more open Qs; global affect ratings on asked for opinion anger, anxiety, dominance, more; lower negative friendliness, affect ratings. responsiveness, interest.

Analysis of videotaped role-plays w/another trainee.

Assessment

99

4.5 hrs. over three 90-minute sessions; videotaped role-play w/SP.

RC; P-P; E n = 22; Cn = 20; primary care physicians and residents.

P-P; single group; 169 physicians, nurses, social workers, and others in cancer care.

Joos et al., 1996

Maguire, Booth et al., 1996

3- or 5-day workshop; learner-determined objectives; instructional videos; role play w/feedback.

2 interventions (see focus); 8 hrs. in two 4-hr. sessions 1 week apart; lecture, roundtable discussion; practice w/SP; role-play based on segments of interviews w/RPs.

—

RC; P-P; EHn = 22; PDn = 23; Cn = 24; primary care physicians.

Smith, Lyles, Mettler, Marshall, et al., 1995e Roter et al., 1995

discussion; live demonstration/modeling; role-play; supervised interviewing w/RPs. —

Focus: emotion handling skills (EH); problem-defining skills (PD). Specific skills: EH: asking about feelings; listening more, talking less; following up on signs of emotional stress; complimenting effort; legitimizing patients’ views/feelings; expressing empathy; expressing partnership or support; providing reassurance. PD: resisting immediate follow-up of first concern; asking “anything else?”; negotiating time; starting with open Qs; facilitating utterances; assessing psychosocial aspects; probing for patients’ understanding; expressing concern; clarifying patients’ expectations. Focus: physicians’ awareness of patients’ concerns. Specific skills: identifying and eliciting patient’s agenda; negotiating a realistic interview agenda; identifying patient’s attributions/expectations; relationship-building skills. Focus: skills promoting and inhibiting patient disclosure of information. Specific skills: promoting skills: open Qs; Qs w/psychological focus;

—

Analysis of interviews w/SPs; patients’ assessment of desired concerns/services; patients’ perceptions of information received; patient satisfaction; patient compliance. Analysis of interviews w/SPs immediately after intervention and 6 months later.

Analysis of interviews w/RPs and one SP; physicians’ recognition of psychosocial problems and emotional distress; clinical proficiency; patients’ reported reduction in emotional stress.

RPs’ assessment of residents’ skills; patient satisfaction.

continued

Increase in 3/6 promoting skills immediately and 6 months later.; decrease in inhibiting

Es had greater proportion of visits in which all concerns were met; Es’ patients perceived greater information giving.

EHs used more EH utterances; PDs used PD utterances; PDs recognized more psychosocial and emotional behaviors in patients; PDs proficient; PDs’ patients had more reduction in stress.

Es rated higher on confidence; Es’ patients more satisified.

100

P-P; single group; 206 physicians, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and others in cancer care.

P-P; single group; 24 pediatric residents.

P-P; single group; 9 oncologists, 1 psychiatrist, 3 fellows.

P-P; 178 oncologists.

NRC; P-P; E n = 35; Cn = 33 primary care physicians. RC; P-P; E n = 19; Cn = 23; internal medicine residents.

Maguire, Faulkner, et al., 1996

Morgan & Winter, 1996

Baile et al., 1997

Fallowfield et al., 1998

Greco et al., 1998

Langewitz et al., 1998

Design and Sample a

Source

1.5- or 3-day workshop; readings; instructional video; learner-determined objectives; role-play w/SPs and feedback. .5 day per week over 13 weeks or 5-hr. workshop; discussion in triads. 1.5-day seminar; lecture; demonstration interviews w/SPs; role-play; progress

4.5 hrs. in 3 sessions; lecture; panel discussion; live demonstration, role-play; group discussion. 3-day workshop; lecture; instructional videotape; readings; practice interviews w/SP and feedback; personal awareness exercise; learner-determined objectives.

3- or 5-day workshop; learner-determined objectives; instructional videos; role-play.

Interventionb

Focus: patient-centered interviewing Specific skills: showing empathy in greeting; acknowledging initial

Focus: patient-centered interviewing Specific skills: ?

Focus: skills for stressful interactions. Specific skills: ? initiating discussion of patient’s concerns; accessing patient’s knowledge of illness; asking Qs to elicit illness concerns; encouraging elaboration of illness concerns; summarizing illness concerns; moving patient to discuss other concerns; managing own feelings. Focus: breaking bad news Specific skills: ?

Focus: disclosure of psychological problems. Specific skills: open Qs; Qs w/psychological focus; clarifying psychological focus; screening Qs; educated guesses. Focus: delivering bad news. Specific skills: ?

clarifying psychological focus; educated guesses; empathy.

Skillsc

TABLE 5.1 (Continued)

Communication-Specific Results d

Residents evaluated program highly; 2/5 residents showed subtle improvement. Improvement on 6/10 skills.

Improvement on 7/12 items. Es better on 10/14 skills.

RP assessment of physicians’ communication. Analysis of interview w/SP; global ratings.

Analysis of interviews w/SPs; Improvement on self-confidence ratings. participants’ self-rated confidence.

Participants’ self-appraisal.

Analysis of interviews w/SP; residents’ evaluation of training program.

behaviors in 3/6 immediately and 6 months later. Analysis of interviews w/SPs. Increase in use of Qs w/psychological focus; clarification of psychological concerns; open Qs.

Assessment

101

Same as Smith et al., 1995

RC; P-P; E n = 31; Cn = 30; primary care residents.

P-P; single group; 15 oncologists, 2 fellows.

Smith et al., 1998

Baile et al., 1999

2 5-hr. workshops 6 weeks apart; learner-determined objectives; lecture; readings; instructional video; role-play w/feedback.

8 hrs. over 2 days; lecture; role-play.

NRC; P-P; E n = 10; Cn = 8; primary care physicians.

Roter et al., 1998

assessment meetings; one-on-one sessions during clinical work with RPs.

complaints; taking up emotions; clarifying consultation reasons; summarizing patient’s statement of concern; announcing history-taking phase; structuring consultation; sharing evaluation; conveying detailed information as desired by patient. Focus: patient-centered interviewing. Specific skills: information giving in both biomedical and psychosocial domains; open Qs; expressing concern, empathy, reassurance; positive exchanges; using facilitators, interpretations, and signals of interest. Focus: patient-centered interviewing. Specific skills: encouraging patient responses; allowing the patient to talk; responding to emotions; not completely pursuing biomedical data initially; including psychosocial data initially; not dominating the interview; building rapport; following up on patient-initiated topics, effectively managing the interview. Additional skills w/SPs: providing information; motivating behavioral change; supporting patients’ achievement in attaining health goals; managing somatizing patients. Focus: breaking bad news (BBN) and managing difficult patients (MDP). Specific skills: (BBN) creating an appropriate setting; eliciting patient’s perception of the problem; assessing patient’s desire for information; giving information in small chunks; checking Improvement on 18/21 BBN skills; improvement on 4/15 MDP skills.

Participants’ self-rated self-efficacy.

continued

Es greater on knowledge, attitudes; greater on 2/10 data-gathering skills w/RPs; 10/10 data-gathering skills w/SPs; 10/14 informing and motivating skills; 8/14 managing somatization skills.

Es used more open Qs and facilitators; rated as expressing more interest and friendliness.

Residents’ knowledge; attitudes, and commitment to psychosocial medicine; patient satisfaction and self-reported physical functioning; analysis of interviews w/SP and RPs.

Analysis of interviews w/RPs; patient satisfaction; global affective tone ratings.

102

Design and Sample a

RC; P-P; E n = 32; Cn = 29; primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, others.

P-P; single group; 85 primary care physicians.

P-P; single group; 911 physicians over 5 yrs.

Source

Brown et al., 1999

Costanza et al., 1999

Stein & Kwan, 1999

5-hr. seminar; lecture; instructional video; live demonstration; readings; role-play w/SP. 1-day workshop; lecture/ discussion; instructional video; role-play.

2 4-hr. workshops; readings; lecture; role-play; taped office visits w/RPs.

Interventionb

Es improvement on self-assessments (no C group comparison).

No improvement in communication skills; improvement in 1/3 stage counseling skills. Improvement on all 18 self-assessment skills.

SP assessment of physicians’ skills.

Communication-Specific Results d

Patients’ judgments of physicians’ skills; 1-item patient satisfaction measure; physicians’ self-assessments.

Assessment

Focus: skills for enhancing effectiveness Self-assessments of interviewing skills and efficiency of interviews (EE) and immediately after and handling difficult patients (DP). 3 months after intervention. Specific skills: (EE) using open Qs; asking if there is “anything else;” asking about psychosocial issues; exploring barriers to adherence; using own feelings as diagnostic information; negotiating and setting agendas; guiding effective information flow. (DP) determining which behaviors are difficult and why; stating impasse or

patient’s understanding frequently; avoiding medical jargon; empathizing with and exploring patient’s emotions; providing a summary; negotiating a treatment strategy. (MDP) ? Focus: skills for building effective relationships with patients (ER); negotiation skills, especially for disagreement situations (NS). Specific skills: (ER) listening actively; communicating concern, understanding, respect; responding to patient’s feelings. (NS) ? Focus: counseling intervention (mammography screening). Specific skills: ?

Skillsc

TABLE 5.1 (Continued)

103

P-only, single group; pediatricians, family physicians, gynecologists. ? groups of 20–30.

Hardoff & Schonmann, 2001

30- to 45-minute session; role-play w/SPs and feedback.

1-day workshop in 2 sessions; role-play w/SPs and feedback from SPs.

Improvement in 1/5 skill categories; improvement in overall score across all 5 categories.

Self-reported using of learned principles.

Postinterview evaluation by SPs.

Self-report 1 month after intervention.

b SP

a RC

= randomized control; NRC = nonrandomized control; P-P = pre- and posttest; P-only = posttest only; E = experimental (intervention) group; C = control group. = simulated (or standardized) patient; RP = real patient; role-play alone = other participant or instructor assumed a role, as opposed to a SP or RP. c Qs = questions; ? alone = insufficient information about skills or no report of skills; ? followed by skills = uncertainty about skills listed, derived from assessment instrument rather than a description of skills. d Improvements, etc., reflect statistically significant results involving E and C or pre- and posttest comparisons. Assessments not mentioned were nonsignificant or not specifically communication related. e This is the same study as Smith et al., 1995 reported above, except for a different assessment.

P-P, single group; 7 pediatric intensive care fellows.

Vaidya et al., 1999

dilemma; expressing common goals; using empathy to diffuse strong emotions. Focus: breaking bad news. Specific skills: ? allowing parents to talk/ask Qs; expressing sympathy and compassion; avoiding medical jargon; using appropriate body language; asking about parents’ understanding; discussing assessment and prognosis; discussing rationale and approach to therapy; leaving room for hope; asking psychosocial Qs; relieving parents of blame/guilt; preparing parents; greeting parents warmly; letting parents tell their story; showing interest; encouraging parents to ask Qs. Focus: improving skills in communicating with adolescants. Specific skills: careful listening; a nonjudgmental approach; assuring confidentiality; others?

104

CEGALA AND BROZ

Regarding the samples, it is no surprise that the vast majority of studies (80%) involved primary care physicians (i.e., family medicine physicians, general internists, or pediatricians), as these physicians have consistently been the focus of most of the published research on physician-patient communication and have traditionally been the most responsive to and concerned about communication matters. We were surprised and encouraged to see communication skills training studies that used cancer providers (about 20% of the studies examined here). There is some indication that oncologists and other health professionals who deal with cancer patients do not receive adequate training in communicating with patients, particularly with respect to “breaking bad news” and handling strong, emotionally-charged interview contexts (Baile et al., 1999). Future research on communication skills training should encompass studies using various medical specialists, including surgeons. Overall, the researchers employed a wide variety of instructional strategies, but the emphasis was appropriately placed on strategies that involved modeling (e.g., instructional videos) and practice (e.g., role-playing) with feedback. These are the instructional strategies that are most likely to promote the learning of complex behaviors, such as communication skills, as well as increase the efficacy of newly acquired skills (Bandura, 1997). What is not clear from most of the literature, however, is the extent to which communication skills are retained beyond immediate assessment following an intervention. Some studies assessed long-term retention of skills, ranging from 3 months to 2 years (Bowman, Goldberg, Millar, Gask, & McGrath, 1992; Maguire, Booth, Elliott, & Jones, 1996; Stein & Kwan, 1999), with reasonably positive results. However, more research is needed to examine the long-range effects of communication skills training interventions. Perhaps even more important than assessment of the long-term effects of training is better alignment between the communication skills that are taught and the instruments and procedures for assessing the learners’ performance. Several of the studies examined here had apparent or blatant mismatching of skills and assessment instruments (Baile et al., 1999; Bowman et al., 1992; Brown, Boles, Mullooly, & Levinson, 1999; Greco, Francis, Buckley, Brownlea, & McGovern, 1998; Kaaya, Goldberg, & Gask, 1992; Roter, Cole, Kern, Barker, & Grayson, 1990; Smith et al., 1995; Stein & Kwan, 1999; Vaidya, Greenberg, Patel, Strauss, & Pollack, 1999). Consequently, some researchers reported significant effects on communication skills that were not directly taught or reported nonsignificant results for skills that were not actually assessed. Much more care is needed in specifying communication skills and locating or developing assessment instruments that accurately reflect the learners’ skills. Given the extent of the misalignment in the current training literature, it is sometimes difficult to place much confidence in the obtained results. In a real sense, there are more studies of provider communication skills training than there are available results with which to accurately judge the effectiveness of such training. Despite these potential problems, overall there is a good deal of support for the hypothesis that provider communication skills training is indeed effective (see Table 5.1). At the same time, however, it must be recognized that about 30% of the training studies relied solely or primarily on the participants’ self-perceptions of communication skills to assess the effects of training. Although self-perceptions of communication competence are related to the evaluation of communicative performance, they cannot be used confidently as the primary or sole means for assessing the effects of communication skills training. Finally, very few studies have examined the impact of provider communication skills training on patients’ health-related outcomes (Joos et al., 1996; Roter et al., 1995). Although it is important to establish that skills training results in significant improvement in providers’ communication, the ultimate goal of such training is to enhance the quality

5. COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING

105

of health care. Considerable research into physician-patient communication has demonstrated a significant link between communication and patients’ health outcomes (Ong et al., 1995; Pendleton, 1982; Roter, 1989; Thompson, 1994), but this research is only indirectly connected to training studies per se. More effort is needed to translate basic research findings into key communication skills and to organize them into a conceptual framework that guides the design of training interventions. PATIENT COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING

As is evident from the last section and reviews of research into physician-patient communication in general (Korsch & Negrete, 1972; Ong et al., 1995; Pendleton, 1982; Roter, 1989; Thompson, 1994), considerable attention has been devoted to the communication skills of providers (especially physicians) over the last 30 years. In comparison, relatively little research has been devoted to patients’ communication. Given the paucity of research into patient communication skills training, we opted not to set narrow inclusion criteria. We used Anderson and Sharpe’s (1991) review of research into communication skills training as a starting point for our literature search, although we also conducted a Medline search covering the years included in their review. In addition, we conducted a Medline search of research published from 1990 to the present, and we examined relevant studies from the reference lists of all the published reports identified by the Medline searches. Our search resulted in 19 studies of patient communication skills training. Some key features of these studies are reported in Table 5.2. It should be noted that the table omits many details. Our intent was to include only information that was relevant to our concerns, namely, the communication skills that have been addressed and the methods of instructing patients. For further information, the interested reader might begin with Anderson and Shapre’s (1991) review, then access later studies as needed. Communication Skills

The potential list of relevant, specific communication skills for patients is probably as long and varied as a list of individual patients and their medical problems. However, most of the research into patient communication skills training has focused on information exchange skills. Our own research suggests that information exchange involves three fundamental skills: information seeking, information provision, and information verifying (Cegala, 1997; Cegala, Coleman, & Warisse, 1998; Cegala, McNeilis, Socha McGee, & Jonas, 1995; Cegala, Socha McGee, & McNeilis, 1996). Below, we use these concepts to organize our review of communication skills addressed in the patient training literature. Information Seeking. As noted in Table 5.2, most of the attention given to patients’ communication has focused on information seeking—question asking in particular. Because research suggests that patients often do not engage in information seeking (e.g., Beisecker & Beisecker, 1990; Ley, 1988; Parrott, 1994; Street, 1991), it is not surprising that researchers have directed their efforts this way. Despite extensive attention to question asking within the patient communication skills training literature, more research is needed. The impact of such training on patients’ question-asking is moderate, at best. Only about half of the studies reported significantly more question-asking among trained patients (Cegala, McClure, Marinelli, & Post, 2000; Cegala, Post, & McClure, 2001; Dow, Verdi, & Sacco, 1991; Robinson & Whitfield, 1985; Rost, Flavin, Cole, & McGill, 1991; Roter, 1977; Socha McGee & Cegala, 1998;

106

RC, P-P; E1n = 50, E2n = 50, Cn = 50. RC, P-P; E n = 33, Cn = 26. RC; E n = 35, Cn = 32.

Anderson et al., 1987

Tabak, 1988

Greenfield et al., 1988

— RC, P-P; E n = 23, Cn = 22.

RC, E1n = 100; E2n = 100; Cn = 50. RC, E n = 115 Cn = 107

Design a

Roter, 1984c Greenfield et al., 1985

Merkel et al., 1983

Roter, 1977

Source

TABLE 5.2

Audiotape; self-report; blood sugar. Audiotape; self-report.

Videotape; self-report.

— Audiotape; self-report.

Self-reports.

Audiotape; Self-report; Patient records.

Data Sources

Even male:female, mean age 50, mean H.S.+ education, diabetics. Mean age 35, H.S.+ education, 81% female.

Male, 60% minority, low to moderate education, mean age 58, hypertensives.

— Mostly male, mean age 55, mean H.S.+ education, ulcer patients.

No information reported other than they were adults.

Poor African American women, median age 50, hypertensives and diabetics

Patient Sample

14 residents.

11 physicians, 45 residents.

1 health educator (not a physician).

— 8 physicians.

10 family practice residents.

2 physicians, 1 nurse practitioner.

Provider Sample

Booklet encouraging patients to ask questions, model questions provided.

Same as Greenfield et al., 1985.

— 23-minute F-T-F; reviewed patient chart, encouraged to ask questions, addressed barriers to question asking, encouraged rehearsal of questions. 14-minute videotape, modeling of question-asking and raising concerns about treatment.

10 minute F-T-F; focus on question-asking protocol, eliciting patients’ expectations, some practice without feedback. 4-minute video followed by a F-T-F session in which major points were summarized and prompts for questions given.

Interventionb

Summary of Key Features of Research Into Patient Communication Skills Training, 1977 to Present

Question-asking.

Information seekingd ; negotiation skills.

Question-asking; disclosure of problems/concerns.

Question-asking; provision; verifying all in the form of suggestions in the the video. — Information seekingd ; negotiation of medical decisions.

Question-asking; verifying.

Communication Skills

107

RC, P-P; E n = 24, Cn = 24.

RC (physicians only) E n = 80, Cn = 60.

Dow et al., 1991

Lewis et al., 1991

Videotape; self-report.

Videotape; self-report.

Patient self-report.

RC; E1n = 13, E2n = 18, Cn = 18.

Study 2

Audiotape; self-report; physiological measures.

Patient self-report; physician’s report of patients’ question-asking.

RC, P-P; NRC, P-P; En = ? Cn = ? Sample totals = 105 and 43.

RC; E n = 29, Cn = 24.

Thompson et al., 1990 Study 1

Kaplan et al., 1989d

Parents and children, mean ages 38 and 8.5.

Even male:female, mean age 31, mean H.S. education, psychiatric patients.

OB/GYN patients; average age 30; white, upper midlle class.

OB/GYN patients, white upper middle class.

Hypertensive patients: mean age 54, mean grammar school education, 68% female, 62% Spanish speaking. Breast cancer patients: mean age 47, H.S.+ education, female.

34 residents.

1 person role playing a physician.

2 physicians.

1 physician.

?

?

Written list of possible OB/GYN concerns with instructions to write at least 3 questions to ask the physician: instructed to take question list into exam room. E1 received a checklist of information to obtain; asked to think about and write questions to ask physician; instructed to take question list into the exam room. E2 received a 2-sentence printed message urging patients to feel free to ask questions. 2.5 weeks, of inpatient sessions, 5, 90 minute sessions, F-T-F practice and modeling focused on question-asking about medications. Some attention to stating concerns and symptoms. 10 minute videotape, one for parent, one for child; modeling; practice for children.

Same as Greenfield et al., 1985.

continued

Children: question-asking, raising concerns. Parents: questionasking, agenda setting, expressing concerns.

Question-asking; stating concerns and symptoms.

Question-asking.

Question-asking.

Information seekingd ; negotiation skills.

108

Audiotape; self-report. Physician rating.

Audiotape; patient self-report; physician perceptions.

Videotape; patient self-report.

RC; E n = ?, Cn = ? NRC; E n = 40, Cn = 40.

RC; E n = 59, Cn = 61.

RC; E n = 10, Cn = 10.

Butow et al., 1994

McCann & Weinman, 1996

Socha McGee & Cegala, 1998

Frederikson & Bull, 1995

Audiotape; self-report; blood sugar.

Data Sources

RC, P-P; E n = 30, Cn = 31.

Design a

Rost et al., 1991

Source

Mean age 37, 6 males, 14 females, 30% African American.

Mean age 43, 61% female, various social classes.

Cancer patients (N = 142), 47% inpatients, 84% female. 80 patients.

Inpatients, diabetics, mean age 40, mean H.S.+ education, 60% female.

Patient Sample

10 family practice residents.

1 physician.

1 physician.

1 physician.

22 fellows and residents.

Provider Sample

TABLE 5.2 (Continued)

Printed handout encouraging question-asking; model questions. Printed leaflet encouraging patients to think about their problem and what they hope the physician can do, tell the physician concerns clearly and concisely, listen and ask questions. Brief printed leaflet encouraging patients to take a more active role, identify problems, consider causes and possible treatments, state concerns clearly, and ask questions about diagnosis and treatment. 30-minute F-T-F session focusing on the patients’ concerns and goals for the interview; patients encouraged to ask questions on specific topics, aided in preparing questions, encouraged to provide detailed information about symptoms, encouraged to check on their understanding of information periodically throughout the interview.

Modified version of Greenfield et al. plus printed materials with audio models and role playing exercises.

Interventionb

Question-asking; information provision and verifying.

Question-asking; reference to information provision.

Question-asking; reference to information provision.

Question-asking; overcoming barriers to question asking. Question-asking.

Communication Skills

109

NRC; E n = 16; Cn = 17.

—

RC; E n = 377?, Cn = 385? RC; E n = 50, C1n = 49, C2n = 51.

Audiotape; patient and physician self-reports.

—

Audiotape; patient and physician self-reports.

Self-report.

Mean age 72; 51% white; 52% H.S. or less education; 42% male.

8 primary care physicians, 1 chief resident.

—

Printed booklet same as Cegala, Marinelli et al. 2000, except modified for elderly; 30-minute F-T-F session devoted to patients’ concerns, going over booklet responses, aiding in organizing thoughts and listing questions.

Printed booklet addressing question-asking with space for practice; section on provision with question guides and space for taking notes, section on information verifying with examples: mailed to patients 2–3 days prior to interview. —

25 primary care physicians.

Mean age 45; 29% males; 27% minority patients; education from grammar school to graduate school.

—

Printed prompt card with sample questions.

13 physicians.

New patients, mostly college educated.

Question-asking; information provision and verifying.

—

Question-asking; information provision and verifying.

Question-asking.

b F-T-F

a RC

= randomized control; NRC = nonrandomized control; P-P = pre- and posttest; E = experimental (intervention) group; C = control group. = face-to-face; intervention given just prior to seeing the physician unless otherwise stated. c This is the same study as Roter (1977) except that here the content of questions was coded and examined. d Includes question-asking and controlling moves designed to elicit information. e This is a review of the results of Greenfield et al., 1985, 1988. However, data for two new samples are also reported, as listed in the table. f This is the same study as Cegala, Marinelli, et al., 2000, except here data are reported on training and patients’ discourse, whereas Cegala, Marinelli, et al., 2000 focused on training and patient compliance.

Cegala, McClure, et al., 2000f Cegala, et al., 2001

Cegala, Marinelli, et al., 2000

Fleissig et al., 1999

110

CEGALA AND BROZ

Thompson, Nanni, & Schwankovsky, 1990). A partial explanation for these results may be found in the differences among instructional methods used by researchers (to be discussed below). Yet there are probably other factors that contributed to the inconsistency in results. From a communication perspective, one might characterize the overall definition and treatment of question asking as somewhat unsophisticated. Most researchers did not consider the topic of questions in their coding or analyses, and thus virtually all attention was focused on form rather than content. Even so, form was treated rather simply: Questions were typically defined only as direct information-seeking utterances. Our research and others’ work has shown that patients (and physicians) seek information in other ways besides direct questioning (Cegala, 1997; Cegala, Marinelli, & Post, 2000; Frankel, 1990). Yet, for the most part, these other forms of information seeking have been ignored in the research on patient communication skills training. Likewise, the basic definition of information seeking appears to be overly simple. For example, few researchers distinguished between questions that seek new knowledge and those that seek to clarify information already given (Anderson, DeVellis, & DeVellis, 1987; Cegala, McClure, et al., 2000; Cegala et al., 2001; Robinson & Whitfield, 1985; Rost et al., 1991; Roter, 1977; Socha McGee & Cegala, 1998). Aside from definitional issues, more attention to individual differences among patients should be included in training procedures intended to enhance information seeking. Although research studies have documented that patients do not ask physicians many questions, little attention has been devoted to understanding why this is so. Based on observation of over 200 physician-patient interviews, the first author believes that many patients simply are uncertain about what to ask physicians during a medical interview. Many patients do not formulate questions until they have had time to process what the physician has said or do not realize their lack of understanding until they try to follow the recommended treatment or explain their illness to someone. Thus, in addition to the cultural and personality factors that may affect patients’ willingness to engage in information seeking, factors such as patients’ knowledge about illness and disease, their ability to prepare questions in advance of an interview, and their ability to ask questions spontaneously during an interview are likely to affect the process and outcome of information seeking. These and other matters await researchers’ attention. Information Provision. Comparatively little attention has been given to training patients in information provision. A few studies minimally address provision by merely encouraging patients to express concerns or to report symptoms clearly and completely (Dow et al., 1991; Frederikson & Bull, 1995; Lewis, Pantell, & Sharp, 1991; McCann & Weinman, 1996; Merkel, Rudiskill, & Nierenberg, 1983). Cegala and associates appear to have devoted the most attention to patients’ information provision. In two studies, an entire section of a training booklet was devoted to information provision (Cegala, McClure et al., 2000; Cegala et al., 2001), and in a third study patients were assisted with provision matters during a face-to-face session (Socha McGee & Cegala, 1998). Patients’ provision utterances were not coded in the latter study, but a detailed coding procedure was applied in the former studies. Overall, the results indicated that trained patients engaged in significantly more information provision than untrained patients. Considerably more research is needed on the effects of patient training in information provision skills. The provision of information by patients is critical to the physicians’ ability to accurately diagnose and treat medical problems (Frederikson, 1995; Hampton,

5. COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING

111

Harrison, Prichard, & Seymour, 1975; Peterson et al., 1992; Sandler, 1980). In addition, the efficiency and effectiveness with which patients provide information during a medical interview may have a significant bearing on the length of medical interviews, an issue of great importance within the context of managed care (Dugdale, Epstein, & Pantilat, 1999; Goold & Lipkin, 1999). Most research into patient communication skills training has found no difference in the length of interviews involving trained versus untrained patients (Butow, Dunn, Tattersall, & Jones, 1994; Cegala, McClure, et al., 2000; Cegala et al., 2001; Greenfield, Kaplan, & Ware, 1985; Greenfield, Kaplan, Ware, Yano, & Frank, 1988; Roter, 1977; Socha McGee & Cegala, 1998; Thompson et al., 1990). But given that most of the research on training has emphasized patients’ information seeking, little is known about how patients’ enhanced information provision skills may affect interview length. In light of increasing concerns about the cost of health care, there is good reason to devote more attention to the effects of training patients in provision skills. Training patients to present information effectively and efficiently may have the potential to reduce interview time while maintaining or even enhancing health care quality. Additionally, patients who efficiently and effectively provide information to their physicians may encourage them to be more complete and detailed in their own information provision, as some research suggests that training one member of the medical dyad influences the other member’s discourse in similar ways (Cegala, McClure, et al., 2000; Cegala et al., 2001; Levinson & Roter, 1993; Roter et al., 1998). Information Verifying. What we call information verifying skills are used by individuals in daily conversations to check on information. They are especially important in task-oriented communication, where accurate understanding and reception of information is critical to accomplishing a coordinated objective. In addition, information verifying skills are important to physician-patient communication because they enhance not only immediate understanding but also recall (Bertakis, 1977; Kupst, Dresser, Schulman, & Paul, 1975; Ley, 1988). When information verifying has been addressed in the patient communication skills literature, the focus has been on clarifying questions (Robinson & Whitfield, 1985; Rost et al., 1991; Roter, 1977). Research by Cegala and associates (Cegala, McClure, et al., 2000; Cegala et al., 2001) has expanded information verifying to include utterance categories beyond questions clarification. Repetitions are utterances that either request a repeat or provide a complete or partial repeat of another’s utterance, whereas formulations are summaries of key points of either one’s own discourse, another’s discourse, or part of a conversation to which multiple parties have contributed. Also included is bracketing, which involves the forecast that additional information will follow or that additional information will be sought on a particular topic. Although bracketing is not an information-verifying move per se, bracketing utterances serve to enhance understanding by allowing conversational partners to suspend immediate, potential misunderstandings about information exchange matters. Although Cegala and associates have expanded the categories of information verifying, verifying categories have shown the weakest training effects (Cegala, McClure et al., 2000; Cegala et al., 2001). Cegala et al. (2001) speculate that the reason is that informationverifying skills have been given the least amount of attention in their training materials. The issue of how much attention is devoted to training is keyed to related matters about differences in training intervention procedures. Accordingly, this is a good transition to

112

CEGALA AND BROZ

the next section, which addresses the instructional strategies used to train patients in communication skills. Communication Skills Training Interventions

As indicated in Table 5.2, a variety of strategies have been used to instruct patients in communication skills. The extent to which these strategies actually teach patients communication skills is a major focus of this section. A related topic of concern is the issue of balancing instructional effectiveness with the cost and efficiency of dissemination. Whereas the specifics of interventions used in training research are quite varied, all interventions employ either face-to-face instruction, videotape, printed materials, or some combination of these. Anderson and Sharpe (1991) found in their meta-analysis that the largest effect sizes were associated with patient communication skills interventions that included modeling and/or practice components. Our review of training research is consistent with their finding, although we did not conduct a formal meta-analysis. The studies we examined that included a modeling component resulted in trained patients asking more questions, providing more information, and/or being more compliant than their untrained counterparts (Anderson et al., 1987; Cegala, Marinelli, et al., 2000; Cegala, McClure, et al., 2000; Cegala et al., 2001; Dow et al., 1991; Rost et al., 1991; Roter, 1977). Only two studies that included a modeling component resulted in no difference between trained and untrained patients’ question asking (Anderson et al., 1987; Tabak, 1988), and one study found no difference in clinical outcomes (Rost et al., 1991). We found a similar pattern among studies that included a practice component. Most of these showed improvements in question asking, information eliciting, information provision, and clinical outcomes or compliance (Cegala, Marinelli, et al., 2000; Cegala, McClure, et al., 2000; Cegala et al., 2001; Dow et al., 1991; Greenfield et al., 1985; Greenfield et al., 1988; Kaplan et al., 1989; Rost et al., 1991; Roter, 1977; Socha McGee & Cegala, 1998). The role of modeling and practice in communication skills training research has at least two important implications. First, it underscores the idea that communication skills instruction requires more than merely reminding or encouraging patients to ask questions, or to provide complete and clear information, or to negotiate treatment options. Most patients benefit from, indeed require, seeing someone model these behaviors, and afterwards they need the opportunity to practice the skills, ideally with feedback. Most teachers of communication know and apply these principles in their instruction, and those who design and execute communication skills training for patients should apply them as well. However, a second and related implication of modeling and practice is the potential high cost of providing effective communication skills training. Modeling can often be achieved with audio- or videotape, as was done in most of the studies reviewed here. Although playback equipment is not expensive, the production of good quality audio and especially video materials is not cheap. Given the extensive media exposure, if not media sophistication, of most individuals in today’s society, there is little choice but to employ instructional materials of good quality or risk losing credibility or the patients’ interest. Inclusion of a practice component is even more costly. Most of the training studies that had a practice component accomplished it through face-to-face instruction (Cegala et al., 2001; Dow et al., 1991; Greenfield et al., 1985; Greenfield et al., 1988; Kaplan et al., 1989; Lewis et al., 1991; Rost et al., 1991; Roter, 1977; Socha McGee & Cegala, 1998). Only two studies had a practice component without face-to-face instruction. The second

5. COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING

113

part1 of the intervention used by Rost et al. (1991) included printed take-home materials that encouraged patients to role-play as a means of practicing communication skills. The printed booklet used by Cegala et al. (2000) and Cegala et al. (2001) contained space for patients to write concerns, symptoms, and questions after reading material designed to prompt their thinking about these matters. Interestingly, although significant results were obtained in both of these latter studies, the results were considerably stronger in the second study (Cegala et al., 2001), where reading of the booklet was followed by a 30-minute face-to-face session. The point here is that most clinicians cannot afford to hire personnel to conduct faceto-face training sessions with patients. Typically, nurses are not able to perform such instructional tasks due to lack of time or skill. Accordingly, clinicians face a dilemma— either lose the benefits of incorporating modeling and practice components into patient communication skills training or pay the high costs of developing and delivering these components. Future research into patient communication skills training thus should examine ways of maximizing instructional effectiveness and ease of dissemination without increasing costs. This is a huge challenge. Several studies have shown that the most effective means of instructing patients involves tailoring objectives and content to each individual’s needs (Burke & Dunbar-Jacob, 1995; Dunbar-Jacob, Burke, & Pyczynski, 1995; Kreuter, Farrell, Olevitch, & Brennan, 2000; Rudd, 1995). It is likely that the success of several of the communication skills training studies employing face-to-face instruction was due in part to the customizing of instruction that occurred (Cegala et al., 2001; Greenfield et al., 1985; Greenfield et al., 1988; Kaplan et al., 1989; Rost et al., 1991; Roter, 1977; Socha McGee & Cegala, 1998). The need to tailor instruction, besides underscoring the importance of face-to-face practice, makes the development of effective modeling materials even more difficult and costly. Recent research using computer technology has been successful in tailoring health messages to individuals’ needs and stages of change (Kreuter et al., 2000). However, there is a considerable difference between tailoring messages that are designed to inform patients and tailoring instruction that is intended to teach complex skills, like communication. Still, computer technology in the form of CD-ROMs (e.g., Walker & Ross, 1995), particularly interactive CD-ROMs, and Web sites may provide a means for instructing patients in communication skills using modeling relatively cheaply. Those who would provide communication skills training through the use of computers, or any intervention strategy for that matter, must also confront the issue of accessibility. The patients who could benefit most from communication skills training are probably the least likely to have access to computers or know how to use them even if they were made available. Meeting the challenge to find effective, cheap, and easily disseminated instructional materials for patient communication skills training will require the talent and effort of many scholars. The current research into patient communication skills training suggests that meeting this challenge would be well worth the time and effort needed. CONCLUSION

We conclude this chapter with a few comments about additional directions for future research into communication skills training. Our first observation has to do with long-term

1 The first part of the Rost et al. (1991) intervention took place in a hospital setting and included a face-to-face practice session with a health educator.

114

CEGALA AND BROZ

training effects. Overall, few studies have examined the effects of training beyond immediate postintervention assessment. Some of the provider communication skills training studies examined long-term effects (Bowman et al., 1992; Maguire, Booth, et al., 1996; Stein & Kwan, 1999), but none of these employed a randomized, controlled design with pre- and posttesting, and one assessed only the participants’ self-judgments of communication skills (Stein & Kwan, 1999). None of the patient communication skills training studies systematically examined long-term effects. A few studies assessed outcomes beyond immediate training, but there is no way of determining if the results were due to long-term effects of the training procedure (Greenfield et al., 1988; Rost et al., 1991; Roter, 1977). Given the high cost of training for both providers and patients, it is important for future research to determine the long-term effects of training interventions and what, if any, means of periodic reinforcement may be needed to maintain participants’ communication skills. A second and related observation concerns the generalization and transference of communication skills. This issue is perhaps less significant for providers than it is for patients. Regarding patients, most of the training efforts have occurred within a primary care context. Although this context is centrally important to modern health care given the prevalence of managed care, it is not clear if communication skills learned within that context are easily transferred to other health settings, such as communication with specialists, for example. Although some research into provider training has examined specialties, especially oncology, no research to our knowledge has examined the effects of patient communication skills training within a specialty context. Thus, we do not know if existing training interventions require modification to be used in specialty contexts, nor do we know if communication skills are transferred from primary care to specialty settings. Given the illnesses (e.g., cancer, heart disease, and stroke) that account for major health care costs in dollars and human suffering, future research should examine communication skills training in specialty settings and determine the extent of transference of communication skills training from one medical setting to another. A related research task is to determine how patients’ individual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, education) interact with communication skills training interventions. For example, we do not know to what extent patients’ education relates to the kind of intervention methods used for delivering instruction (e.g., print, face-to-face, videotape). Such factors, to the extent they do interact with interventions, could be of considerable importance in addressing issues of cost, dissemination, and accessibility of communication skills training interventions. Finally, it is clear from this review that communication skills training has been directed to either providers or patients. In only one study were both providers and patients trained in communication skills (Lewis et al., 1991). Whatever else we know about communication, we do know that it is a process dependent upon the contributions of all participants. Understanding the process and developing ways to improve it must involve paying attention to all conversational partners’ contributions and perceptions. From what has been done so far, we have reasonably clear evidence that communication skills training has positive effects on providers and patients. Future research needs to systematically examine the relative and interactive contributions of providers and patients. For example, we need randomized, controlled studies that allow for outcome comparisons between groups in which only one participant (provider or patient) is trained and groups in which both are trained. Such research will allow for the determination of the relative contributions of trained participants and, more importantly, will lay the ground work for interventions designed to enhance training effects by interfacing and complementing the skills taught to

5. COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING

115

providers and patients. Such research designs will not be implemented easily or cheaply. They will require multiple equivalent sites to minimize possible confounding among trained and untrained participants. They will also likely require an initial focus on a limited range of illnesses (e.g., diabetes, hypertension) with clearly implied outcomes that can be related to the participants’ discourse and to training intervention effects. Additionally, this type of research will require significant grant support and interdisciplinary research teams. Given the recent interest in communication and health by such funding agencies as National Cancer Institute (NCI), this type of research is not only possible, it is in demand. REFERENCES Anderson, L. A., DeVellis, B. M., & DeVellis, R. F. (1987). Effects of modeling on patient communication, satisfaction, and knowledge. Medical Care, 25, 1044–1056. Anderson, L. A., & Sharpe, P. A. (1991). Improving patient and provider communication: A synthesis and review of communication interventions. Patient Education and Counseling, 17, 99–134. Baile, W. F., Kudelka, A. P., Beale, E. A., Glober, G. A., Myers, E. G., Greisinger, A. J., Bast, R. C., Jr., Goldstein, M. G., Novack, D., & Lenzi, R. (1999). Communication skills training in oncology: Description and preliminary outcomes of workshops on breaking bad news and managing patient reactions to illness. Cancer, 86, 887–897. Baile, W. F., Lenzi, R., Kudelka, A. P., Maguire, P., Novack, D., Goldstein, M., Myers, E. G., & Bast, R. C., Jr. (1997). Improving physician-patient communication in cancer care: Outcome of a workshop for oncologists. Journal of Cancer Education, 12, 166–173. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman. Beisecker, A. E., & Beisecker, T. D. (1990). Patient information-seeking behaviors when communicating with doctors. Medical Care, 28, 19–28. Bertakis, K. D. (1977). The communication of information from physician to patient: A method for increasing patient retention and satisfaction. Journal of Family Practice, 5, 217–222. Bowman, F. M., Goldberg, D. P., Millar, T., Gask, L., & McGrath, G. (1992). Improving the skills of established general practitioners: The long-term benefits of group teaching. Medical Education, 26, 63–68. Brown, J. B., Boles, M., Mullooly, J. P., & Levinson, W. (1999). Effect of clinician communication skills training on patient satisfaction: A randomized, controlled trial. Annals of Internal Medicine, 131, 822–829. Burke, L. E., & Dunbar-Jacob, J. (1995). Adherence to medication, diet, and activity recommendations: From assessment to maintenance. Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, 9, 62–79. Butow, P. N., Dunn, S. M., Tattersall, M. H., & Jones, Q. J. (1994). Patient participation in the cancer consultation: Evaluation of a question prompt sheet. Annals of Oncology, 5, 199–204. Cegala, D. J. (1997). A study of doctors’ and patients’ patterns of information exchange and relational communication during a primary care consultation: Implications for communication skills training. Journal of Health Communication, 2, 169–194. Cegala, D. J., Coleman, M. T., & Warisse, J. (1998). The development and partial test of the Medical Communication Competence Scale (MCCS). Health Communication, 10, 261– 288. Cegala, D. J., Marinelli, T., & Post, D. M. (2000). The effect of patient communication skills training on treatment compliance in primary care. Archives of Family Medicine, 9, 57–64.

116

CEGALA AND BROZ

Cegala, D. J., McClure, L., Marinelli, T. M., & Post, D. M. (2000). The effects of communication skills training on patients’ participation during medical interviews. Patient Education and Counseling, 41, 209–222. Cegala, D. J., McNeilis, K. S., Socha McGee, D., & Jonas, A. P. (1995). A study of doctors’ and patients’ perceptions of information processing and communication competence during the medical interview. Health Communication, 7, 179–203. Cegala, D. J., Post, D., & McClure, L. (2001). The effects of patient communication skills training on the discourse of elderly patients during a primary care interview. Journal of the American Geriactics Society, 49, 1505–1511. Cegala, D. J., Socha McGee, D., & McNeilis, K. S. (1996). Components of patients’ and doctors’ perceptions of communication competence during a primary care medical interview. Health Communication, 8, 1–28. Costanza, M. E., Luckmann, R., Quirk, M. E., Clemow, L., White, M. J., & Stoddard, A. M. (1999). The effectiveness of using standardized patients to improve community physician skills in mammography counseling and clinical breast exam. Preventive Medicine, 29, 241– 248. Dow, M. G., Verdi, M. B., & Sacco, W. P. (1991). Training psychiatric patients to discuss medication issues. Effects on patient communication and knowledge of medications. Behavior Modification, 15, 3–21. Dugdale, D. C., Epstein, R., & Pantilat, S. Z. (1999). Time and the patient-physician relationship. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 14(Suppl. 1), S34–S40. Dunbar-Jacob, J., Burke, L. E., & Pyczynski, S. (1995). Clinical assessment and management of adherence to medical regimens. In P. M. Nicassio & T. W. Smith (Eds.), Managing chronic illness: A biopsychosocial perspective (pp. 313–349). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Emanuel, E. J., & Emanuel, L. L. (1992). Four models of the physician-patient relationship. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267, 2221–2226. Fallowfield, L., Lipkin, M., & Hall, A. (1998). Teaching senior oncologists communication skills: Results from phase I of a comprehensive longitudinal program in the United Kingdom. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 16, 1961–1968. Faulkner, A., Argent, J., Jones, A., & O’Keeffe, C. (1995). Improving the skills of doctors in giving distressing information. Medical Education, 29, 303–307. Fleissig, A., Glasser, B., & Lloyd, M. (1999). Encouraging out-patients to make the most of their first hospital appointment: To what extent can a written prompt help patients get the information they want? Patient Education and Counseling, 38, 69–79. Frankel, R. (1990). Talking in interviews: A dispreference for patient-initiated questions in physician-patient encounters. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Interaction competence (pp. 231–262). Washington, DC: University Press of America. Frederikson, L. G. (1995). Exploring information-exchange in consultation: The patients’ view of performance and outcomes. Patient Education and Counseling, 25, 237–246. Frederikson, L. G., & Bull, P. E. (1995). Evaluation of a patient education leaflet designed to improve communication in medical consultations. Patient Education and Counseling, 25, 51–57. Goold, S. D., & Lipkin, M., Jr. (1999). The doctor-patient relationship: Challenges, opportunities, and strategies. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 14(Suppl. 1), S26–S33. Greco, M., Francis, W., Buckley, J., Brownlea, A., & McGovern, J. (1998). Real-patient evaluation of communication skills teaching for GP registrars. Family Practice, 15, 51–57. Greenfield, S., Kaplan, S., & Ware, J. E., Jr. (1985). Expanding patient involvement in care: Effects on patient outcomes. Annals of Internal Medicine, 102, 520–528.

5. COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING

117

Greenfield, S., Kaplan, S. H., Ware, J. E., Jr., Yano, E. M., & Frank, H. J. (1988). Patients’ participation in medical care: Effects on blood sugar control and quality of life in diabetes. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 3, 448–457. Hampton, J., Harrison, M., Prichard, J., & Seymour, C. (1975). Relative contributions of history-taking, physical examination, and laboratory investigation to diagnosis and management of medical outpatients. British Medical Journal, 2, 486–489. Hardoff, D., & Schonmann, S. (2001). Training physicians in communication skills with adolescants using teenage actors as simulated patients. Medical Education, 35, 206–210. Hargie, O., Dickson, D., Boohan, M., & Hughes, K. (1998). A survey of communication skills training in UK schools of medicine: Present practices and prospective proposals. Medical Education, 32, 25–34. Hulsman, R. L., Ros, W. J., Winnubst, J. A., & Bensing, J. M. (1999). Teaching clinically experienced physicians communication skills: A review of evaluation studies. Medical Education, 33, 655–668. Joos, S. K., Hickam, D. H., Gordon, G. H., & Baker, L. H. (1996). Effects of a physician communication intervention on patient care outcomes. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 11, 147–155. Kaaya, S., Goldberg, D., & Gask, L. (1992). Management of somatic presentations of psychiatric illness in general medical settings: Evaluation of a new training course for general practitioners. Medical Education, 26, 138–144. Kaplan, S. H., Greenfield, S., & Ware, J. E., Jr. (1989). Assessing the effects of physicianpatient interactions on the outcomes of chronic disease. Medical Care, 27(Suppl. 3), S110– S127. Korsch, B. M., & Negrete, V. F. (1972, August). Doctor-patient communication. Scientific American, 227, 66–74. Kreuter, M., Farrell, D., Olevitch, L., & Brennan, L. (2000). Tailoring health messages: Customizing communication with computer technology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kruijver, I. P., Kerkstra, A., Bensing, J. M., & van de Wiel, H. B. (2000). Nurse-patient communication in cancer care. A review of the literature. Cancer Nursing, 23, 20–31. Kruijver, I. P. M., Kerkstra, A., Francke, A. L., Bensing, J. M., & van de Wiel, H. B. M. (2000). Evaluation of communication training programs in nursing care: A review of the literature. Patient Education and Counseling, 39, 129–145. Kupst, M. J., Dresser, K., Schulman, J. L., & Paul, M. H. (1975). Evaluation of methods to improve communication in the physician-patient relationship. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 45, 420–429. Langewitz, W. A., Eich, P., Kiss, A., & Wossmer, B. (1998). Improving communication skills: A randomized controlled behaviorally oriented intervention study for residents in internal medicine. Psychosomatic Medicine, 60, 268–276. Leopold, N., Cooper, J., & Clancy, C. (1996). Sustained partnership in primary care. Journal of Family Practice, 42, 129–137. Levinson, W., & Roter, D. (1993). The effects of two continuing medical education programs on communication skills of practicing primary care physicians. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 8, 318–324. Lewis, C. C., Pantell, R. H., & Sharp, L. (1991). Increasing patient knowledge, satisfaction, and involvement: Randomized trial of a communication intervention. Pediatrics, 88, 351– 358. Ley, P. L. (1988). Communicating with patients: Improving communication, satisfaction and compliance. New York: Croom Helm.

118

CEGALA AND BROZ

Maguire, P., Booth, K., Elliott, C., & Jones, B. (1996). Helping health professionals involved in cancer care acquire key interviewing skills: The impact of workshops. European Journal of Cancer, 32A, 1486–1489. Maguire, P., Faulkner, A., Booth, K., Elliott, C., & Hillier, V. (1996). Helping cancer patients disclose their concerns. European Journal of Cancer, 32A, 78–81. Makoul, G. (1999). Communication in Medicine. (Contemporary Issues in Medicine Report No. 3). Washington, DC: Association of American Medical Colleges. McCann, S., & Weinman, J. (1996). Empowering the patient in the consultation: A pilot study. Patient Education and Counseling, 27, 227–234. Merkel, W. T., Rudisill, J. P., & Nierenberg, B. P. (1983). Preparing patients to see the doctor: Effects on patients and physicians in a family practice center. Family Practice Research Journal, 2, 147–163. Morgan, E. R., & Winter, R. J. (1996). Teaching communication skills: An essential part of residency training. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescant Medicine, 150, 638–642. Ong, L. M. L., DeHaes, J. C. J. M., Hoos, A. M., & Lammes, F. B. (1995). Doctor-patient communication: A review of the literature. Social Science and Medicine, 40, 903–918. Parrott, R. (1994). Exploring family practitioners’ and patients’ information exchange about prescribed medications: Implications for practitioners’ interviewing and patients’ understanding. Health Communication, 6, 267–280. Pendleton, D. A. (1982). Doctor-patient communication: A review of the literature. In D. A. Pendleton & J. C. Hasler (Eds.), Doctor-patient communication (pp. 5–53). London: Academic Press. Peterson, M. C., Holbrook, J. H., Hales, D., Smith, N. L., & Staker, L. U. (1992). Contributions of the history, physical examination, and laboratory investigation in making medical diagnoses. Western Journal of Medicine, 156, 163–165. Robinson, E. J., & Whitfield, M. J. (1985). Improving the efficiency of patients’ comprehension monitoring: A way of increasing patients’ participation in general practice consultations. Social Science and Medicine, 21, 915–919. Rost, K. M., Flavin, K. S., Cole, K., & McGill, J. B. (1991). Change in metabolic control and functional status after hospitalization: Impact of patient activation intervention in diabetic patients. Diabetes Care, 14, 881–889. Roter, D. L. (1977). Patient participation in the patient-provider interaction: The effects of patient question asking on the quality of interaction, satisfaction and compliance. Health Education Monographs, 5, 281–315. Roter, D. L. (1984). Patient question-asking in physician-patient interaction. Health Psychology, 3, 395–409. Roter, D. L. (1989). Which facets of communication have strong effects on outcome: A meta analysis. In M. Stewart & D. Roter (Eds.), Communicating with medical patients (pp. 183– 196). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Roter, D. L., Cole, K. A., Kern, D. E., Barker, L. R., & Grayson, M. (1990). An evaluation of residency training in interviewing skills and the psychosocial domain of medical practice. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 5, 347–354. Roter, D. L., Hall, J. A., Kern, D. E., Barker, L. R., Cole, K. A., & Roca, R. P. (1995). Improving physicians’ interviewing skills and reducing patients’ emotional distress: A randomized clinical trial. Archives of Internal Medicine, 155, 1877–1884. Roter, D., Rosenbaum, J., de Negri, B., Renaud, D., DiPrete-Brown, L., & Hernandez, O. (1998). The effects of a continuing medical education programme in interpersonal communication skills on doctor practice and patient satisfaction in Trinidad and Tobago. Medical Education, 32, 181–189.

5. COMMUNICATION SKILLS TRAINING

119

Rudd, P. (1995). Clinicians and patients with hypertension: Unsettled issues about compliance. American Heart Journal, 130, 572–579. Sandler, G. (1980). The importance of the history in the medical clinic and the cost of unecessary tests. American Heart Journal, 100, 928–931. Sanson-Fisher, R., & Cockburn, J. (1997). Effective teaching of communication skills for medical practice: Selecting an appropriate clinical context. Medical Education, 31, 52–57. Silverman, J., Kurtz, S., & Draper, J. (1998). Skills for communicating with patients. Abingdon, England: Radcliff Medical Press. Smith, R. C., Lyles, J. S., Mettler, J. A., Marshall, A. A., Van Egeren, L. F., Stoffelmayr, B. E., Osborn, G. G., & Shebroe, V. (1995). A strategy for improving patient satisfaction by the intensive training of residents in psychosocial medicine: A controlled, randomized study. Academic Medicine, 70, 729–732. Smith, R. C., Lyles, J. S., Mettler, J., Stoffelmayr, B. E., Van Egeren, L. F., Marshall, A. A., Gardiner, J. C., Maduschke, K. M., Stanley, J. M., Osborn, G. G., Shebroe, V., & Greenbaum, R. B. (1998). The effectiveness of intensive training for residents in interviewing. A randomized, controlled study. Annals of Internal Medicine, 128(2), 118–126. Smith, R. C., Mettler, J. A., Stoffelmayr, B. E., Lyles, J. S., Marshall, A. A., Van Egeren, L. F., Osborn, G. G., & Shebroe, V. (1995). Improving resident’s confidence in using psychosocial skills. J. Gen. Intern. Med., 10, 315–320. Smith, R. C., Osborn, G., Hoppe, R. B., Lyles, J. S., Van Egeren, L., Henery, R., Sego, D., Alguire, P., & Stoffelmayr, B. (1991). Efficacy of a one-month training block in psychosocial medicine for residents: A controlled study. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 6, 535– 543. Socha McGee, D., & Cegala, D. J. (1998). Patient communication skills training for improved communication competence in the primary care medical consultation. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 26, 412–430. Stein, T. S., & Kwan, J. (1999). Thriving in a busy practice: Physician-patient communication training. Effective Clinical Practice, 2, 63–70. Street, R. L., Jr. (1991). Information-giving in medical consultations: The influence of parents’ communicative styles and personal characteristics. Social Science and Medicine, 32, 541– 548. Tabak, E. R. (1988). Encouraging patient question-asking: A clinical trial. Patient Education and Counseling, 12, 37–49. Thompson, S. C., Nanni, C., & Schwankovsky, L. (1990). Patient-oriented interventions to improve communication in a medical office visit. Health Psychology, 9, 390–404. Thompson, T. L. (1994). Interpersonal communication and health care. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (2nd ed., pp. 696–779). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Vaidya, V. U., Greenberg, L. W., Patel, K. M., Strauss, L. H., & Pollack, M. M. (1999). Teaching physicians how to break bad news: A 1-day workshop using standardized parents. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 153, 419–422. Walker, D., & Ross, J. M. (1995). Therapeutic computing: Teaching therapeutic communications utilizing a videodisc. Computers in Nursing, 13, 103–108.

6 The Nature of the Therapeutic Relationship and the Assessment of Its Discourse in Routine Medical Visits Debra Roter Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health

Kelly S. McNeilis Southwest Missouri State University

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

In one manner or another, the construct of the physician-patient relationship and its expression through the medical dialogue has been described or alluded to in the history of medicine since the time of the Greeks (e.g., Plato’s The Gorgias) and in the modern medical and social sciences literature for the past 50 years (Engel, 1977; Freidson, 1970; Parsons, 1951; Szasz & Hollender, 1956). Nevertheless, historians of modern medicine have tracked an undeniable decline in the centrality of communication to the care process. In his study of the history of physicians and patients, Shorter (1985) attributes the denigration of communication to the ascendancy of the molecular and chemistry-oriented sciences as the predominant 20th-century medical paradigm. This change was fundamental in directing medical inquiry away from the person of the patient to the biochemistry and pathophysiology of the patient. It was not coincidental that the practice of interviewing patients from a written outline designed around a series of yes/no hypothesis-testing questions replaced unstructured medical histories at this point in the history of medicine. White (1988) lamented that, because of this shift toward a biomedical focus, physicians fail to recognize that “apples are red and sweet as well as being composed of cells and molecules” (p. 6). Lacking a pathway to collaboration and partnership, many see the need for fundamental reform in medicine’s vision. Just as the molecular and chemistry-oriented sciences were adopted as last century’s medical paradigm, incorporation of the patient’s perspective into medicine’s definition of patient need has been suggested as the medical paradigm of the 21st century (Engel, 1988; White, 1988; McWhinney, 1989). The medical dialogue is the fundamental instrument through which the battle over paradigms is being waged; the patient’s problem will be anchored in either a biomedical and disease context or a broader and more integrated illness context that incorporates the

121

122

ROTER AND McNEILIS

patient perspective (Mishler, 1984). In other words the nature of the patient’s problem will be established and the visit’s agenda and therapeutic course will be determined by whichever paradigm wins out. A debate of long-standing intensity related to the assessment of medical dialogue centers on the distinctions between quantitative and qualitative evaluative approaches (Roter & Frankel, 1992). The heat of the debate is derived not merely from a disagreement over the relative advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantitative methods but from the broader perception that these methods reflect incompatible paradigms. Advocates of these methods have not only argued their relative merits but maintained unusually critical and intellectually isolated positions. A well-recognized list of attributes distinguish the quantitative and qualitative paradigms and their adherents. The quantitative worldview has been characterized as hypothetico-deductive, particularistic, objective, and outcome-oriented; its researchers are logical positivists. Quantitative researchers typically present statistical summaries and correlates of objectively measured patient and provider behaviors. In contrast, the qualitative worldview has been characterized as social anthropological, inductive, holistic, subjective, and process-oriented; its researchers are phenomenologists (Reichardt & Cook, 1969). Qualitatively inclined researchers rarely assign numerical values to their observations but prefer instead to record data in the language of their subjects, almost always presenting actual speech in the form of verbatim transcripts of audio- and videotape recordings. An allegiance to a particular paradigm implies not only a worldview but also a paradigm-specific method of inquiry and even styles of presentation. There is a certain parallel between the systems of open-sea navigation described by the cultural anthropologist Thomas Gladwin and the debate among researchers over qualitative and quantitative methods (Gladwin, 1964). The system of navigation represented by the European tradition is distinguished by the plotting of a course prior to a journey’s beginning that subsequently guides all decisions regarding location. The extent to which the ship “stays the course” is a testament to the navigator’s skill. The Islanders of Truk face the problem of managing long distances in uncertain conditions in a very different manner than the Europeans. The Trukese navigator has no preestablished plan of any kind; experience from previous voyages and information at hand during the current sailing trip is all that the Trukese navigator uses for guidance. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a broad context for understanding the nature of the therapeutic relationship and the assessment and consequences of its discourse in routine medical visits. We review the major coding schemes and perspectives used to study patient-physician interaction and highlight the complementarity of the qualitative and quantitative approaches to this type of analysis. Finally, we suggest future directions for research in this area. THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

Bioethicists Emanuel and Emanuel (1992) suggested that power relations in medical visits are expressed through several key elements, including (1) who sets the agenda and goals of the visit (the physician, the patient, or the physician and patient in negotiation); (2) the role of patients’ values (assumed by the physician to be consistent with their own, jointly explored by the patient and physician, or unexamined); and (3) the functional role assumed by the physician (guardian, advisor, or consultant). Application of these core elements can be useful in recognizing the variety of power relations expressed in models of the physician-patient relationship. Table 6.1 summarizes the four relational styles or models that result from various configurations of patient and physician control.

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

123

TABLE 6.1

Types of Physician-Patient Relationships Physician Control

Patient Control

Low High

Low

High

Default Consumerism

Paternalism Mutuality

Mutuality, the model named in the lower right quadrant, occurs when the participants are on a relatively even footing. Because power in the relationship is balanced, the goals, agenda, and decisions are the result of negotiation between the participants; both the patient and the physician become part of a joint venture. The medical dialogue is the vehicle through which patient values are explicitly articulated and explored. Throughout this process, the physician acts as a counselor or advisor. Paternalism, the most prevalent but not necessarily most efficient or desirable model, is shown in the upper right quadrant. In this model, the physician dominates agenda and goal setting and decision making in regard to both information and services; the medical condition is defined in biomedical terms, and the patient’s voice is largely absent. The physician’s obligation is to act in the patient’s “best interest.” The determination of the patient’s best interest, however, is largely based on the assumption that the patient’s values and preferences are the same as those of the physician. In essence, the physician acts as the patient’s guardian makes decisions regardless of the patient’s preferences. Even when both parties have mutually agreed upon a paternalistic relationship, the patient and physician are often on so unequal a footing that the patient is unable to shape the relationship to the same degree as the physics. The possibility exists, then, that the patient may adopt a passive role, not fully aware of alternatives or able to negotiate a more active stance (President’s Commission, 1982). In the third model, consumerism, the typical power relationship may be reversed. The patient may set the goals and agenda for the visit and take sole responsibility for decision making. Patient demands for information and technical services are accommodated by a cooperating physician, and patient values are defined and fixed by the patient and unexamined by the physician. The consumerist model redefines the medical encounter as a marketplace transaction. Caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) rules the transaction, with power resting with the buyer (patient), who can make the decision to buy (seek care) or not as he or she sees fit (Haug & Lavin, 1983). The physician’s role is to act as a technical consultant, obliged to provide information and services contingent upon patient preferences (and within professional norms). Fault can also be found with the consumerist model, for it overly narrows the physician’s role. Patients may limit physician participation in decision making without appreciating the full benefits that inclusion of the physician’s perspective can add (Roter & Hall, 1992; Schneider, 1998). When patient and physician expectations are at odds or when needed change in the relationship cannot be negotiated, the relationship may come to a dysfunctional standstill, a kind of relationship default, as represented in the upper left of the table. A default situation is characterized by unclear or contested common goals, unclear or neglected patient values, and an uncertain role for the physician. It is here where medical management may be least effective, with neither the patient nor the physician sensing progress or direction. A frustrated and angry patient may make inappropriate time and service demands and

124

ROTER AND McNEILIS

ultimately drop out of care completely because of failed expectations. The physician may view the patient as “difficult and hateful” and view the patient’s visits as representing the most frustrating aspects of medicine. Unless alignment of the relationship is undertaken through direct intervention, the relationship is likely to continue to unravel and ultimately fail. Such interactional styles, combined with the communicative requirements of the medical interaction, are the very elements health communication researchers study. The following sections cover the quantitative and qualitative approaches that researchers employ to study communication elements and relational styles in physician-patient interaction. MEASUREMENT OF COMMUNICATION DYNAMICS Quantitative Approaches to Interaction Analysis

It is only since the mid-l960’s that the actual dynamics of the therapeutic dialogue have been observed in any systematic manner and an attempt to recast this aspect of medicine as science has been made. Increased methodological and technological sophistication has made observation and analysis of the medical visit easier over the years, and indeed the number of empirical studies of physician-patient communication doubled from l982 to l987 (Roter, Hall, & Katz, 1988). A review of studies directly assessing patient-provider communication and its correlates found 28 different analysis systems used in 61 studies (Roter et al., 1988). Half the studies used audiotape as their primary method of observation; the remaining studies were equally likely to use videotape or impartial observers. In recent years, there appears to be a trend away from the use of observers to creating “hard copy” records of the interaction—a trend no doubt related to the increasing complexity of analysis schemes that favor a verbatim record. The choice of video- or audiotape as a means of observation was closely related to the kind of research undertaken. Research done to facilitate physician training and medical education favored the use of videotape, whereas audiotape was the frequent choice in more general research. Much of the training research made use of videotape not only as a source of evaluative data but as an intervention tool as well. Roter et al. (1988) reported a great deal of diversity in the analysis approaches they reviewed. More than half the investigators employed an analysis system uniquely designed for their current study, and the other investigators used a coding approach, usually with some minor modifications, employed in a prior study by themselves or other investigators. The most commonly used process analysis systems were those of Bales, Roter, and Stiles, but even these were used in only five to seven studies each. Some half dozen other systems were used in at least one prior study. Most unique systems attempted to abstract and categorize the factual information physicians communicated during the encounter. The 17 studies of this kind ranged from very simple counts of information to complex assessments of exactly what was communicated as well as what that information might mean to the patient. Unlike process analysis, content systems were generally limited to the one coded category of information giving and did not attempt to put it within the broader context of physician and patient communication. The studies did, however, generally relate the communicated information to patient recall. A more recent review of communication assessment instruments covering the period 1986 to 1996 identified a total of 44 instruments (Boon & Stewart, 1998). Approximately one third of these were designed to evaluate student performance in communication skills training programs; of these, only 3 were used by an investigator other than the system’s

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

125

author, although not within the past 15 years. Also identified in the review were 28 systems used primarily for the assessment of communication in research studies. In this category, 4 systems were used by multiple investigators. As was true in the Roter et al. (1988) study, the most commonly used systems were those of Bales, Stiles, and Roter. In addition, the patient-centered method was used by multiple investigators. A brief overview of each of these four systems is provided below. Bales’ Process Analysis System. Concerned with group dynamics, Bales (l950) developed an analysis system for assessing patterns of interaction and communication and decision-making processes within small groups. Since its original conceptualization, Bales’ approach has been more widely modified than any other single approach to understanding the dynamics of the medical encounter. Bales’ system focuses on ways in which the process and structure of communication among persons in a group reflects how they differentially participate in problem solving. It is based on the premise that problem solving occurs in two domains, the task domain and the socioemotional domain. Interaction is described in terms of 12 mutually exclusive categories. Six are conceived as affectively neutral and ascribed to the task domain (e.g., gives suggestion or asks for orientation), and 6 are viewed as representing the socioemotional domain. These latter are divided into positive and negative affective categories (e.g., agrees or disagrees; shows tension release or shows tension). Analysis using Bales’ system focuses on literal transcripts of the verbal events of an encounter. These events are operationally defined as the smallest discriminable speech segments to which the rater can assign a classification. A unit may be as short as a single word or as long as a lengthy sentence. Compound sentences are usually divided at the conjunction, and sentence clauses are scored as separate units when they convey a single item of thought or behavior, such as an acknowledgement, evaluation, or greeting. Inasmuch as Bales’ system was originally devised to study group interaction, many researchers who derived theoretical direction from the system extensively changed the substantive categories to more directly reflect dyadic medical interaction. Nevertheless, the first studies of medical dialogue using Bales’ process analysis system, which were done in the late 1960s and 1970s, are still cited as the seminal studies on physician-patient communication (Davis, 1969, 1971; Freemon, Negrete, Davis, & Korsch, 1971; Korsch, Gozzi, & Francis, l968). Additional studies done in the 1980s on adult visits (Stewart, 1984) and pediatric visits (Starfield et al., 1981) were also closely modeled on Bale’s system. The Verbal Response Mode (VRM). The Verbal Response Mode (VRM), an alternative theoretical approach based on linguistic theory, was introduced by William Stiles (1992). Like Bales’ system, the VRM is a general-purpose system for coding speech acts and has uses beyond analyzing medical encounters. The unit of analysis is a speech segment, defined grammatically as equivalent to one psychological unit of experience— that is, a single utterance. The operational definition of an utterance is similar to that used by Bales. In particular, an utterance can be a simple sentence, an independent clause, a nonrestrictive dependent clause, an element of a compound predicate, or a term of acknowledgement, evaluation, or address. The system forms a taxonomy that implies a particular interpersonal intent or microrelationship between communicator and recipient. There are three principles of classification: the source of experience, operationalized as attentiveness (to the other speaker) or informativeness (the speaker’s own experience); presumption about experience,

126

ROTER AND McNEILIS

operationalized as directive (controlling dialogue) or acquiescent (deferring to the other’s viewpoint); and, finally, the frame of reference, defined as presumptuous (presuming knowledge about the other person) or unassuming (not presuming particular knowledge). Each of these classification principles is dichotomous, taking the value of “the speaker” or “the other.” The taxonomy assigns language segments to the categories—disclosure, edification, advisement, confirmation, question, acknowledgement, interpretation, and reflection—in the following ways. Source of experience refers to a speaker’s attentiveness to the other person, including utterances that relate to the other person’s experience (i.e., questions, acknowledgments, interpretations, and reflections). Informative utterances reflect the speaker’s own experience through disclosures of thoughts, feelings, wishes, perceptions, or intentions concerning the speaker’s experience (i.e., disclosures, edifications, advisements, and confirmations). Directiveness refers to the speaker’s control of the dialogue, including utterances that use the speaker’s frame of reference or viewpoint (i.e., disclosures, questions, advisements, and interpretations). Acquiescent utterances (i.e., edifications, acknowledgments, confirmations, and reflections) allow the other’s viewpoint to determine the course of the conversation. In presumptuous utterances (i.e., advisements, interpretations, confirmations, and reflections), a speaker expressly presumes knowledge about the other person. For example, when one utters a reflection, one presumes to understand the other’s experience. Similarly, when one utters an advisement (guiding another person’s behavior), one presumes to know what the other should do. Unassuming utterances (i.e., disclosures, questions, edifications, and acknowledgments) make no such presumption. Using this taxonomy, each speech segment is coded twice, once with respect to its grammatical form (or literal meaning) and once with respect to its communicative intent (or pragmatic meaning). Thus, there are 64 possible form-intent combinations, 8 pure modes, in which form and intent coincide, and 56 mixed modes, in which they differ. The reliability of VRM coding appears to be adequate. Stiles reported 81% agreement for form and 66% for intent (based on Cohen’s Kappa) in a study of parent-child interaction (Stiles & White, 1981), and Meeuwesen, Schaap, and van der Staak (1991), in their study of primary care visits, reported an average of 78% agreement over categories. The VRM has been used by its author and several others in studies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. These include studies on primary care (Inui, Carter, Kukull, & Haigh, 1982; Stiles, Putnam, & Jacob, 1982) and studies of patients with particular types of problems, including hypertensive patients (Orth, Stiles, Scherwitz, Hennrickus, & Vallbona, 1987), expectant mothers (Brownbridge, Lilford, & Tindale-Biscoe, 1988), breast cancer patients (Burton, Parker, & Wollner, 1991), patients with physical complaints possessing psychological components (Meeuwesen et al., 1991), and the institutionalized aged (Caporael, 1981). See Stiles (1992) for a more exhaustive review of VRM studies. The Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS). The RIAS is derived loosely from social exchange theories related to interpersonal influence, problem solving (Bales, 1950; Emerson, l976), and reciprocity (Ben-Sira, 1980; Davis, 1969; Gouldner, l960; Roter & Hall, 1989). It provides a tool for viewing the dynamics and consequences of patients’ and providers’ exchange of resources through the interaction of the medical dialogue. The social exchange orientation is consistent with health education and empowerment perspectives that view the medical encounter as a “meeting between experts” and is grounded in an egalitarian model of patient-provider partnership that rejects expert domination and passive patient roles (Freire, 1983; Roter, 1987, 2000a, 2000b;

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

127

Roter & Hall, 1992; Tuckett, Boulton, Olson, & Williams, 1985; Wallerstein & Bernstein, 1988). A good way to organize and ground RIAS-coded communication in the clinical encounter is to use a functional model of medical interviewing (Cohen-Cole, 1991). In this model, task behaviors fall within two of the medical interview functions: “gathering data” to understand patient problems and “educating and counseling” patients about their illness and motivating them to adhere to treatment. Affective behaviors generally reflect a third medical interview function, “building a relationship” through developing rapport and being responsiveness to the patient’s emotions. A fourth function of the visit, “partnership building” involves enhancing patients’ capacity to engage in an effective partnership with their physicians. Although not explicitly defined by the authors of the functional model, the use of verbal strategies to help patients integrate and translate between the biomedical and psychosocial paradigms of the therapeutic dialogue deserves special note. The “activating” function facilitates the expression of patients’ expectations, preferences, and perspectives so that they may more meaningfully participate in treatment and management decision-making (Roter, 2000a). The RIAS is applied to the smallest unit of expression to which a meaningful code can be assigned, generally a complete thought. These units are assigned to mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories that reflect the content and form of the medical dialogue. Form distinguishes utterances that are primarily informative (information-giving statements), persuasive (counseling statements), interrogative (closed and open-ended questions), affective (social, positive, negative, and emotional utterances), and process oriented (partnership-building utterances, orientations, and transitions). Content areas are specified for exchanges about medical condition and history, therapeutic regimen, lifestyle behaviors, and psychosocial topics relating to social relations and feelings and emotions. In addition to assigning utterances to the verbal categories of exchange, coders rate each speaker on a 6-point scale reflecting a range of affective dimensions, including anger, anxiety, dominance, interest, and friendliness. The ratings have been found to reflect voice tone channels that are largely independent of literal verbal content (Hall, Roter, & Rand, 1981). The system is flexible and can be tailored to the study context by adding or elaborating categories. The variables that can be calculated include total amount of talk (by participant), the ratio of provider to patient talk (an indication of verbal dominance), and the ratio of biomedical to psychosocial talk (an indicator of topic focus). Patient-centeredness scores can be computed by calculating the ratio of patient to physician communication control: the sum of physician information giving (including biomedical and psychosocial information giving) and patient psychosocial information giving and question asking divided by the sum of physician question asking and patient biomedical information giving. Calculating such variables is similar to the approach taken in several studies (Wissow et al., 1998) and by other investigators (Greenfield, Kaplan, & Ware, 1985). Coders apply the RIAS directly to audiotapes without transcription, using direct entry software that can be applied to digitized audio or video files or used with analogue audioor videotape recordings. When additional coding tasks are added—for instance, noting the presence of targeted skills, adding selected verbatim excerpts of dialogue or word use, or marking the dialogue of additional participants—coding may take longer. The RIAS has demonstrated substantial reliability and predictive validity for a variety of patient outcomes. In the first author’s own studies, the reliability has ranged across categories, from roughly .7 to .9 based on Pearson correlation coefficients, with lower reliabilities reflecting infrequent categories (Roter, Hall, & Katz, 1987; Roter et al., 1997;

128

ROTER AND McNEILIS

Wissow et al., 1998). Other researchers have reported similar reliabilities (Inui et al., 1982; Bensing & Dronkers, 1992; Van Dulmen, Verhaak, & Bilo, 1997; Mead & Bower, 2000). The RIAS has been widely used in studies in the United States and Europe as well as Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It has been applied to a variety of medical settings and specialties (i.e., adult and pediatric primary care, emergency medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, oncology, surgery, nursing, podiatry, and dentistry) as both a descriptive and evaluative research tool and a teaching tool. See Roter and Larson (2001) for representative references to the RIAS. A System for Measuring Patient-Centeredness. This system, developed specifically to assess the patient-centeredness of patient and physician behaviors (McWhinney, 1989; Stewart et al., 1995), involves scoring audiotaped or videotaped medical encounters (Brown, Weston, & Stewart, 1989; Levenstein, McCracken, McWhinney, Stewart, & Brown, 1986; Stewart et al., 1995). The scoring procedure is described in detail elsewhere (Brown, Stewart, & Tessier, 1995: Henbest & Stewart, 1989; Stewart et al., 1995), but the scores range from 0 (not at all patient-centered) to 100 (very patientcentered) based on an assessment of three main components. The first component is “understanding of the patients’ disease and experience.” This understanding is indicated by the specification of statements related to six elements of the illness experience: symptoms, prompts, ideas, expectations, feelings, and impact on function. Every pertinent statement for each of the six elements made by the patient is recorded verbatim on the coding sheet. The coder assigns a score based on whether the physician provided preliminary exploration (yes or no), further exploration (yes or no), or cut off discussion (yes or no). The second component, “understanding the whole person,” identifies the extent to which the physician and patient explore the context of the patient’s life setting (e.g., family, work, social supports) and stages of personal development (e.g., life cycle). The third component, “finding common ground,” reflects the development of mutual understanding and agreement in three key areas: the nature of the problems and priorities, the goals of treatment and management, and the roles of the physician and patient. Interrater reliability reported by the system’s authors and their raters ranged between .69 and .83 (Brown, Stewart, McCracken, McWhinney, & Levenstein, 1986; Stewart et al., 1996). Mead and Bower (2000) reported an intraclass correlation coefficient of .58 for use of the system in their study. Other Code Systems. The four systems reviewed above are the most widely recognized. There are a variety of other communicative phenomena being studied using somewhat different coding systems. These systems have been used primarily by their creators, although their results are as relevant and reliable as the more established systems. Further, some of these coding systems are grounded in theoretical frameworks. Four representative examples of previously published and reliable coding schemes are briefly reviewed below. One group of researchers, dissatisfied with single-level coding systems that inadequately assessed complex communicative moves, developed the Multi-Dimensional Interactional Analysis System (MDIA). They have primarily applied the system to the study of physician–elderly patient interactions (Charon, Greene, & Adelman, 1994; Greene, Adelman, Friedmann, & Charon, 1994). The purpose of the system is to capture complex information and relational strategies enacted by participants. Six components are coded: content (and who initiates), topic responsiveness, relational messages, overall task performance by physician and patient, three major topics covered, and sentinel events.

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

129

Greene et al. (1994) found older patient satisfaction was positively correlated with patient information-giving on patient-initiated topics, physician questions and supportiveness, length of visit, negatively phrased physician questions, shared laughter, and physician satisfaction. Three other systems are noted for their theoretical focus and creativity in charting new territory. Street and Millay (2001) have combined both qualitative and quantitative methods to develop a new system to assess patient participation in medical interviews. Other researchers have taken the well-established Relational Control Coding Scheme (RCCS) developed by Rogers and Farace (1975) and applied it to various medical settings and sites in order to uncover relational control patterns in provider-patient interactions (Cecil, 1998; von Frederichs-Fitzwater, & Giligun, 2001). Using a communicative competence framework, McNeilis (2001) developed the Coordination and Competence System (CACS) to assess patterns of competent and less competent physician-patient communication. Three components are coded, including content, utterance alignment (two levels), and function (McNeilis, 2001). A recent study using this coding scheme reported that independent ratings of medical students’ communication competence were related to the coding of their utterances in simulated patient interactions (Gillotti, Thompson, & McNeilis, in press). The study indicated the specific communicative behaviors that predicted judgments of competence. Comparison Studies

Two studies and one special journal issue compared coding systems in an attempt to draw some conclusions regarding their relative practical and predictive value or to validate one system by comparing with another. In the first of these studies, Bales’ original process analysis scheme, the RIAS, and the VRM were compared by Inui and associates (Inui et al., l982). The three interaction analysis systems were applied to 101 new-patient visits to a general medical clinic for which patient knowledge, satisfaction, recall of prescribed medications, and compliance had been determined. The investigators found that the explanatory power of the three systems differed. For instance, Bales’ system explained 19% of the variation between patients who took prescribed drugs correctly, compared with 28% for the RIAS and none for the VRM. Explanation of variation in knowledge was somewhat better for the RIAS than for Bales’ system and the VRM, and satisfaction also favored the RIAS and Bales’ systems. Specific findings were as follows: Physicians’ giving of directions and orientation to a patient was negatively related to knowledge, expressions of tension (verbal or nonverbal) were negatively related to satisfaction, and patient bids for clarification and physician anxiety (global ratings) were negatively related to compliance. In the second comparative study, the RIAS, a measure of patient-centeredness using the Henbest and Stewart coding approach (1989), and a global measure devised for use in the Euro-communication study were compared (Mead & Bower, 2000). The three instruments were each applied to the same sample of 55 videotaped general practice consultations. Correlations between the three measures were low, with correlations of similar magnitude between the Euro-communication rating scale and the RIAS ( Pearson correlation = .37; p < .01) and the Euro-communication rating scale and the Henbest and Stewart measure (Pearson correlation = .37; p < .01). The lowest correlation was between the RIAS and Henbest and Stewart measure (Pearson correlation = .21; p < 12). The Euro-communication rating scale was significantly correlated with five variables: physician age, perceived acquaintance with the patient, consultation length, proportion

130

ROTER AND McNEILIS

of patient-directed eye gaze in the consultation, and physician ratings of the importance of psychological factors. The RIAS was significantly correlated with all of these variables except physician age. In addition, the RIAS was correlated with the patient’s score on the General Health Questionnaire, a validated measure of emotional distress (Goldberg & Williams, 1988), patient age, and patient health status. The Henbest and Stewart (1989) measure was significantly associated with only one of the measures—patient-directed eye gaze. Recently, a special issue of Health Communication (Thompson, 2001) was devoted to reporting the results of new and previously published coding systems. Six different systems, including the RIAS, the patient-centered method, and the VRM, were applied to the same data set (10 general practitioner–patient interactions collected from an urban family practice clinic). The three other systems, included for their new or enduring theoretical contributions, were the CACS (McNeilis, 2001), a system for assessing patient participation (Street & Millay, 2001), and a relational control coding system (von Frederichs-Fitzwater & Giligun, 2001). Unfortunately, various problems with confidentiality and access prevented the authors from relating their coding results to outcome data. Despite this, there were dramatic similarities noted between the systems’ categories and between their goals, and there was also a conceptual linkage between the systems regarding patient participation in the medical interview (Rimal, 2001). In particular, Rimal noted that who controls the interview, as indicated by topic changes, amount of talk time, and expertise, is related to the capacity and willingness of patients to participate in the medical interview. Frankel (2001) also reviewed the results and reported that the goal of the special issue was not to highlight the superiority of one system over another. Instead, the value of such comparison studies lies in the sharing of results and expansion research objectives that can occur. Both Rimal and Frankel were quick to point out, however, that the standards for reporting results and identifying reliability and validity need vast improvement for this research tradition to continue to improve. Qualitative Inquiry into Health Communication

Increasingly over the past decade, studies using primarily qualitative methods for analyzing the physician-patient relationship have been published in medical, interdisciplinary, and communication journals. Unlike research using the coding systems described in the previous section, most qualitative health communication research does not rely on previous research or analytical schemes—its objectives are different. Qualitative communication research focuses on examining communicative practices and performances in a particular context. The assumption is that, through communicative acts, we enact the meaning of our relationships and experiences (Lindlof, 1995). Further, the objective of qualitative research is “to understand how people choose to express themselves” (Lindlof, 1995, p. 5). Because the goal is to understand people and their behavior, the researchers are less concerned with prediction and the control of variables. Instead, they attempt to preserve the form and content of human interaction and then to analyze its qualities. They want to describe and analyze practices and performances, not to statistically transform them for inferential purposes. An understanding of human relationships is developed by observing and recording communicative practices and performances. The research is typically guided by such questions as these: What is going on in this setting? What communicative actions are being performed here? How do the participants do these performances?

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

131

Researchers who engage in qualitative inquiry have multiple ways in which to approach physician-patient interaction. Given the subjective nature of illness and health, the institutional nature of the setting, and the life-and-death importance of health care, qualitative inquiry can provide rich detail about communicative practices and performances and how they interact in the delivery of care. How do researchers gather data on communicative practices and performances? The data primarily include actual talk, gestures, social action, and recollections and interpretations of actions performed. Usually these data are collected through in-depth interviews (including focus groups), participant observations, recordings of naturally occurring talk, and diaries. The methods used in analyzing the data include but are not limited to metaphor and narrative analysis, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis. These methods are reviewed below, and notable studies that used the methods are identified. The review is not intended to be exhaustive but rather to point to representative examples of qualitative research in health communication. Discourse Analysis. For the most part, discourse analysis focuses on how talk within medical or other settings functions to change, establish, or maintain social or power relationships. Researchers who use discourse analysis (and conversation analysis) are interested in investigating actual speaking practices in medical interactions, and for this purpose they create verbatim transcripts of audio- or videotaped sessions. For example, Fisher and Todd’s (1983) now seminal book, The Social Organization of Doctor-Patient Communication, examined detailed transcripts of various medical interactions to uncover institutional practices that affect medical decision making. In one chapter, Cicourel described how physicians’ and patients’ beliefs conflict with one another. Cicourel examined actual medical talk and the accompanying patient medical records to identify underlying beliefs and sources of misunderstanding. Other examples of discourse-based research include, several studies that examined goals and identities within the context of women’s health care delivery (Beck, 1997; Beck & Ragan, 1992; Smith-Dupre & Beck, 1996). Specifically, Beck (1997) analyzed personal experiences and recorded interactions to discover how “communicative activities work reflexively to enable participants to display and respond to relational and individual identities and goals” (p. 6). Other studies examined misunderstandings between physicians and patients (Cicourel, 1983; Shuy, 1976; West, 1984a, 1984b), the interactional accomplishment of tasks such as information exchange and relational development (Frankel & Beckman, 1982; Shuy, 1983), the constraints imposed by the interview structure on the ability of patients to tell their stories (Mishler, 1984), the opportunities for empathy that exist in medical interviews (Suchman, Markakis, Beckman, & Frankel, 1997), the functioning of interview closings (White, Rosson, Christensen, Hart, & Levinson, 1997), and the medical gaze and autonomy in dialogue (Nessa & Malterud, 1998a, 1998b). Conversational Analysis. Closely related to discourse analysis is the use of conversation analytic techniques. Conversation analysis rests on the assumption that structural features of talk obligate participants to pursue certain courses of action. Talk is transcribed using Gail Jefferson’s transcription conventions (see Morris & Chenail, 1995). The resulting transcriptions provide a means for understanding the timing and placement of utterances in streams of dialogue (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Some conversation analytic research is concerned with developing exemplars of and discovering rules for certain features of talk within medical interactions. Such research typically examines turn-taking rules, question-and-answer sequences, and conversational

132

ROTER AND McNEILIS

repair attempts, among other conversational phenomena. Talk of the Clinic (Morris & Chenail, 1995) presents many variants within this tradition. For instance, Frankel and Beach, in separate chapters, proposed that the traditional question-and-answer structure of the medical interview constrains participants’ choices for responding. Beach examined the use of “okays” in clinical interactions by identifying the diversity of its usage on a continuum from no difficulties in accomplishing tasks to increasing troubles needing remedy. Other studies have focused on the function of turn-taking and interruptions (West, 1984a, 1984b) and on the opening segments of medical interviews (Frankel and Beckman, 1982). Researchers have also looked at how politeness strategies are used to communicate social distance and influence decision making (Aronsson & Satterlund-Larsson, 1987) and how the presence and use of a computer in the medical exam imposes certain structural changes in physician and patient disclosure (Greatbatch, Heath, Campion, & Luff, 1995). The value of conversation analysis generally lies in its micro-analysis of naturally occurring medical talk (also true of discourse analysis). West and Frankel (1991) argued that conversation analytic techniques can help substantially in determining how certain communicative features of the medical interview can impact patient outcomes. Narrative Analysis. Narrative analysis, along with its various interpretive cousins, focuses on the recounted or observed stories of participants’ experiences. Waitzkin and Britt (1993) defined narrative in the medical context as “story telling that portrays the interrelationships among physical symptoms and the psychologic, social, or cultural context of these symptoms” (p. 1122). Generally, narrative analysis is intended to report on and give voice to individuals as they navigate the medical maze (Frank, 2000). Waitzkin and his colleagues have used narrative analysis in their studies based on the idea that one can expose social and institutional control, discourse features, and ideology that appear peripheral to medicine’s technical tasks (Borges & Waitzkin, 1995; Waitzkin & Britt, 1993). For instance, Waitzkin and Britt (1993) investigated self-destructive behaviors in medical interactions to uncover how various activities are marginalized or interrupted in the traditional medical interview. In doing so, they developed useful criteria for interpreting and analyzing narratives in medical encounters specifically. Mishler’s (1984) research is also representative of narrative analysis, for he used transcribed interactions to unearth two competing stories in the medical context, one involving “the voice of medicine” and the other “the voice of the lifeworld.” As a final example, narrative analysis encompasses using a grounded theory approach to analyze recorded or observed medical interactions. Also referred to as narrative account, the goal is to observe oneself and other participants in order to fashion an account of how understandings emerged during the interaction (Hirschmann, 1999). Studies utilizing this technique have examined how interns learn and unlearn communication skills (Hirschmann, 1999) and identified emergent relational themes in physician-patient dialogue (Walker, Miller-Day, & Arnold, in press). LIMITATIONS OF RESEARCH METHODS

There are a number of fundamental issues with which the field must contend for progress to continue, including the lack of guiding theoretical models, the limitations of current methods, the application of research methods and results to physician training and assessment, and the changing nature of the therapeutic relationship. Primary among these issues is the lack of theoretical models to guide investigators. (See Hall, Roter, & Katz, 1988; Roter, 2000a; Roter & Hall, 1992; and Thompson, 1994,

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

133

1998, for discussions of current models.) This theoretical deficit has contributed to the largely exploratory nature of physician-patient communication studies and the general absence of conceptual framing of results. In response, meta-analytic methods could be applied to uncover common underlying dimensions of this body of research. Many of the coding systems are complementary and could be combined in creative and powerful ways. Furthermore, measurement approaches must be subject to both construct and predictive tests of validity. We would encourage scholars to continue to explore the common denominators among the systems reviewed here and those recently published. In other words, researchers need to be conducting further analysis to identify commonalities and thereby promote creative syntheses as well as the replication of studies and the validation of their findings. Second, methodological limitations are evident in all of the individual systems of interaction analysis. In particular, there has yet to be developed a practical approach to accounting for interaction sequences in our coding systems. A basic assumption has been that summary profiles based on the frequencies of verbal behaviors engaged in during an encounter adequately reflect the communication process. However, as pointed out by Inui and Carter (l985), this is analogous to describing Hamlet as a play in which the principal characters include ghosts, witches, lords, ladies, officers, soldiers, sailors, messengers, and attendants, one of whom is already dead, one of whom dies by drowning, one by poisoned drink, two by poisoned sword, and one by sword and by drink! The schism between qualitative and quantitative methods continues to stymie progress on both fronts. It was not our intent to present a false dichotomy in reporting quantitative and qualitative studies separately. However, we found that most researchers self-identified their study as either quantitative or qualitative in nature. There is a paucity of research that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, and scholars in the field have frequently called for studies that combine methods of both types (Frankel, 2001; Rimal, 2001; Roter & Frankel, 1992; for an exception see Street & Millay, 2001). We need to develop new models of analysis that are integrative rather than parallel or competing. Frankel (2001), in a special issue of Health Communication, advocated combining qualitative and quantitative methods, noting that previous research has demonstrated that a synthesis of techniques for studying physician-patient interaction has better predictive power. He goes on to say, however, that in order to develop new approaches, researchers need to develop standards or conventions for reporting results to minimize the current variation in reporting techniques. New computer technologies and software, but nontraditional thinking even more so, may be the key to these breakthroughs. Along these same lines, the design of research in the field has been quite narrow and almost entirely cross-sectional, with little attention to longitudinality or continuity of care. In the meta-analysis reported earlier, only 40% of the studies did not indicate whether the patient and physician were previously acquainted (Roter et al., 1988). It is very rare for a study to follow the same patient-physician dyad prospectively; we found only two small studies of this kind, one a qualitative analysis (Stewart et al., 1995) and the other using the RIAS system (Van Dulmen et al., 1997). Our current work is moving in this direction; we have analyzed the health maintenance visits of 192 new babies over a 1-year period (for a total of 700 visits) to 30 pediatricians. Surprisingly, we found that a long-standing relationship was not associated with more frequent discussion of psychosocial topics or with greater physician awareness of maternal distress (Wissow et al., 2000). Although we suspect that continuity of care benefits the therapeutic relationship, we really know very little about continuity’s black box. In fact, it may be that there are some negative aspects

134

ROTER AND McNEILIS

of continuity, such as the presumptuousness of familiarity, labeling, and the need for a fresh perspective. Better specification of the ongoing relationship can be accomplished through more conscientious reporting by investigators and through more creative research designs. Third, investigators have some responsibility to make their research methods and findings accessible to the clinical audience. More intervention studies are needed in which teaching methods are evaluated in light of actual changes in physicians’ communication style and, further, validated against changes in patient outcomes. Those physicians who act as trainers in clinical interviewing courses would benefit from this area of research and could be asked to collaborate with researchers in developing analysis schemes pertinent to quality-of-care assessments. Research on patient interventions is also important and relatively underdeveloped. Many studies that addressed patient interventions found favorable effects. This is clearly an area that needs further elaboration and has tremendous potential for health education trials. FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Health communication researchers need to pay attention to the communicative dynamics in medical relationships under stress. Most of what we know about patient-physician communication has been learned within the context of routine primary care. There is a growing and important body of studies of cancer patients that will help us better understand nonroutine care and the management of life-threatening illness episodes. Incorporation of psychotherapeutic techniques and theories into communication assessment and primary care training will help push forward the field and enable physicians to better deal with the psychosomatic and psychosocial distress experienced by so many primary care patients. In addition to the obvious adaptations of psychotherapy within the context of primary care, new approaches to defining the nature of the therapeutic alliance and the parameters for patient counseling need to be established. Relationships outside of primary care, including emergency room visits and the care provided by specialists, have been largely ignored. Insight into these areas is important not only because a large number of patients remain outside of the primary care system but also because a majority of patients straddle primary and specialty care. Communication researchers must confront emerging ethical and philosophic issues. These include issues that arise where uncertainty is present, such as end-of-life planning, enrollment in clinical trials, treatment of the cognitively impaired, and genetic testing. Insight is needed into the social context of the therapeutic relationship, and attention must be given to gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity, particularly the gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity of physicians. Of these social context variables, gender has received the most attention within communication studies, although the number of studies is still quite small, probably less than 20 (Roter & Hall, 1992). Virtually unknown are the effects of physician social class, ethnicity, and culture on patients of the same or a different background. Knowledge of the basic social psychology of the therapeutic relationship continues to mature but still shows vulnerable gaps. We cannot yet consistently increase patient understanding and recall, improve participatory decision-making, or optimize adherence and commitment to therapeutic regimens. These are continuing and critical challenges for communication researchers. We must embrace the use of new interactive computer technologies at all levels of our work. Interactive CD-ROMs, web-based programming, and interactive videos are part of the new frontier.

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

135

Finally, the basic characteristics of the provider-patient relationship may be undergoing substantial evolutionary changes (Inui & Carter, l985). There is considerable evidence that patients are becoming more consumerist in orientation, and members of the new generation of patients are likely to directly challenge physician authority during medical encounters (Haug & Lavin, l983). There is also evidence that physicians may be accommodating their patients by agreeing to a more egalitarian relationship and tolerating patient participation in decision making. The implication of these changes is tremendous, and they must be given full and serious consideration in conceptualizing how the patient-physician relationship may be articulated in the medical encounter. Important strides have been made in understanding doctor-patient relations, but challenges remain. The most significant of these challenges is to push forward our conceptual and methodological imagination to approach the field in new and meaningful ways. REFERENCES Aronsson, K., & Satterlund-Larsson, U. (1987). Politeness strategies and doctor-patient communication on the social choreography of collaborative thinking. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 6, 1–27. Bales, R. F. (1950). Interaction process analysis. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley. Beach, W. A. (1995). Preserving and constraining options: “Okays” and “official” priorities in medical interviews. In G. H. Morris & R. J. Chenail (Eds.), The talk of the clinic: Explorations in the analysis of medical and therapeutic discourse (pp. 259–290). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Beck, C. S. (1997). Partnership for health: Building relationships between women and health care givers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Beck, C., & Ragan, S. (1992). Negotiating interpersonal and medical talk: Frame shifts in the gynaecologic exam. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 11, 47–61. Bensing, J. M., & Dronkers, J. (1992). Instrumental and affective aspects of physician behavior. Medical Care, 30, 283–298. Ben-Sira, Z. (1980). Affective and instrumental components in the physician-patient relationship: An additional dimension of interaction theory. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 28, 170–181. Boon H., & Stewart M. (1998). Patient-physician communication assessment instruments: 1986 to 1996 in review. Patient Education and Counseling, 35, 161–176. Borges, S., & Waitzkin, H. (1995). Women’s narratives in primary care medical encounters. Women’s Health, 23, 29–56. Brown, J. B., Stewart, M. A., McCracken, E. C., McWhinney, I. R., & Levenstein, J. H. (1986). The patient-centered clinical method: 2. Definition and application. Family Practice, 3, 75–79. Brown, J. B., Stewart, M., & Tessier, S. (1995). Assessing communication between patients and doctors: A manual for scoring patient-centered communication (Working Paper Series No. 95). London, Ontario: University of Western Ontario, Centre for Studies in Family Medicine. Brown, J. B., Weston, W. W., & Stewart, M. A. (1989). Patient-centered interviewing: 2. Finding common ground. Canadian Family Physician, 35, 153–157. Brownbridge, G., Lilford, R. J., & Tindale-Biscoe, S. (1988). Use of a computer to take booking histories SP in a hosptial antenatal clinic. Medical Care, 26, 474–487. Burton, M. V., Parker, R. W., & Wollner, J. M. (1991). The psychotherapeutic value of a “chat”: A verbal response modes study of a placebo attention control with breast cancer patients. Psychotherapy Research, 1, 39–61.

136

ROTER AND McNEILIS

Caporael, L. R. (1981). The paralanguage of caregiving: Baby talk to the institutionalized aged. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 876–884. Cecil, D. W. (1998). Relational control patterns in physician-patient clinical encounters: Continuing the conversation. Health Communication, 10, 125–150. Charon, R., Greene, M. G., & Adelman, R. D. (1994). Multi-dimensional interaction analysis: A collaborative approach to the study of medical discourse. Social Science and Medicine, 39, 955–965. Cicourel, A. V. (1983). Language and the structure of belief in medical communication. In S. Fisher & A. Todd (Eds.), The social organization of doctor-patient communication (pp. 221–240). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Cohen-Cole, S. (1991). The medical interview: The three function approach. St. Louis, MO: Mosby. Davis, M. (1969). Variations in patients’ compliance with doctors advice: An empirical analysis of patterns of communication. American Journal of Public Health, 58, 274–288. Davis, M. (1971). Variation in patients’ compliance with doctors’ orders: Medical practice and doctor-patient interaction. Psychiatry in Medicine, 2, 31–54. Emanuel, E. J., & Emanuel, L. L. (1992). Four models of the physician-patient relationship. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267, 2221–2226. Emerson, R. M. (l976). Social exchange theory. Annual Review of Public Health, 2, 335–362. Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196, 129–136. Engel, G. L. (1988). How much longer must medicine’s science be bound by a seventeenth century world view? In K. White (Ed.), The task of medicine: Dialogue at Wickenburg. (pp. 113–136). Menlo Park, CA: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Fisher, S., & Todd, A. D. (1986). Friendly persuasion: Negotiating decisions to use oral contraceptives. In S. Fisher & A. D. Todd (Eds.), Discourse and institutional authority: Medicine, education, and law (pp. 3–25). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Fisher, S., & Todd, A. D. (Eds.). (1983). The social organization of doctor-patient communication. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Frank, A. W. (2000). The standpoint of storyteller. Qualitative Health Research, 10, 354–366. Frankel, R. M. (1995). Some answers about questions in clinical interviews. In G. H. Morris & R. J. Chenail (Eds.), The talk of the clinic: Explorations in the analysis of medical and therapeutic discourse (pp. 233–258). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Frankel, R. M. (2001). Cracking the code: Theory and method in clinical communication analysis. Health Communication, 13, 101–110. Frankel, R. M., & Beckman, H. B. (1982). Impact: An interaction-based method for preserving and analyzing clinical transactions. In L. Pettegrew (Ed.), Explorations in provider and patient interaction (pp. 71–85). New York: Humana. Freemon, B., Negrete, V., Davis, M., & Korsch, B. (1971). Gaps in doctor-patient communication. Pediatric Research, 5, 298–311. Freidson, E. (1970). Professional dominance. Chicago: Aldine. Freire, P. (1983). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Continuum. Gillotti, C., Thompson. T. L., & McNeilis, K. S. (in press). Communicative competence in the delivery of bad news. Social Science and Medicine. Gladwin, T. (l964). Culture and logical process. In W. H. Goodenough (Ed.), Explorations in cultural anthropology: Essays in honor of George Peter Mudock (pp. 167–177). New York: McGraw-Hill. Goldberg, D. P. (1972). The detection of psychiatric illness by questionnaire. London: Oxford University Press.

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

137

Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review, 26, 161–179. Greatbatch, D., Heath, C., Campion, P., & Luff, P. (1995). How do desktop computers affect the doctor-patient interaction. Family Practice, 12, 32–36. Greene, M. G., Adelman, R. D., Friedmann, E., & Charon, R. (1994). Older patient satisfaction with communication during an initial medical encounter. Social Science and Medicine, 38, 1279–1288. Greenfield, S., Kaplan, S. H., & Ware, J. E. (1985). Patients’ participation in medical care: Effects on patient outcome. Annals of Internal Medicine, 102, 520–528. Hall, J., Roter, D., & Katz, N. (1988). Correlates of provider behavior: A meta-analysis. Medical Care, 26, 657–675. Hall, J., Roter, D., & Rand, C. (1981). Communication of affect between patients and physicians. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 11, 18–30. Haug, M., & Lavin, B. (1983).Consumerism in medicine: Challenging physician authority. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Henbest, R. J., & Stewart, M. A. (1989). Patient-centeredness in the consultation: 1. A method for measurement. Family Practice, 6, 249–253. Hirschmann, K. (1999). Blood, vomit, and communication: The days and nights of an intern on call. Health Communication, 11, 35–58. Inui, T. S., & Carter, W. B. (1985). Problems and prospects for health services research on provider-patient communication. Medical Care, 23, 521–538. Inui, T. S., Carter, W. B., Kukull, W. A., & Haigh, V. H. (1982). Outcome-based doctor-patient interaction analysis: 1. Comparison of techniques. Medical Care, 10, 535–549. Korsch, B. M., Gozzi, E. K., & Francis, V. (1968). Gaps in doctor-patient communication: 1. Doctor-patient interaction and patient satisfaction. Pediatrics, 42, 855–871. Levenstein, J. H., McCracken, E. C., McWhinney, I. R., Stewart, M. A., & Brown, J. B. (1986). The patient-centered clinical method: 1. A model for the doctor-patient interaction in family medicine. Family Practice, 3, 24–30. Lindlof, T. R. (1995). Qualitative communication research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McNeilis, K. S. (2001). Analyzing communication competence in medical interview. Health Communication, 13, 5–18. McWhinney, I. (l989). The need for a transformed clinical method. In M. Stewart & D. Roter (Eds.), Communicating with medical patients (pp. 25–40). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Mead, N., & Bower P. (2000). Measuring patient-centeredness: A comparison of three observation-based instruments. Patient Education and Counseling, 39, 71–80. Meeuwesen, L., Schaap, C., & van der Staak, C. (1991). Verbal analysis of doctor-patient communication. Social Science and Medicine, 10, 1143–1150. Mishler, E. G. (1984). The discourse of medicine: Dialectics of medical interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Morris, G. H., & Chenail, R. J. (Eds.). (1995). The talk of the clinic: Explorations in the analysis of medical and therapeutic discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Nessa, J., & Malterud, K. (1998a). “Feeling your large intestines a bit bound”: Clinical interaction—talk and gaze. Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, 16, 211–215. Nessa, J., & Malterud, K. (1998b). Tell me what’s wrong with me: A discourse analysis approach to the concept of patient autonomy. Journal of Medical Ethics, 24, 394–400. Orth, J. E., Stiles, W. B., Scherwitz, L., Hennrikus, D., & Vallbona, C. (1987). Interviews and hypertensive patients’ blood pressure control. Health Psychology, 6, 29–42. Parsons T. (1951). The social system. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

138

ROTER AND McNEILIS

Plato. (1961). The Gorgias (E. J. Emanuel, Trans.). In E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (Eds.), The collected dialogues (pp. 720). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Making health care decisions and ethical and legal implications of informed consent in the patient-practitioner relationship (Vol. 1). (1982). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Reichardt, C. S., & Cook, T. D. (1969). Beyond qualitative versus quantitative methods. In C. S. Reichardt and T. D. Cook (Eds.), Qualitative and quantitative methods in evaluation research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Rimal, R. (2001). Analyzing the physician-patient interaction: An overview of six methods and future research directions. Health Communication, 13, 89–100. Rogers, L. E., & Farace, R. V. (1975). Analysis of relational communication in dyads: New measurement procedures. Human Communication Research, 1, 222–239. Roter, D. (1987). An exploration of health education’s responsibility for a partnership model of client-provider relations. Patient Education and Counseling, 9, 25–31. Roter, D. L. (2000a). The enduring and evolving nature of the patient-physician relationship. Patient Education and Counseling, 39, 5–15. Roter D. L. (2000b). The medical visit context of treatment decision-making and the therapeutic relationship. Health Expectations, 3, 17–25. Roter, D., & Frankel, R. (1992). Quantitative and qualitative approaches to the evaluation of the medical dialogue. Social Science and Medicine, 34, 1097–1103. Roter, D. L., & Hall, J. A. (1989). Studies of doctor-patient interaction. Annual Review of Public Health, 10, 163–180. Roter, D. L., & Hall, J. A. (1992). Doctors talking to patients/patients talking to doctors: Improving communication in medical visits. Westport, CT: Auburn House. Roter, D., Hall, J., & Katz, N. (1987). Relations between physicians’ behaviors and patients’ satisfaction, recall, and impressions: An analogue study. Medical Care, 25, 399–412. Roter, D., Hall, J., & Katz, N. (1988). Patient-physician communication: A descriptive summary of the literature. Patient Education and Counseling, 12, 99–119. Roter, D. L., & Larson, S. (2001). The relationship between residents’ and attending physicians’ communication during primary care visits: An illustrative use of the Roter Interaction Analysis System. Health Communication, 13, 33–48. Roter, D. L., Stewart, M., Putnam, S., Lipkin, M., Stiles, W., & Inui, T. (1997). Communication patterns of primary care physicians. Journal of the American Medical Association, 270, 350–355. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematic for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language, 50, 696–735. Schneider, C. E. (1998). The practice of autonomy: Patients, doctors, and medical decisions. New York: Oxford University Press. Shorter, E. (l985). Bedside manners. New York: Simon & Schuster. Shuy, R. (1983). Three types of interference to an effective exchange of information in the medical interview. In S. Fisher & A. Todd (Eds.), The social organization of doctor-patient communication (pp. 189–202). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Shuy, R. W. (1976). The medical interview: Problems in communication. Primary Care, 3, 365–386. Smith-Dupre, A., & Beck, C. A. (1996). Enabling patients and physicians to pursue multiple goals in health care encounters: A case study. Health Communication, 8, 91–104. Starfield, B., Wray, C., Hess, K., Gross, R., Birk, P. S., & D’Lugoff, B. C. (1981). The influence of patient-practitioner agreement on outcome of care. American Journal of Public Health, 71, 127–131.

6. NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

139

Stewart, M. A. (1984). What is a successful doctor-patient interview? A study of interactions and outcomes. Social Science and Medicine, 19, 167–175. Stewart, M. A. (1995). Effective physician-patient communication and health outcomes: A review. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 152, 1423–1433. Stewart, M., Brown, J. B., Donner, A., McWhinney, I. R., Oates, J., & Weston, W. (1996). The impact of patient-centered care on patient outcomes in family practice (Final report). London, Ontario: Ministry of Health, Health Services Research. Stewart, M., Brown, J. B., Weston, W. W., McWhinney, I. R., McWilliam, C. L., & Freeman, T. R. (1995). Patient-centered medicine: Transforming the clinical method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stiles, W. B. (1992). Describing talk: A taxonomy of verbal response modes. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Stiles, W. B., Putnam, S. M., & Jacob, M. C. (1982). Verbal exchange structure of initial medical interviews. Health Psychology, 1, 315–336. Stiles, W. B., Putnam, S. M., James, S. A., & Wolf, M. D. (1979). Dimensions of patient and physician roles in medical screening interviews. Social Science and Medicine, 13, 335–341. Stiles, W. B, & White, M. L. (1981). Parent-child interaction in the laboratory: Effects of role, task, and child behavior pathology on verbal response mode use. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 9, 229–241. Street, R. L., & Millay, B. (2001). Analyzing patient participation in medical encounters. Health Communication, 13, 61–74. Suchman, A. L., Markakis, K., Beckman, H. B., & Frankel, R. (1997). A model of empathic communication in the medical interview. Journal of the American Medical Association, 277, 678–682. Szasz, P. S., & Hollender, M. H. (1956). A contribution to the philosophy of medicine: The basic model of the doctor-patient relationship. Archives of Internal Medicine, 97, 585–592. Thompson, T. L. (1994). Interpersonal communication and health care. In M. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 696–725). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Thompson, T. L. (1998). Patient/health professional communication. In L. Jackson & B. K. Duffy (Eds.), Health communication research: A guide to developments and directions (pp. 37–56). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Thompson, T. L. (Ed.). (2001). Coding Provider-Patient Interaction [Special issue]. Health Communication, 13(1). Tuckett, D., Boulton, M., Olson, C., & Williams, A. (1985). Meetings between experts. New York: Tavistock. von Frederichs-Fitzwater, M., & Giligun, X. (2001). Relational control in physician-patient encounters. Health Communication, 13, 75–88. Van Dulmen, A. M., Verhaak, P. F. M., & Bilo, H. J. G. (1997). Shifts in doctor-patient communication during a series of outpatient consultations in non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Patient Education and Counseling, 30, 227–237. Waitzkin, H., & Britt, T. (1993). Processing narratives of self-destructive behavior in routine medical encounters: Health promotion, disease prevention, and the discourse of health care. Social Science and Medicine, 36, 1121–1136. Walker, K.L., Miller-Day, M., & Arnold, C. L. (in press). Investigating the physician-patient relationship: Examining emerging themes. Health Communication, 14. Wallerstein, N., & Bernstein, E. (1988). Empowerment education: Freire’s ideas adapted to health education. Health Education Quarterly, 15, 379–394. West, C. (1984a). Medical misfires: Mishearings, misgivings, and misunderstandings in physician-patient dialogues. Discourse Processes, 7, 107–134.

140

ROTER AND McNEILIS

West, C. (1984b). Routine complications: Troubles with talk between doctors and patients. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. West, C., & Frankel, R., (1991). Miscommunication in medicine. In N. Coupland, H. Giles, & J. Wiemann (Eds.), Miscommunication and problematic talk (pp. 166–194). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. White, K. (l988). Physician and professional perspectives. In K. White (Ed.), The task of medicine: Dialogue at Wickenburg (pp. 4–29). Menlo Park, CA: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. White, J. C, Rosson, C., Christensen, J., Hart, R., & Levinson, W. (1997). Wrapping things up: A qualitative analysis of the closing moment of the medical visit. Patient Education and Counseling, 30, 155–165. Wissow, L. S., Roter, D., Bauman, L. J., Crain, E., Kercsmar, C., Weiss, K., Mitchell, H., & Mohr, B. (1998). Patient provider communication during the emergency department care of children with asthma. Medical Care, 36, 1439–1450. Wissow, L. S., Roter, D., Larson, S., Wang, M. C, Hwang, W. T., & Johnson, R. (2000). Longitudinal pediatric care and discussion of maternal psychosocial issues. Paper presented at the Mental Health Services Research Meetings, Washington, DC.

7 Outcomes of Patient-Provider Interaction Judith Belle Brown, Moira Stewart, and Bridget L. Ryan The University of Western Ontario

Over 30 years ago, Barbara Korsch’s (Korsch, Gozzi, & Francis, 1968) seminal work on patient satisfaction within the domain of the patient-provider encounter set the agenda for research on the interaction between patient-provider communication and patient outcomes. A plethora of studies have since provided substantial evidence on the interaction. These studies have moved beyond issues of patient satisfaction to include evidence on patient physiological outcomes (Greenfield, Kaplan, & Ware, 1985; Kaplan, Greenfield, & Ware, 1989), improvements in patient adherence (Garrity, 1981; Golin, DiMatteo, & Gelberg, 1996), and the impact of poor communication on provider malpractice complaints (Beckman, Markakis, Suchman, & Frankel, 1994; Lester & Smith, 1993). Relevant research findings include serendipitous results from studies not exclusively designed to explore the patient-provider interaction, as described later in this chapter (Headache Study Group, 1986). This chapter examines the relationship between patient-provider interaction and patient and provider outcomes. Patient outcomes include satisfaction, adherence to treatment, and patient health outcomes ranging from self-reporting (e.g., reporting reductions in concern about symptoms) to measures of physiologic status. Provider outcomes include malpractice complaints and the length of the consultation. The findings presented in this chapter were garnered from both qualitative and quantitative studies. A consistent message from studies using different methods enhances credibility, and the importance of multimethod approaches is discussed in the section on developing a research agenda for the 21st century. Research findings lack relevance if they are not directly applicable to the clinical setting. Findings must be timely, accessible, and make intuitive sense to the practitioner. A central challenge for researchers is discovering how study findings can best be disseminated

141

142

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

and ultimately improve patient and provider outcomes. The final section of this chapter discusses the implications of the research findings for clinical practice. Although this chapter examines specific outcomes connected to patient-provider interaction, what will quickly become apparent to the reader are the multiple and equally dynamic interfaces among the various outcomes. For example, patient satisfaction intersects with health outcomes, and the perennial concern about consultation length is interwoven with both patient satisfaction and health outcomes. Furthermore, the introduction of managed care adds a whole new dimension to the research on patient-provider interaction. Thus, research on patient-provider interaction and outcomes is influenced by many contexts, including the patients, the providers, and the specific environments in which the interaction transpires. Nonetheless, due to time and fiscal restraints, investigators have been required to focus their research narrowly. As a result, they have concentrated on specific aspects of a single patient-provider interaction, neglecting the evolution of interactions over time. This limitation poses challenges for future research as we continue to explore the synergistic interchange between patients and their providers. PATIENT OUTCOMES Satisfaction

Historically, patient satisfaction has been an important outcome. In a review of satisfaction research, Di Palo (1997) noted that patient satisfaction studies date back almost half a century. Much of the early research into patient satisfaction was part of a broad effort to investigate people’s satisfaction with different areas of their lives. In the 1960s and 1970s, medical sociology grew into a separate subfield, and so too did research into patient satisfaction. Unlike other sociological research, sociodemographic variables could not account for much of the variation in patient satisfaction (Fox & Storms, 1981; Pascoe, 1983; Ware, Davies-Avery, & Stewart, 1978). The most consistent relationships were found between patient satisfaction and age and sex, with increased satisfaction being associated with being older and female. Even in the cases of age and sex, the relationship with satisfaction depended on which aspect of medical care was being measured and the amount of variation accounted for was small (Pascoe, 1983). As noted previously, Korsch in the late sixties reported that there were a number of communication barriers between pediatricians and mothers that contributed significantly to dissatisfaction. These included lack of warmth and friendliness on the part of the physician, failure to take into account the parent’s concerns about and expectations for the medical visit, lack of clear-cut explanations of the diagnosis and the causation of illness, and the use of medical jargon (Korsch et al., 1968). Discovery of these causes of dissatisfaction led to greater interest in the patient-provider interaction and its effect on satisfaction. During the 1980s, studies on patient satisfaction increasingly treated patient satisfaction as multidimensional and included the patient’s assessment of the physician’s technical competence as well as the quality of the patient-physician interaction. Hall and Dornan (1988) conducted a meta-analysis of 107 studies on patient satisfaction and uncovered 12 dimensions of patient satisfaction. These included overall satisfaction; aspects relating to the provider, such as humanness and competence; and aspects relating to the system, such as cost, physical facilities, and waiting time. The investigators found that patients ranked aspects related to the provider, such as humanness, technical quality, and overall quality of medical care, as the most important. Aspects related to the system and not the provider were ranked as least important.

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

143

A 1997 collaborative study (Roter et al.), representing 13 sites in North America also described interaction patterns in primary care that were associated with patient satisfaction. The researchers found that the pattern associated with the highest level of satisfaction included communication that was balanced between the psychosocial and the biomedical; the pattern associated with the next level of satisfaction was labeled a consumerist pattern (the patients ask questions and physicians provide a large amount of information). This study emphasized that a communication approach that incorporates both psychosocial and biomedical topics is preferred by patients. In addition, research by S. J. Williams and Calnan (1991) identified intangible aspects of the patient-provider relationship as more important to patient satisfaction than issues such as access and availability, providing further evidence that communication is an essential component of the patient-provider interaction (M. Stewart et al., 1995). Specifically, for older patients, the provider’s interpersonal, affective style may have a larger influence on satisfaction than the actual subjects discussed during a visit (Greene, Adelman, Friedman, & Charon, 1994). Great value is placed on “caring” rather than “curing” (Linn et al., 1982). Thus, having a practitioner who understands their condition and whom they can turn to and rely on is very important. In Greene, Adelman, et al.’s 1994 study focusing on older patients, physician support and question asking in response to patient-raised topics was found to be positively correlated with patient satisfaction. The study also identified a trend indicating a negative correlation between patient question asking on patient-raised topics and satisfaction. The researchers hypothesized that older patients have been socialized to respect and not challenge the provider’s medical expertise and therefore have the expectation that the physician should be asking the questions. The patient is more comfortable answering questions than asking them and therefore less satisfied when having to do so during a medical encounter. The importance of continuity of care to patient satisfaction was highlighted in a review by Dietrich and Marton (1982). They concluded that continuity of care increased satisfaction for both patients and staff. This finding was consistent across various populations. Further, continuity of care can positively influence the attitudes of patients about the quality of care that they receive. Wasson et al. (1984) found that patients who experienced discontinuous care were less satisfied with their medical care and believed that their providers were not as knowledgeable or thorough. In another study, Weiss and Blustein (1996) found that long-standing patient-provider ties fostered less expensive, less intensive medical care. However, continuity can be disrupted when patients are dissatisfied. Researchers have examined patients’ decision to switch to different providers as a method of demonstrating dissatisfaction. A number of studies showed a relationship between dissatisfaction and the intention to switch services (Pascoe, 1983). In a study of older Americans, Weiss and Blustein (1996) found that dissatisfaction served as an incentive for change in provider for a small but significant portion (19.6%) of the subset of 251 respondents who had been seeing their care provider for one year or less. The most common reasons for dissatisfaction with a provider were “attitude or personality” (28.7%) and ineffectiveness of treatment (24.3%). The provider’s awareness of the patient’s expectations during a consultation is vital to achieve effective communication (S. Williams, Weinman, Dale, & Newman, 1995). Therefore, when the quality of communication with the provider is rated highly, patients are more likely to be satisfied with their medical care (Bertakis, as cited in Williams et al., 1995). The expectations of the practitioner are also related to patient satisfaction. For example, physician expectations as to whether an older patient would improve in the next

144

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

2 months were found to be a significant predictor of patient satisfaction. Those patients whom the physician expected to get better were more satisfied with their care (Linn, Linn, & Stein, 1982). In summary, research has demonstrated that the key elements of patient-provider communication influencing satisfaction include a caring and understanding manner on the part of the health care provider, medical competence, a balanced inquiry into psychosocial and biomedical concerns, continuity of the patient-provider relationship, and the expression of patient and provider expectations. These findings have implications for both training and clinical practice, and these implications are elaborated on in the final section. Adherence

Recommendations for treatment and/or management make up a prominent component of the patient-provider interaction. As a result, patient-provider communication and patient adherence to treatment regimens are inextricably linked. Patient-provider communication has been identified as the most important factor in determining patient adherence to treatment in a number of studies with different populations (Garrity, 1981; Kjellgren, Ahlner, & Saljo, 1995; Ley, 1982; McLane, Zyzanski, & Flocke, 1995; Svarstad, 1985). As Salzman (1995) noted, successful communication is essential to patient adherence if clinicians are going to “help and encourage patients to participate fully in an agreed upon regimen in an informed and intelligent manner” (p. 21). Numerous articles (Blackwell, 1996; Garrity, 1981; Golin et al., 1996; Kjellgren et al., 1995; Ley, 1982, 1985; Roter, 1989; Sanson-Fisher, Campbell, Redman, & Hennrikus, 1989; Sbarbaro, 1990; Squier, 1990; Svarstad, 1985; B. M. Wilson, 1995) have summarized the multiple dimensions of the patient-provider interaction that are linked with patient adherence to treatment regimens. From this literature, four inter-related issues are evident: information exchange or patient education; finding common ground concerning expectations; the patient’s active role in the interaction; and the necessity of the practitioner’s positive affect, empathy and encouragement. Each of these issues is discussed below, with particular attention to the challenges of adherence for older patients. As for the first issue, patient education significantly influences whether a patient adheres to a treatment regimen. A key factor closely linked to adherence is the clinician’s role as an educator who must ensure that the patient understands and remembers the treatment regimen (Garrity, 1981; Kjellgren et al., 1995; Ley, 1982; Svarstad, 1985). Clear, concise, and explicit physician instructions have been associated with higher patient adherence (Garrity, 1981). Replete in the literature are communication guides or techniques to increase adherence, such as providing simple directions, repeating instructions, explicitly categorizing the information given, providing instructions in a clear and simple manner, providing concrete and specific directions, checking for understanding, and using different communication strategies (e.g., diagrams, videos, written information) (Kjellgren et al., 1995; Ley, 1985; Sanson-Fisher et al., 1989; Svarstad, 1985). In addition, information transfer can be improved by providing training or coaching to patients or providers (Ley, 1982). Although education is important for all patients, older patients face particular challenges, in part because of increased comorbidity. Adherence has been reported by health care providers as one of the more difficult problems they face when treating chronically ill, older patients (Coe, Prendergast, & Psathas, 1984). Thus, encouraging adherence to treatment is an important aspect of the older patient–provider interaction. As with other

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

145

populations, research has identified communication as the most important factor in determining adherence in older patients (McLane et al., 1995). The number and dosing of medications have been found to be major stumbling blocks to adherence in the elderly (Anderson, Reed, & Kirk, 1982). Salzman (1995) found that adherence decreased among the elderly as the number of drugs prescribed and number of doses required per day increased. Lack of knowledge about a medication and its purpose has been associated with lower adherence (Salzman, 1995). Also, less time spent with elderly patients discussing these issues was one of the strongest predictors of lower adherence (McLane et al., 1995). Providers have been advised to assist medication adherence by taking the time to fully describe the medication and explain why it is being prescribed (Anderson et al., 1982; Garrity & Lawson, 1989; Salzman, 1995). The research clearly supports the importance of appropriate information exchange and education to improving patients’ adherence to treatment. However, information exchange and education alone are not sufficient to ensure patient adherence (Blackwell, 1996). The second major issue reported in the literature on patient-provider interaction and patient adherence is the goal of establishing mutual expectations for treatment. Discordance between patient and provider expectations may decrease adherence (Blackwell, 1996; Garrity, 1981; Golin et al., 1996). Thus, it is imperative that the patient and provider find common ground concerning treatment goals and regimens (Sanson-Fisher et al., 1989). Finding common ground increases the patient’s responsibility for the treatment decision and therefore increases the likelihood of adherence to the treatment regimen (Blackwell, 1996; Garrity, 1981; Golin et al., 1996). The third major issue is the patient’s role in the treatment decision. Accepting some responsibility for the treatment was found to be a condition necessary for maximal adherence (Garrity, 1981; Golin et al., 1996; B. M. Wilson, 1995). For the most part, patients who assume an active role in their care ask more questions and participate in making decisions about the treatment protocol (Garrity, 1981). Although active patients appear to demonstrate greater adherence, research has shown that not all patients desire the same level of involvement in their care. For example, a patient may be very active in obtaining information about treatment options but may still want the practitioner to decide on the final treatment protocol (Golin et al., 1996). It is important for the patient and the provider to determine together what the patient’s role will be. A study by Anderson et al. (1982) found that a discussion about shared responsibility and roles between the patient and the provider was associated with adherence in elderly patients. Although patients may vary in the amount of involvement they wish to have, the research suggests that some level of patient involvement is necessary for patient adherence. Therefore, physicians are encouraged to develop strategies, such as finding common ground and partnership building, that enhance the opportunities for patient involvement in interactions. A patient’s comfort level with participating in the interaction may depend on the fourth issue identified in the literature—the clinician’s ability to empathize with, understand, and encourage the patient. Positive affect appears to be associated with increased levels of patient adherence (Garrity, 1981; Kjellgren et al., 1995). Emotional support (Garrity, 1981), friendliness (Kjellgren et al., 1995), empathy (Squier, 1990), and partnership building (Roter, 1989; Sbarbaro, 1990) all appear to be important factors in improving patient’s adherence to treatment protocols. A study by Coe et al. (1984) stressed the importance of physicians’ understanding their elderly patients’ context for improving adherence. For example, if physicians understood their patients’ daily schedules, living arrangements, and possible cognitive or physical barriers to recall and adherence, they could adapt the timing of the medications and the

146

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

manner in which the medication and dosage is explained. This strategy reflects a patientcentered approach to medical care, with a strong emphasis on finding common ground between patients and physicians (M. A. Stewart, 1995). It is noteworthy that many of the provider characteristics associated with better adherence have also been associated with patient satisfaction. A study of older patients found that the more satisfied the patient, the better the chance that the older patient would adhere to the treatment regimen (Greene, Majerovitz, Adelman, & Rizzo, 1994; Linn et al., 1982). Linn et al. (1982), upon finding that physician expectations were related to adherence, speculated that the physicians’ expectations of the older patient were conveyed (verbally or nonverbally) to the patient and that this affected both adherence and satisfaction. For example, if a physician had negative expectations, the patient was less satisfied with the visit, put little faith in the physician’s suggested treatment, and thus did not follow the treatment regimen. In summary, four central issues related to the patient-provider interaction have been identified as playing an important role in patient adherence to treatment protocols. First, the patient-provider relationship provides the context within which information regarding the treatment regimen is communicated. Many communication strategies have been shown to enhance this transfer of information. Second, the patient and the provider must work toward finding common ground concerning treatment expectations. Adherence with the treatment regimen is enhanced when the patient and provider determine a treatment that meets both their needs and expectations. Third, patients should be encouraged to play an active role in gathering information about treatment options and in the actual decision-making process. Finally, positive affect on the part of the provider, including empathy and encouragement, further enhances the patient’s adherence to treatment protocols. This requires discussing aspects of a treatment regimen, such as medication scheduling, within the context of the patient’s particular life situation. Health Outcomes

A literature review published on this topic in 1995 found 21 studies relevant to patientprovider interaction and patient health outcomes (M. A. Stewart). An update of this review using the same MEDLINE search strategy for the years 1993 to 1999 uncovered three new relevant articles (“A Controlled Trial,” 1995; Kinnersley, Stott, Peters, & Harvey, 1999; Selfe, Matthews, & Stones, 1998). The first article (“A Controlled Trial,” 1995), by the SUPPORT principal investigators, described an intervention to improve end-of-life care in five U.S. teaching hospitals. The intervention included increasing the information physicians were given about the condition of the patients and assigning a nurse the responsibility of eliciting preferences, improving the understanding of outcomes, encouraging attention to pain, and facilitating patientphysician communication. The intervention did not demonstrate a positive influence on a variety of outcomes, including the patients’ level of pain. The study by Selfe et al. (1998) examined the influence of the initial consultation on the patients’ recovery from chronic pelvic pain. The authors used a visual analogue scale to examine the physician’s understanding of the patient’s problem, the patient’s willingness to accept the physician’s explanation or advice, and the patient’s perception of the physician’s ease during the consultation. They found that the patients’ satisfaction with the initial consultation was associated with complete recovery at follow-up 6 months later.

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

147

TABLE 7.1

Elements of Effective History-taking Element Provider Asks many questions about the patient’s understanding of the problem, concerns, and expectations and about his or her perception of the impact of the problem on function Asks the patient about his or her feelings Shows support and empathy Patient Expresses him- or herself fully, especially with regard to feelings, opinions, and information

Perceives that a full discussion of the problem has taken place Perceives that the physician has understood problem and was at ease during consultation

Patient Outcomes Affected Patient anxiety (Evans et al., 1987); symptom resolution (Heszen-Klemens & Lapinska, 1984) Psychologic distress (Roter et al., 1995) Psychologic distress (Roter et al., 1995); symptom resolution (Heszen-Klemens & Lapinska, 1984) Role limitation and physical limitation (Greenfield et al., 1985); health status, functional status, and blood pressure (Kaplan et al., 1989; Orth et al., 1987) Symptom resolution (Headache Study Group, 1986) Symptom resolution (Selfe et al., 1998)

The third study, by Kinnersley et al. (1999), explored whether, for patients presenting for new episodes of care, the physician’s consulting style, specifically the patient-centeredness of the consultation, was related to five outcomes. They found that the patient-centeredness of the consultation was related to patients’ satisfaction but not to patient-physician agreement, resolution of symptoms, resolution of concerns, or functional health status. These three studies, together with the other studies covered in the published review, can be summarized as follows. With regard to history taking, four randomized trials and six analytic studies were reviewed, of which eight obtained significant positive findings. Those aspects of history taking that were found to have a significant association with patient outcomes are summarized in Table 7.1. In general, the important aspects seem to be the physician’s asking questions about the patient’s illness experience and showing support as well as the patient’s fully expressing him- or herself. In the studies that examined discussion of the management plan, seven of the eight randomized, controlled trials and six of the eight analytic studies found significant correlations between communication interventions or variables and patient health outcomes. The aspects of communication relevant to discussion of the management plan that were found to significantly influence health outcomes are summarized in Table 7.2. These focus on information sharing, mutual decision-making, and patient-physician agreement. Five additional studies had findings relevant to other aspects of communication, such as a positive style (Thomas, 1978, 1987), a directive style (Savage & Armstrong, 1990), patient knowledge of instructions (Hulka, Kupper, Cassel, & Mayo, 1975), and meeting multifaceted in-patient support and information needs (“A Controlled Trial,” 1995). Of these, four studies showed no significant association between communication and patient health outcomes. Therefore, synthesizing Tables 7.1 and 7.2 leads to the conclusion that patient health outcomes are affected by (a) providers’ helping patients to fully describe their experience,

148

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN TABLE 7.2

Elements of Effective Discussion of the Management Plan Element Patient is encouraged to ask more

Patient is successful at obtaining information

Patient is provided with information programs and packages Provider gives clear information along with emotional support

Provider is willing to share decision making Physician and patient agree about the nature of the problem and the need for follow-up

Patient Outcomes Affected Anxiety (Thompson et al., 1990); role limitation and physical limitation (Greenfield et al., 1985; Greenfield et al., 1988; Kaplan et al., 1989) Functional status (Greenfield et al., 1985, Kaplan et al., 1989); physiologic status (Greenfield et al., 1988; Kaplan et al., 1989) Pain (Egbert et al., 1964); function (Johnson et al., 1988); mood and anxiety (Rainey, 1985) Psychologic distress, (Roter et al., 1995); symptom resolution (Heszen-Klemens & Lapinska, 1984); blood pressure (Orth et al., 1987) Patient anxiety (Fallowfield et al., 1990) Problem resolution (Starfield et al., 1981); symptom resolution (Bass et al., 1986)

(b) providers’ expressing empathy and support, (c) providers’ giving patients clear information, and (d) shared decision-making leading to agreement on the course of action. The reader will note a similarity between these key dimensions and those important for patient adherence. Five studies deserve special mention because of their design and unique findings. The Headache Study Group (1986) designed an analytic cohort study in family practice to answer the question, What variables predict recovery from headaches after a 1-year followup period? Characteristics of the patient; the interaction between the physician and the patient; and the symptoms, signs, and treatment were assessed during the first 6 weeks of the year. Recovery from headache was assessed at the end of the year. Those patients who recovered from the headaches at the end of the year were 3.4 times more likely to have perceived that their headache had been fully discussed at the initial visit than patients who had not recovered. This was the most important predicator of recovery from headache among the myriad clinical, treatment, and patient variables. Two studies of supportive care that affected “hard” health outcomes are also worthy of consideration. Spiegel, Bloom, Kraemer, and Gottheil (1989) conducted a randomized, controlled trial of supportive expressive group therapy for women with metastatic breast cancer. Fifty women were randomized to the group intervention, which lasted 1 year. After 4 years, all of the patients in the control group had died and a third of the treatment group were alive. Fawzy, Fawzy, and Hyun (1994) randomized 38 patients with newly diagnosed malignant melanoma to meet in groups for six sessions encompassing support and structured learning. Outcome measures, which were more positive in the intervention group than in the control group, included immune function, coping, anxiety, and depression. In addition, after 5 years, the survival rate in the study group was significantly higher than in the control group. Patients’ positive perceptions about patient-provider interaction have been found to influence not only patient outcomes but other health care outcomes as well. For example, Redelmeier, Molin, and Tibshirani (1995) conducted a randomized, controlled trial to examine compassionate care for the homeless. This care was provided by well-trained

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

149

volunteers who listened attentively to and shared common experiences with patients who visited emergency departments. The researchers found that the homeless patients who were randomly assigned to receive compassionate care were significantly more satisfied and took significantly longer to return for another visit than patients receiving usual care. The researchers suggested that compassionate care may reinforce the reassurance being offered to the patient and promote faith in the system. With increased trust there may be a decrease in patients’ need for a second opinion, leading to a reduction in the use of overtaxed emergency rooms. In a recent study with an analytic cohort design, M. Stewart et al. (2000) sought to test the association between health outcomes and the patient-centeredness of an interaction. Patient-centeredness was measured by whether the physicians had elicited the patient’s experience of the illness as well as information about the disease, explored whole-person issues, and found common ground with the patient about the nature of the problem and the management plan. The study, which related patient-centered scores of audiotaped interactions (of family physicians and their patients) with health outcomes, revealed an important intermediary variable: the patient’s perception that the visit was patient-centered. This finding suggests that patient perceptions are an important step in the pathway connecting the patient-provider interaction to patient health and other health care outcomes, such as referral and diagnostic testing (M. Stewart et al., 2000). It also has important implications for managed care policies regarding patient-provider interaction. PROVIDER OUTCOMES Malpractice Claims

Patient dissatisfaction and poor communication between patients and health care providers may lead patients to file malpractice suits against their providers (Levinson, 1994). A number of studies have shown an association between poor communication and malpractice claims (Beckman et al., 1994; Hickson, Clayton, Githens, & Sloan, 1992; Hickson et al., 1994; Lester & Smith, 1993; Vincent, Young, & Phillips, 1994). The communication problems most frequently identified are inadequate explanation of diagnosis or treatment (Beckman et al., 1994; Hickson et al., 1992; Hickson et al., 1994; Vincent et al., 1994) and patients’ feeling ignored (Hickson et al., 1992; Hickson et al., 1994; Vincent et al., 1994). Other communication problems include physicians’ misleading patients (M. Stewart et al., 1995), physicians’ not understanding patient and family perspectives (Beckman et al., 1994), physicians’ devaluing patient and family views (Beckman et al., 1994), physicians’ desertion of patients (Beckman et al., 1994), and patients’ feeling rushed (Hickson et al., 1994). Using an experimental design, Lester and Smith (1993) demonstrated that negative physician communication behaviors—such as no eye contact; no smiling; no praise; no friendly physical contact; harsh, clipped, critical tones; minimal exchange of information; no acknowledgement of verbalizations; no reflection of affect; and a relatively short period of contact—could be risk factors for malpractice suits. Their findings suggest that positive communication behaviors—such as eye contact, friendly tone of voice, good exchange of information, smiling, appropriate physical contact (e.g., shaking hands), self-disclosure, acknowledgement of verbalizations, reflections of affect, appropriate praise, and a relatively long period of contact—decrease the likelihood of malpractice suits. Other studies have also indicated that good communication between patients and providers helps prevent malpractice claims (Penchansky & Macnee, 1994; Shapiro et al., 1989).

150

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

In contrast to the studies cited above, the study by Levinson, Roter, Mullooly, Dull, and Frankel (1997) was unique in two ways: the researchers investigated the relationship between poor communication and malpractice claims through direct observation and identified specific communication behaviors that could potentially reduce the risk of litigation and they compared communication behaviors related to malpractice claims within different physician specialties. The authors identified communication behaviors that were characteristic of “claim” and “no-claim” primary care physicians. No-claim primary care physicians had longer visits and displayed more humor and laughter. They also provided more statements to help orient the patients to their actions or plan (e.g., “First I will examine you, then you will have tests”). Finally, the physicians used more facilitating comments, elicited patients’ opinions, clarified patients’ understanding, and addressed patient prompts. Interestingly, the study did not find communicative behaviors that distinguished between claims and no-claims surgeons. The authors suggested that patients’ expectations may be different when they visit surgeons or that other factors such as negligence and surgical complications may be more important than the communication variables measured. However, it may also be that communication between patients and their surgeons is more important when the surgeons must break bad news or inform patients of poor surgical outcomes. Based on the studies cited, it appears that a breakdown in communication often triggers a complaint about clinical care that could lead to a malpractice claim. This finding has implications for both future research and clinical practice. Time

The majority of research on how time impacts the patient-provider interaction has been conducted in the primary care setting, and although the length of consultation varies from country to country, the debate on how much time is enough remains persistent in the medical community (A. Wilson, 1991). The hypothesis that the “ability to communicate effectively may be largely a function of the time available for the consultation” (Roland, Bartholomew, Courtenay, Morris, & Morrell, 1986, p. 874) is at the center of the controversy, and there exist studies that support each side. After reviewing the relevant findings, this section concludes with a discussion of the methodological challenges in studying the relationship between patient-provider interaction and time. The following studies provide evidence to support the belief that optimal patientprovider interactions do not result in longer office visits. Marvel, Doherty, and Weiner’s (1998) study compared the interviews of exemplary family physicians (physicians who had received postgraduate training in family therapy) and those of community family physicians (physicians who had no additional training). The researchers found no difference in the length of the office visits between the two physician groups, but the exemplary physicians engaged the patients in more in-depth interactions, including exploration of psychosocial issues and collaboration with patients. Arborelius and Bremberg (1992) found that positive consultations (i.e., consultations that left physician and patient with a positive impression) took less time than negative consultations (those that left both parties with a negative impression). Furthermore, in the positive consultations, more time was devoted to exploring patient ideas and concerns. This finding is consistent with the results of Marvel et al.’s (1998) study. Greenfield, Kaplan, Ware, Yano, and Frank (1988) observed that, although the total volume of conversation

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

151

between experimental group patients and their physicians was greater than for the control group, there was no corresponding change in the length of the visit. The intervention (to improve the information-seeking skills of the patient) produced a more active interchange but not a longer visit. Again, this is in concert with Marvel et al.’s (1998) findings on enhanced patient collaboration. Henbest and Fehrsen (1992) found that the most patientcentered consultations did not take longer than those that were less patient-centered. They stated that the “frequent assumption that it takes longer to conduct a patient-centered consultation was not supported. Lack of time cannot be legitimately offered as an excuse for not conducting patient-centered consultations” (p. 316). In contrast, other studies suggest that optimal patient-provider interaction requires longer consultations (Ferris, 1998; Hornberger, Thorn, & MaCurdy, 1997; Howie, Porter, Heaney, & Hopton, 1991; Hull & Hull, 1984; Jacobson, Wilkinson, & Owen, 1994; Marvel, 1993; Ridsdale, Morgan, & Morris, 1992; Verby, Holden, & Davis, 1979; Westcott, 1977). Ferris (1998) found that longer visits were associated with the provision of counselling and preventive services such as vaccination. Hornberger et al. (1997) concluded that it is not possible to meet the expectations of the provider, the patient, and the many and varied professional organizations generating clinical practice guidelines without increasing the length of the consultations. Howie et al. (1991) found that, for 17 of 33 questions asked, significantly higher proportions of patients gave responses that favored long consultations. The question “Did the doctor give you a chance to say what was really on your mind?” was positively associated with length of visit. They concluded that “the advantages of longer consultations do not simply lie in more services being provided but in a larger proportion of the needs which have been recognized being followed up by the doctor” (p. 54). In a study examining the lengthening of booking intervals from 5 to 10 minutes, M. Williams and Neal (1998) found that patients reported greater satisfaction with the longer consultation and were better able to understand and cope with their illnesses. A discussion of the impact of consultation length on patient-provider interaction would not be complete without the inclusion of patient satisfaction. Some studies have found that a decline in patient satisfaction is associated with longer visits (Hornberger et al., 1997). In contrast, an association between length of visit, patient volume, and patient satisfaction was found by Zyzanski, Stange, Langa, and Flocke (1998). Lower patient satisfaction was more common among the patients of high-volume physicians, whose visits were 30% shorter than those of low-volume physicians. Patients of high-volume physicians reported less follow-up on patient problems, less attention to patient responses, and less adequate explanations provided. In addition, high-volume physicians had significantly fewer patients who were up to date on the recommended guidelines for screening, counselling, and immunization. Thus, the authors suggested that increases in efficiency may occur at the expense of patient satisfaction and adequate preventive care and have a negative impact on the patient-provider interaction. Using the same data set, Gross, Zyzanski, Borawski, Cebul, and Stange (1998) identified two interaction strategies that would improve patient satisfaction. First, providers need to allow a brief period of time to “chat” about topics of a nonmedical nature. This kind of discussion, they suggested, may help the patient connect with the provider. Secondly, physicians must allow sufficient time to provide patients with feedback on clinical findings. Also using the same rich data set, Stange et al. (1998) observed that the mean length of the patient-physician visit was 10 minutes. Patients reported high levels of satisfaction with their provider and perceived that their expectations had been met. Taken together, these findings suggest that a 10-minute encounter is long enough to satisfy patients and meet their expectations.

152

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

Certain factors, including patient and physician characteristics, may increase or decrease the consultation length. First, some topics such as alcohol abuse (Arborelius & Thakker, 1995) and stress (Russell & Roter, 1993) may require more time due to their complex nature. Also, patient characteristics such as socioeconomic status (Bain, 1979), age (Hull & Hull, 1984; Pereles & Russell, 1996; Westcott, 1977) and need for an interpreter (Rivadenyra, Elderkin-Thompson, Silver, & Waitzkin, 2000) may necessitate longer visits. Physician factors that may result in shorter visits include lack of time available for consultations (Herman, 1997) and lack of adequate physician remuneration for longer consultations (Howie et al., 1991; Pereles & Russell, 1996; Wirtzer, 1993). In conclusion, the examination of consultation length faces several methodological challenges. Securing a representative sample may be difficult, as the clinicians likely to agree to participate in studies on consultation length may reflect a biased sample. The greatest challenge, however, may be finding an effective method of measuring consultation length. Patient and provider self-reports of consultation length may be inaccurate. Also, determining the mean length of patient visits by dividing the time a provider spends in the office or clinic by the number of patients seen lacks precision (A. Wilson, 1991). The provider may spend considerable time on charting or administrative activities. The most accurate way of determining the consultation length is to observe the actual encounter between the patient and provider (A. Wilson, 1991), either directly (e.g., sitting in on the interview or viewing it through a one-way mirror) or by audio- or videotaping the encounter (which is less intrusive and more amenable to subsequent analysis). However, observation, no matter what the method, tends to be labor intensive and expensive. Another important issue is the context of the encounter. Context, in this sense, refers to outpatient versus inpatient care as well as the provider’s specific discipline. The clinical setting may dictate the amount of time available for the interaction. Some health care providers, such as family physicians, are in a position to build on the interaction over multiple encounters. This suggests that future research needs to examine series of consultations as well as individual encounters (Gray, 1998). The relationship between patient-provider interaction and consultation length remains a controversial issue. More detailed and rigorous studies, such as those by Gross et al. (1998), Zyzanski et al. (1998), and Stange et al. (1998), will serve to settle the question. A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Research on the impact of patient-provider interaction on both patient and provider outcomes has an opportunity to make important contributions. We make four recommendations regarding future research on this topic. First, a variety of methods need to be employed to maximize research credibility. Qualitative and quantitative methods both build on and inform each other, as demonstrated later in this section. Second, more intervention studies are needed to determine the interconnections between patient-provider interaction and outcomes for both patients and providers. Third, researchers need to develop and refine assessment tools for exploring patient-provider interaction, increasing the rigor of this area of inquiry. Finally, research on patient-provider interaction and outcomes must take into account the confusion and tension surrounding managed care. Future research should also attempt to determine what outcomes are most relevant for patient health and well-being as well as patient care. In doing this, it will need to distinguish between outcomes favored by patients and those endorsed by providers. Of utmost importance will be the establishment of mutually agreed upon outcomes. Finding common ground on these outcomes will guide not only further research but clinical practice

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

153

as well. When the most efficacious treatment is inconsistent with the needs of the patient, clinical wisdom may override research evidence. For example, if a physician and a patient with type 2 diabetes rigidly adhere to effective intervention guidelines in order to lower the patient’s HbA1 C, their interaction might be compromised as a side effect, putting their long-term relationship in jeopardy. In other words, a short-term gain might preclude success in the long run. This is where the interface between qualitative and quantitative methods is essential. The following examples demonstrate the research potential when both methods are brought together. By conducting in-depth interviews with patients regarding their providers’ communication style while providing information on smoking cessation, we may learn about the patients’ experience. Our new understanding can then be used to direct the development of instruments to ascertain patients’ satisfaction with health promotion strategies targeted at smoking cessation and also ascertain the patients’ ultimate success when these strategies are used. Alternatively, quantitative studies may identify a correlation between certain patient-provider characteristics that encourage adherence to a specific medication regimen. However, a qualitative approach (interviews or focus groups) may be necessary to isolate the specific activities or actions of the providers that enhanced the patients’ adherence. Recent qualitative studies (Britten, Stevenson, Barry, Barber, & Bradley, 2000; Salmon, Peters, & Stanley 1999) provide examples of how this research approach may shed light on difficult and complex issues and ultimately generate hypotheses for future exploration. For example, Britten et al.’s (2000) study on the misunderstanding between patients and physicians regarding the decision-making process used in the family practice setting highlights specific issues that could be explored via quantitative methods. One specific finding was that patients and physicians often disagree about the attribution of side effects. Future research could explore not only how frequently this occurs but what factors significantly ameliorate this problem. The study by Salmon et al. (1999) on patients’ perceptions of medical explanations of somatization disorders also illustrates how qualitative findings may provide insights of value for designing future quantitative studies of difficult patient problems. Their finding that patients with somatization disorders are both satisfied and empowered when their physicians’ explanations of the problems are perceived as tangible, exculpating, and involving could guide the development of an intervention study on communication and subsequent patient outcomes. Often studies are conducted retrospectively to investigate the impact of patient-provider communication on patient outcomes. Future research needs to employ a prospective approach, such as that used by Golin et al. (2000) to investigate the relationship between patient-physician communication and the desire for resuscitation. As suggested by this study, qualitative methods to examine the dynamics that alter patients’ communication and potential outcomes are also needed. McWilliam, Brown, and Stewart’s (2000) study on breast cancer is an example of how qualitative findings can provide important information and direction in the development of intervention studies designed to change provider styles of communication. In this study, breast cancer patients identified four dimensions as crucial to their communication with their physicians, particularly around the time of first diagnosis or a diagnosis of recurrence. First, they desired their physicians to spend time with them, exhibit a caring attitude, and engender hope. Second, they placed a high value on information sharing. As breast cancer patients, they felt an urgent need for accurate and detailed information to help them make decisions. However, they wanted to discuss the information with a trusted physician to assess its relevance and meaning for their lives. Third, they wanted to regain control over

154

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

their lives. Here, as in previously described studies, it was important for the physicians to nurture the patients’ first attempts to care for themselves. Finally, they wanted to work together with their physicians, as well as with family and friends, to reknit their lives. These findings were used in the development of a randomized, controlled trial to examine an innovative continuing medical education program on communication with breast cancer patients (the goal of the program was to change provider behavior and hence patient outcomes). In conclusion, future research studies need to employ a variety of methods to optimize the investigation of patient-provider interaction and outcomes. With regard to the need to develop new measures of communication, Boon and Stewart (1998) published a comprehensive review of patient-physician communication assessment instruments cited in the literature from 1986 to 1996. Forty-four instruments were obtained and evaluated; 16 were designed for assessing and teaching patient-physician communication (medical education category) and 28 were designed for research purposes (research category). The instruments ranged from self-report measures to detailed and labor-intensive scoring procedures. The authors found that few instruments had been widely used. Many had never been demonstrated to be reliable or valid, making it difficult to compare the findings of different studies. They suggested that researchers should work collectively to evaluate data sets using different instruments in order to validate the measures. Also, very few instruments take into account nonverbal communication, despite research suggesting that the ability of providers to express emotions nonverbally and decode their patients’ nonverbal cues is associated with patient satisfaction and appointment keeping (DiMatteo, Hays, & Prince, 1986; DiMatteo, Taranta, Friedman, & Prince, 1980). Despite a plethora of available measures, there still appears to be no instrument that captures the dynamic interchange or the subtle nuances that characterize the patientprovider interaction. This remains a rich area for research. As managed care continues to dictate the payment arrangements for patient care, future research must include systematic inquiry into the outcomes of patient-provider interaction, including such issues as patients’ trust in their providers and the providers’ commitment to their patients’ well-being. (Mechanic & Schlesinger, 1996). Also, because managed care organizations place conflicting demands on providers (e.g., expecting them to see more patients while ensuring continued patient satisfaction), future research that combines qualitative and quantitative methods must be directed toward this issue. Based on the burgeoning research on the impact of managed care (see Chapter 15) and the impact of malpractice on patient outcomes, we surmise that these two issues will dominate future practice and drive future research. At present, the links between malpractice and managed care are only anecdotal (Sanders & McBride, 1998) and therefore require further study. However, researchers must proceed with caution. In our opinion, overemphasis on these topics may deflect research from well-founded areas of investigation and prevent them from examining all the important dimensions that impact patient-provider interaction and outcomes. IMPLICATIONS FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE

As indicated, various dimensions of patient-provider interaction impact patient satisfaction, adherence to treatment regimens, and health outcomes. Each of these dimensions has implications for daily practice. Furthermore, the findings of research into these dimensions can inform curriculum development at the undergraduate, postgraduate, and continuing education levels, allowing clinician skills and attributes to be backed by strong evidence.

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

155

For example, the skills of listening and facilitation are not merely supported by “soft evidence” but rather by significant associations with patient satisfaction, patient adherence, patient recovery, and a decline in malpractice claims. Awareness of the importance of continuity and the need to explore both the disease and the illness experience during the encounter can assist the clinician in providing care that is responsive to the patient’s needs and expectations. These findings can drive curriculum, evaluation, and ultimately professional certification. Yet to be determined is the impact of managed care on the patient-provider interaction. In spite of the fact that patients view such physician characteristics as trustworthiness and competence to be important attributes related to outcomes, managed care may undermine these basic components of the patient-provider relationship. Slovenko (1999) noted that “under capitation plans, the less the physician does, the more he or she earns” (p. 12). This notion of ‘do less, earn more’ could translate into ‘communicate less, earn more’. The implications for clinical practice need to be monitored. Although much has been accomplished in terms of educating undergraduate medical students and residents at some faculties of medicine, other faculties have yet to revise their curricula. Continuing medical education is largely an unmapped frontier for the communication educators. The key future challenges for clinicians will be to incorporate desirable changes into practice while maintaining quality interactions with patients. Examples of recent developments include using computers in the examining room so that patients and providers can speedily access information and incorporating evidence-based guidelines or protocols into everyday practice. Both of these changes provide benefits but also carry potential risks, such as diminished interaction between patient and provider. Clinicians and researchers alike would be wise to monitor the impact of these and other new developments on the valued patient-provider interaction. CONCLUSION

This chapter has focused on the effect of patient-provider interaction on patient outcomes such as satisfaction, adherence, and health status as well as its effect on provider outcomes such as malpractice and availability of time. We contend that all of these areas of inquiry are relevant and worthy of study. However, we must ask to what end are we studying and improving patient-provider interaction? Is our goal to positively influence patient health as well as other important health care outcomes, including system-level outcomes? All of the patient-provider interaction issues have implications for practice, and new questions arising out of practice may stimulate innovative research ideas that we have not yet envisioned. Although research on patient-provider interaction has become even more challenging in this era of managed care, the need for increased knowledge demands that future studies be designed and carried out. REFERENCES Anderson, R. J., Reed, G., & Kirk, L. M. (1982). Compliance in elderly hypertensives. Clinical Therapeutics, 5 (Spec. No.), 13–24. Arborelius, E., & Bremberg, S. (1992). What can doctors do to achieve a successful consultation? Videotaped interviews analyzed by the “consultation map” method. Family Practice, 9, 61–66.

156

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

Arborelius, E., & Thakker, K. D. (1995). Why is it so difficult for general practitioners to discuss alcohol with patients? Family Practice, 12, 419–422. Bain, D. J. G. (1979). The relationship between time and clinical management in family practice. Journal of Family Practice, 8, 551–559. Bass, M. J., Buck, C., Turner, L., Dickie, G., Pratt, G., & Robinson, H. C. (1986). The physician’s actions and the outcome of illness in family practice. Journal of Family Practice, 23, 43–47. Beckman, H. B., Markakis, K. M., Suchman, A. L., & Frankel, R. M. (1994). The doctorpatient relationship and malpractice: Lessons from plaintiff depositions. Archives of Internal Medicine, 154, 1365–1370. Blackwell, B. (1996). From compliance to alliance. A quarter century of research. Netherlands Journal of Medicine, 48, 140–149. Boon, H., & Stewart, M. (1998). Patient-physician communication assessment instruments: 1986 to 1996 in review. Patient Education and Counseling, 35, 161–176. Britten, N., Stevenson, F. A., Barry, C. A., Barber, N., & Bradley, C. P. (2000). Misunderstandings in prescribing decisions in general practice: Qualitative study. British Medical Journal, 320, 484–488. Coe, R. M., Prendergast, C. G., & Psathas, G. (1984). Strategies for obtaining compliance with medications regimens. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 32, 589–594. A controlled trial to improve care for seriously ill hospitalized patients. (The Study to Understand Prognosis and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments [SUPPORT]). (1995). Journal of the American Medical Association, 274, 1591–1598. Dietrich, A. J., & Marton, K. I. (1982). Does continuous care from a physician make a difference? Journal of Family Practice, 15, 929–937. DiMatteo, M. R., Hays, R. D., & Prince, L. M. (1986). Relationship of physicians’ nonverbal communication skills to patient satisfaction, appointment noncompliance and physician workload. Health Psychology, 5, 581–594. DiMatteo, M. R., Taranta, A., Friedman, H. S., & Prince, L. M. (1980). Predicting patient satisfaction from physicians’ nonverbal communication skills. Medical Care, 18, 376–387. Di Palo, M. T. (1997). Rating satisfaction research: Is it poor, fair, good, very good or excellent? Arthritis Care and Research, 10, 422–430. Egbert, L. D., Battit, G. E., Welch, C. E., et al. (1964). Reduction of postoperative pain by encouragement and instruction of patients: A study of doctor-patient rapport. New England Journal of Medicine, 270, 825–827. Evans, B. J., Kiellerup, F. D., Stanley, R. O., Burrows, G. D., & Sweet, B. (1987). A communication skills programme for increasing patients’ satisfaction with general practice consultations. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 60, 373–378. Fallowfield, L. J., Hall, A., Maguire, C. P., & Baum, M. (1990). Psychological outcomes of different treatment policies in women with early breast cancer outside a clinical trial. British Medical Journal, 301, 575–580. Fawzy, F. I., Fawzy, N. W., & Hyun, C. S. (1994). Short-term psychiatric intervention for patients with malignant melanoma: Effects on psychological state, coping and the immune system. In C. E. Lewis, C. O’Sullivan, & J. Barroclough (Eds.), The psychoimmunology of cancer: Mind and body in the fight for survival (pp. 291–319). New York: Oxford University Press. Ferris, T. G. (1998, July). Today’s primary care doctors offer more time and counseling to children but also prescribe more medications. AHCPR, 217, 8–9. Fox, J. G., & Storms, D. M. (1981). A different approach to sociodemographic predictors of satisfaction with health care. Social Science and Medicine, 15A, 557–564.

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

157

Garrity, T. F. (1981). Medical compliance and the clinician-patient relationship: A review. Social Science and Medicine: Part E. Medical Psychology, 15, 215–222. Garrity, T. F., & Lawson, E. J. (1989). Patient-physician communication as a determinant of medication misuse in older, minority women. Journal of Drug Issues, 19, 245–259. Golin, C. E., DiMatteo, M. R., & Gelberg, L. (1996). The role of patient participation in the doctor visit: Implications for adherence to diabetes care. Diabetes Care, 19, 1153–1164. Golin, C. E., Wenger, N. S., Liu, H., Dawson, N. V., Teno, J. M., Desbiens, N. A., Lynn, J., Oye, R. K., & Phillips, R. S. (2000). A prospective study of patient-physician communication about resuscitation. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 48, S52–S60. Gray, D. P. (1998). Forty-seven minutes a year for the patient [Editorial]. British Journal of General Practice, 48,1816–1817. Greene, M. G., Adelman, R. D., Friedmann, E., & Charon, R. (1994). Older patient satisfaction with communication during an initial medical encounter. Social Science and Medicine, 38, 1279–1288. Greene, M. G., Majerovitz, D., Adelman, R. D., & Rizzo, C. (1994). The effects of the presence of a third person on the physician–older patient medical interview. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 42, 413–419. Greenfield, S., Kaplan, S., & Ware, J. E., Jr. (1985). Expanding patient involvement in care: Effects on patient outcomes. Annals of Internal Medicine, 102, 520–528. Greenfield, S., Kaplan, S. H., Ware, J. E., Jr., Yano, E. M., & Frank, H. J. (1988). Patients’ participation in medical care: Effects on blood sugar control and quality of life in diabetes. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 3, 448–457. Gross, D. A., Zyzanski, S. J., Borawski, E. A., Cebul, R. D., & Stange, K. C. (1998). Patient satisfaction with time spent with their physician. Journal of Family Practice, 47, 133–137. Hall, J. A., & Dornan, M. C. (1988). What patients like about their medical care and how often they are asked: A meta-analysis of the satisfaction literature. Social Science and Medicine, 27, 935–939. Headache Study Group of The University of Western Ontario. (1986). Predictors of outcome in headache patients presenting to family physicians: A one year prospective study. Headache, 26, 285–294. Henbest, R. J., & Fehrsen, G. S. (1992). Patient-centredness: Is it applicable outside the West? Its measurement and effect on outcomes. Family Practice, 9, 311–317. Herman, J. (1997). Three unhurried consultations. Journal of Family Practice, 44, 313–315. Heszen-Klemens, I., & Lapinska, E. (1984). Doctor-patient interaction, patients’ health behavior and effects of treatment. Social Science and Medicine, 19, 9–18. Hickson, G. B., Clayton, E. W., Entman, S. S., Miller, C. S., Githens, P. B., Whetten-Goldstein, K., & Sloan, F. A. (1994). Obstetricians’ prior malpractice experience and patients’ satisfaction with care. Journal of the American Medical Association, 272, 1583–1587. Hickson, G. B., Clayton, E. W., Githens, P. B., & Sloan, F. A. (1992). Factors that prompted families to file medical malpractice claims following perinatal injuries. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267, 1359–1363. Hornberger, J., Thorn, D., & MaCurdy, T. (1997). Effects of a self-administered previsit questionnaire to enhance awareness of patients’ concerns in primary care. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 12, 597–606. Howie, J. G., Porter, A. M., Heaney, D. J., & Hopton, J. L. (1991). Long to short consultation ratio: A proxy measure of quality of care for general practice. British Journal of General Practice, 41, 48–54. Hulka, B. A., Kupper, L. L., Cassel, J. C., & Mayo, F. (1975). Doctor-patient communication and outcomes among diabetic patients. Journal of Community Health, 1, 15–27.

158

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

Hull. F. M., & Hull, F. S. (1984). Time and the general practitioner: The patient’s view. Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 34, 71–75. Jacobson, L. D., Wilkinson, C., & Owen, P. A. (1994). Is the potential of teenage consultations being missed? A study of consultation times in primary care. Family Practice, 11, 296–299. Johnson, J. E., Nail, L. M., Lauver, D., King, K. B., & Keys, H. (1988). Reducing the negative impact of radiation therapy on functional status. Cancer, 61, 46–51. Kaplan, S. H., Greenfield, S., & Ware, J. E., Jr. (1989). Assessing the effects of physician-patient interactions on the outcomes of chronic disease. Medical Care, 275, S110–S127. Kinnersley, P., Stott, N., Peters, T. J., & Harvey, I. (1999). The patient-centredness of consultations and outcomes in primary care. British Journal of General Practice, 49, 711–716. Kjellgren, K. I., Ahlner, J., & Saljo, R. (1995). Taking antihypertensive medication: Controlling or co-operating with patients? International Journal of Cardiology, 47, 257–268. Korsch, B. M., Gozzi, E. K., & Francis, V. (1968). Gaps in doctor-patient communication: I. Doctor-patient interaction and patient satisfaction. Pediatrics, 42, 855–871. Lester, G. W., & Smith, S. G. (1993). Listening and talking to patients: A remedy for malpractice suits? Western Journal of Medicine, 158, 268–272. Levinson, W. (1994). Physician-patient communication: A key to malpractice prevention. Journal of the American Medical Association, 272, 1619–1620. Levinson, W., Roter, D. L., Mullooly, J. P., Dull, V. T., & Frankel, R. M. (1997). Physicianpatient communication: The relationship with malpractice claims among primary care physicians and surgeons. Journal of the American Medical Association, 277, 553–559. Ley, P. (1982). Satisfaction, compliance and communication. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 21(Pt. 4), 241–254. Ley, P. (1985). Doctor-patient communication: Some quantitative estimates of the role of cognitive factors in non-compliance. Journal of Hypertension, 3(1)(Suppl. 3), S51–S55. Linn, M. W., Linn, B. S., & Stein, S. R. (1982). Satisfaction with ambulatory care and compliance in older patients. Medical Care, 20, 606–614. Marvel, M. K. (1993). Involvement with the psychosocial concerns of patients: Observations of practicing family physicians on a university faculty. Archives of Family Medicine, 2, 629–633. Marvel, M. K., Doherty, W. J., & Weiner, E. (1998). Medical interviewing by exemplary family physicians. Journal of Family Practice, 47, 343–348. McLane, C. G., Zyzanski, S. J., & Flocke, S. A. (1995). Factors associated with medication noncompliance in rural elderly hypertensive patients. American Journal of Hypertension, 8, 206–209. McWilliam, C. L., Brown, J. B., & Stewart, M. (2000). Breast cancer patients’ experiences of patient-doctor communication: A working relationship. Patient Education and Counselling, 39, 191–204. Mechanic, D., & Schlesinger, M. (1996). The impact of managed care on patients’ trust in medical care and their physicians. Journal of the American Medical Association, 275, 1693–1697. Orth, J. E., Stiles, W. B., Scherwitz, L., Hennrikus, D., & Vallbona, C. (1987). Patient exposition and provider explanation in routine interviews and hypertensive patients’ blood pressure control. Health Psychology, 6, 29–42. Pascoe, G. C. (1983). Patient satisfaction in primary health care: A literature review and analysis. Evaluation and Program Planning, 6, 185–210. Penchansky, R., & Macnee, C. (1994). Initiation of medical malpractice suits: A conceptualization and test. Medical Care, 32, 813–831.

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

159

Pereles, L., & Russell, M. L. (1996). Needs for CME in geriatrics: 2. Physician priorities and perceptions of community representatives. Canadian Family Physician, 42, 632– 640. Rainey, L. C. (1985). Effects of preparatory patient education for radiation oncology patients. Cancer, 56, 1065–1061. Redelmeier, D. A., Molin, J. P., & Tibshirani, R. J. (1995). A randomised trial of compassionate care for the homeless in an emergency department. Lancet, 345, 1131–1134. Ridsdale, L., Morgan, M., & Morris, R. (1992). Doctors’ interviewing technique and its response to different booking time. Family Practice, 9, 57–60. Rivadeneyra, R., Elderkin-Thompson, V., Silver, R. C., & Waitzkin, H. (2000). Patient centeredness in medical encounters requiring an interpreter. American Journal of Medicine, 108, 470–474. Roland, M. O., Bartholomew, J., Courtenay, M. J., Morris, R. W., & Morrell, D. C. (1986). The “five minute” consultation: Effect of time constraint on verbal communication. British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Ed.), 292, 874–876. Roter, D. (1989). Which facets of communication have strong effects on outcome: A metaanalysis. In M. Stewart & D. Roter (Eds.), Communicating with medical patients (pp 183– 197). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Roter, D. L., Hall, J. A., Kern, D. E., Barker, L. R., Cole, K. A., & Roca, R. P. (1995). Improving physicians’ interviewing skills and reducing patients’ emotional distress: A randomized clinical trial. Archives of Internal Medicine, 155, 1877–1884. Roter, D. L., Stewart, M., Putnam, S. M., Lipkin, M., Jr., Stiles, W., & Inui, T. S. (1997). Communication patterns of primary care physicians. Journal of the American Medical Association, 277, 350–356. Russell, N. K., & Roter, D. L. (1993). Health promotion counseling of chronic-disease patients during primary care visits. American Journal of Public Health, 83, 979–982. Salmon, P., Peters, S., & Stanley, I. (1999). Patients’ perceptions of medical explanations for somatisation disorders: Qualitative analysis. British Medical Journal, 318, 372–376. Salzman, C. (1995). Medication compliance in the elderly. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 56(Suppl. 1), 18–22. Sanders, P. S., & McBride, D. L. (1998). Malpractice prevention: Good doctor-patient communication. Minnesota Medicine, 81, 28–30. Sanson-Fisher, R. W., Campbell, E. M., Redman, S., & Hennrikus, D. J. (1989). Patientprovider interactions and patient outcomes. Diabetes Educator, 15, 134–138. Savage, R., & Armstrong, D. (1990). Effects of a general practitioner’s consulting style on patients’ satisfaction: A controlled study. British Medical Journal, 301, 968–970. Sbarbaro, J. A. (1990). The patient-physician relationship: Compliance revisited. Annals of Allergy, 64, 325–331. Selfe, S. A., Matthews, Z., & Stones, R. W. (1998). Factors influencing outcome in consultations for chronic pelvic pain. Journal of Women’s Health, 7, 1041–1048. Shapiro, R. S., Simpson, D. E., Lawrence, S. L., Talsky, A. M., Sobocinski, K. A., & Schiedermayer, D. L. (1989). A survey of sued and nonsued physicians and suing patients. Archives of Internal Medicine, 149, 2190–2196. Slovenko, R. (1999). Malpractice in psychotherapy. Forensic Psychiatry, 22, 1–15. Spiegel, D., Bloom, J. R., Kraemer, H. C., & Gottheil, E. (1989). Effect of psychosocial treatment on survival of patients with metastatic breast cancer. Lancet, 2, 888–891. Squier, R. W. (1990). A model of empathic understanding and adherence to treatment regimens in practitioner-patient relationships. Social Science and Medicine, 30, 325–339.

160

BROWN, STEWART, RYAN

Stange, K. C., Zyzanski, S. J., Jaen, C. R., Callahan, E. J., Kelly, R. B., Gillanders, W. R., Shank, J. C., Chao, J., Medalie, J. H., Miller, W. L., Crabtree, B. F., Flocke, S. A., Gilchrist, V. J., Langa, D. M., & Goodwin, M. A. (1998). Illuminating the “black box”: A description of 4454 patient visits to 138 family physicians. Journal of Family Practice, 46, 377–389. Starfield, B., Wray, C., Hess, K., Gross, R., Birk, P. S., & D’Lugoff, B. C. (1981). The influence of patient-practitioner agreement on outcome of care. American Journal of Public Health, 71, 127–131. Stewart, M. A. (1995). Effective physician-patient communication and health outcomes: A review. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 152, 1423–1433. Stewart, M., Brown, J. B., Weston, W. W., McWhinney, I. R., McWilliam, C. L., & Freeman, T. R. (1995). Patient-centered medicine: Transforming the clinical method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stewart, M., Brown, J. B., Donner, A., McWhinney, I., Oates, J., Weston, W. W., & Jordan, J. (2000). The inpact of patient-centered care on outcomes. Journal of Family Practice, 49, 796–804. Svarstad, B. L. (1985). The relationship between patient communication and compliance. In D. D. Breimer, & P. Speiser (Eds.), Topics in Pharmaceutical Sciences (pp. 381–390). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Thomas, K. B. (1978). The consultation and the therapeutic illusion. British Medical Journal, 1, 1327–1328. Thomas, K. B. (1987). General practice consultations: Is there any point in being positive? British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Ed.), 294, 1200–1202. Thompson, S. C., Nanni, C., & Schwankovsky, L. (1990). Patient-oriented interventions to improve communication in a medical office visit. Health Psychology, 9, 390–404. Verby, J. E., Holden, P., & Davis, R. H. (1979). Peer review of consultations in primary care: The use of audiovisual recordings. British Medical Journal, 1(6179), 1686–1688. Vincent, C., Young, M., & Phillips, A. (1994). Why do people sue doctors? A study of patients and relatives taking legal action. Lancet, 343, 1609–1613. Ware, J. E., Davies-Avery, A. & Stewart, A. L. (1978). The measurement and meaning of patient satisfaction: A review of the recent literature. Health and Medical Care Services Review, 1, 1–15. Wasson, J. H., Sauvigne, A. E., Mogielnicki, R. P., Frey, W. G., Sox, C. H., Gaudette, C., & Rockwell, A. (1984). Continuity of outpatient medical care in elderly men: A randomized trial. Journal of the American Medical Association, 252, 2413–2417. Weiss, L. J., & Blustein, J. (1996). Faithful patients: The effect of long-term physician-patient relationships on the costs and use of health care by older Americans. American Journal of Public Health, 86, 1742–1747. Westcott, R. (1977). The length of consultations in general practice. Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 27, 552–555. Williams, M., & Neal, R. D. (1998). Time for a change? The process of lengthening booking intervals in general practice. British Journal of General Practice, 48, 1783–1786. Williams, S., Weinman, J., Dale, J., & Newman, S. (1995). Patient expectations: What do primary care patients want from the GP and how far does meeting expectations affect patient satisfaction? Family Practice, 12, 193–201. Williams, S. J., & Calnan, M. (1991). Key determinants of consumer satisfaction with general practice. Family Practice, 8, 237–242. Wilson, A. (1991). Consultation length in general practice: A review. British Journal of General Practice, 41, 119–122.

7. OUTCOMES OF PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION

161

Wilson, B. M. (1995). Promoting compliance: The patient-provider partnership. Advances in Renal Replacement Therapy, 2, 199–206. Wirtzer, A. W. (1993). No time to listen and talk to patients. [Letter to the editor]. Western Journal of Medicine, 158, 639. Zyzanski, S. J., Stange, K. C., Langa, D., & Flocke, S. A. (1998). Trade-offs in high-volume primary care practice. Journal of Family Practice, 46, 397–402.

8 Medical Disclosure and Decision-Making: Excavating the Complexities of Physician-Patient Information Exchange Catherine M. Gillotti Purdue University Calumet

Words are the most powerful tool a doctor possesses, but words, like a two-edged sword, can maim as well as heal. (Lown, 1996, p. 61)

When it comes to communication, the (sometimes faulty) assumption is that the messages we exchange are true. In the health care setting, the truth is sometimes concealed for the patient’s benefit, distorted in an attempt to compassionately deliver bad news, or not processed by the patient because of its ramifications. In spite of most people’s attempts to cover up the truth, whether their intention is noble or malicious, usually the truth is eventually revealed (Thomasma, 1994). According to Thomasma (1994), there are four types of truth and five reasons why the truth is sometimes concealed in the health care context. The four types are direct truth, factual truth, personal truth, and interpretative truth. Direct truth includes answers to yes/no questions, factual truth is concerned with objective reality, personal truth is selfdisclosure, and interpretative truth involves the interpretation of the reasons behind the communication. Thomasma argued that interpretative or hermeneutical truth is the most complex kind of truth and is particularly relevant in the health care context. Thomasma questioned why the truth is still withheld in the health care context despite the complexity of interpretations of truth and the motivations of the communicators to be honest. He noted that the values of individual well-being and survival of the community and some people’s inability to absorb the truth can result in “necessary paternalism” and suppression of the truth (p. 377). Although Thomasma provided several compelling case studies in which paternalism seemed necessary, he also reminded us that we are entitled to the truth in order to make informed decisions. In the end, he argued that withholding

163

164

GILLOTTI

the truth is only temporary. “In vino, veritas it is said. The truth will eventually come out, even if in a slip of the tongue. Its revelation, if it is to be controlled, must always aim at the good of the patient for the moment” (p. 382). The issues regarding truth-telling in the health care context are among the many that fall within the category of medical disclosure. Examining these issues closely reveals, at the core, the influence of language itself on the physician-patient relationship. Barnlund (1976) argued that human illness is experienced both physically and symbolically. Although physicians must treat physical conditions, Barnlund reminded care providers that communication, particularly language, can have a powerful influence on the well-being of the patient. Tardy (2000) drew a similar connection between communication and well-being in an examination of the role of self-disclosure in the physician-patient interaction, and suggested that balance in information sharing is key to the patient’s wellbeing. What information to provide, how much, when, and with whom are all logistical considerations for both patients and physicians in the often complex physician-patient interaction. This chapter includes a review of various topics related to medical disclosure in order to illuminate the utility of information in the medical context for patient decision-making. In any case of information sharing in the health care context, a decision, even if it is a decision to do nothing, results from the interaction. Utilizing problematic integration (PI) theory (Babrow, 1992; Babrow, Hines, & Kasch, 2000) as a way to understand the complexities of decision making in the health care context, this chapter explores the ethical ramifications of medical disclosure, bad news delivery, informed consent, and end-of-life decisions. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE

The physician-patient relationship has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Street (1992) argued that this relationship is crucial to the development of patient trust and informed decision-making through information exchange. Information giving can be done by either the provider or the patient; thus, medical disclosure is dyadic and interdependent. This section looks at studies that have addressed the implications of medical disclosure for both providers and patients. Researchers and clinicians have carefully examined physician-patient communication. Indeed, studies have been done on verbal communication in the physician-patient consultation (Bain, 1976; Beckman, Markakis, Suchman, & Frankel, 1994; Branch & Malik, 1993; Buckman, 1992), patient perceptions of physician communication (Cardello, Ray, & Pettey, 1995; Street, 1992), patient and physician explanatory models of illness (Helman, 1985), physician liking and expressed emotion (Hall, Epstein, DeCiantis, & McNeil, 1993), patient education about the medical interview (McGee & Cegala, 1998), various verbal and nonverbal coding schemes utilized in the analysis of the physicianpatient relationship (Roter & Frankel, 1992; Roter, Hall, & Katz, 1988; Stiles & Putnam, 1989; Wasserman & Inui, 1983), the impact of provider communication on health outcomes (Greenfield, Kaplan, & Ware, 1985), and explanatory models of the physician-patient relationship (Emanuel & Emanuel, 1992; Epstein, Campbell, Cohen-Cole, McWinney, & Smilkstein, 1993; Stewart, Brown, Weston, McWhinncy, McWilliam, & Freeman, 1995). Regardless of the variables examined, the literature continuously points to the undeniable impact of communication on the physician-patient relationship. DiMatteo (1979) stated that the physician-patient relationship is emotionally charged and that attention should be paid to the interpersonal nature of the relationship. The

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

165

author suggested that there has been a division between treating the patient scientifically and treating the patient interpersonally. Additionally, DiMatteo noted that, historically, bedside manner was really all that physicians had to offer their patients. The author called for acknowledgment of the importance of the socioemotional dimensions of physicianpatient interaction. It has been suggested that attention to these dimensions will increase patient compliance and satisfaction and possibly deter malpractice litigation. The practice of medicine has evolved over the centuries, and so has the nature of the physician-patient relationship. However, certain aspects of this relationship remain constant, including the need for information sharing between providers and patients and the existence of obstacles that can inhibit the exchange of information. Truth-Telling: The Provider’s Perspective

As Waitzkin (1985) stated, Hippocrates argued that it was the physician’s responsibility to determine how much information patients should receive about their condition. Waitzkin suggested that in contemporary Western medicine there are problems of withholding information, but patients more frequently are asserting their right to information. Using uncertainty, power, and social class language differences as foundations for explanation, Waitzkin examined information giving in the physician-patient relationship. The author hypothesized that physicians would withhold information in an attempt to maintain uncertainty and retain power. The study findings did not conclusively demonstrate these points. In fact, the results indicated that physicians provided more information under conditions of diagnostic uncertainty. Additionally, there was a relationship between physician social origin and amount of information provided, with middle- and upper-class physicians providing more information and patients of higher social class receiving more information (Waitzkin, 1985). These results suggest that, even though the concern to “do no harm” was the original principle upon which physicians decided whether to withhold information, it does not necessarily influence information dissemination decisions in the same way today. Goldman (1980) suggested that truth-telling and informed consent are two fundamental issues of medical ethics. Furthermore, he pointed out that patient rights are essential for self-determination and control. He argued that there are several reasons why patients should make their own decisions regarding their health: First is the presumption of their being the best judges of their own interests, which may depend upon personal value orderings known only to them. . . . The second reason is the independent value to self-determination, at least in regard to important decisions (in medical contexts decisions may involve life and death alternatives, affect the completion of major life projects, or affect bodily integrity) (p. 159)

Goldman also pointed out that self-determination incorporates more specific rights, including the right to the truth about health conditions, treatment risks, and alternative treatments. However, when physicians make decisions to withhold information from patients, they might still be exercising the Hippocratic principle. Truth-telling, informed consent, and self-determination are key to the protection of patient rights. Goldman stated that the fundamental right to information in the health care context is associated with the right to make decisions that concern one’s own well-being and life. The information that patients give to providers is of course important to their well-being.

166

GILLOTTI

Truth-Telling: The Patient’s Perspective

Rosenfeld (2000) provided an overview of the philosophical and relational issues related to the dialectical tension between the need for privacy and the need “to be known” (p. 4). The author suggested that it is through self-disclosure that a person establishes a presence in the world and heals him- or herself. Tardy (2000) examined these notions as they operate in the health care context. In an analysis of the work of Sydney Jourard, Tardy reviewed the literature connecting self-disclosure to positive health outcomes, including increased resistance to illness and prevention of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Tardy then investigated Jourard’s hypothesis that self-disclosure is positively correlated with health. The study results indicated general support for Jourard’s work, but Tardy called for more research to examine specific factors that connect self-disclosure to health outcome. Accepting the notion that self-disclosure can have both psychological and physiological benefits, it is appropriate to examine issues of patient privacy and the impact of self-disclosure on physician-patient interaction (Ashworth, Longmate, & Morrison, 1992; Coleman & Shellow, 1995; Crockford, Holloway, & Walker, 1993; Deering, 1999; Parrott, Duncan, & Duggan, 2000; Weijts, 1994; Weiss, 1986). Self-disclosure has been studied in relation to diseases that have a social stigma, such as cancer and HIV/AIDS (Greene, 2000; Mitsuya,1997; Mystakidou, 1996; Schofield, Walkom, & Sanson-Fisher, 1997; Welch Cline & McKenzie, 2000). For example, Greene (2000) examined how and why patients who are HIV positive or have full-blown AIDS disclose their health status given the negative social perceptions of the disease. According to Greene, studying disclosure in this patient population is particularly important because of the increase in the number of HIV-positive patients and the physiological and psychological benefits of disclosure. Researchers also have examined levels of patient participation in health care interactions (Ashworth et al., 1992; Parrott et al., 2000; Weiss, 1986). The information that patients provide is essential for diagnosis and treatment, yet some patients withhold vital information from their providers. Parrott et al. (2000) explored the reasons that patients conceal information by explicating various threats to patient privacy. In particular, patients withhold information because of cultural differences; confidentiality breaches due to team approaches to medicine; the personal characteristics of the patient, such as age and socioeconomic status; the nature of the interaction (e.g., providers can inhibit communication through interruptions); and threats to the patient’s identity, as explained by the theories of impression management (Goffman, 1959) and politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1978; Parrott et al., 2000). In an educational article for nurses, Deering (1999) reviewed the therapeutic goals of provider self-disclosure as a means of provoking disclosure on the part of patients. The more specific goals of provider self-disclosure include patient education, helping patients to realize their reactions are normal, promoting “emotional catharsis,” and showing support to patients. The research in this area clearly illustrates the benefits of patient and provider selfdisclosure. Goldman (1980), Thomasma (1994), and Tardy (2000) all called for balanced information sharing that took into account the legal, ethical, and interpersonal ramifications of information exchange in this context. Of course, consideration of all the factors affecting medical disclosure and patient self-disclosure is all the more important during the delivery of bad news.

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

167

Bad News Delivery

Studies of the delivery of bad news by health care providers reveal that providers are concerned about being effective and offer advice to each other on delivery strategies (Brewin, 1991; Buckman, 1992; Charlton, 1992; Davis, 1991; Edlich & Kubler-Ross, 1991; Fallowfield, 1993; Faulkner, Argent, Jones, O’Keefe, 1995; Graham, 1991; Kaiser, 1993; Krahn, Hallum, & Kime, 1993; Laurent, 1991; Maynard, 1989, 1991; McLauchlan, 1990; Miranda & Brody, 1992; Ptacek & Eberhardt, 1996; Quill & Townsend, 1991; Rabow & McPhee, 1999; Speck, 1991; Statham & Dimavicius, 1992). Practicing physicians, many of whom have learned delivery techniques through trial and error rather than formal training, are the main sources of advice. Many studies stress that little training is provided in medical schools and residency programs and more formal education is needed in this area (Davis, 1991; Fallowfield, 1993; Graham, 1991; Laurent, 1991; McLauchlan, 1990; Miranda & Brody, 1992; Novack, Volk, Drossman, & Lipkin, 1993; Pearse & Cooper, 1993; Quill & Townsend, 1991; Rappaport & Witzke, 1993). This is not to say that studies on communication competencies of medical students and residents have not been conducted at all (Eggly et al., 1997; Gillotti, 1996; Novack et al., 1993; Rappaport & Witzke, 1993; Sloan, Donnelly, Johnson, Schwartz, & Strodel, 1994), however, such studies reveal that more training is needed, as the task is particularly daunting. Lown (1996) questioned why physicians depict medical situations in the most dire terms. He suggested several contributing factors. First, negative predictions are embedded in the culture. Second, due to the prevalence of malpractice litigation, physicians feel compelled to tell the patient the uncensored truth. However, as Lown emphasized, bluntly stating the prognosis without some kind words could lead the patient to view the physician as uncompassionate and inspire future litigation. Lown also recognized that fear caused by the negative presentation of health information can undermine decision making. Charlton (1992) likewise emphasized the importance of attending to the way the news is delivered. According to Charlton, a patient’s ability to cope depends on several factors, including the prognosis and how the news is delivered. The attention given to developing appropriate strategies for bad news delivery points to the complexities of the task while reinforcing the obligation of physicians to inform patients of their conditions. Bad news delivery and informed consent are inextricably tied to patient rights and autonomy (Charlton, 1992; Goldman, 1980; Waitzkin, 1985). In fact, the literature appears to reflect a tug-of-war between necessary paternalism and patient self-determination and autonomy (Charlton, 1992; Goldman, 1980; Thomasma, 1994). Goldman (1980) thoroughly examined the arguments for and against medical paternalism. He proposed two conditions under which physicians may withhold information: “One is where the truth will cause direct harm-depression or loss of continued will to live. The other is where informing may be instrumentally harmful in leading to a choice of wrong treatment or none at all” (p. 171). As a counterargument to paternalism, Goldman stated that it is unlikely that safeguarding patient rights will lead to harm. He also argued that, even if a patient may experience depression upon hearing the truth about his or her prognosis, a greater harm will be committed by denying the patient his or her rights. Although there is a reasonable argument for medical paternalism with roots in the Hippocratic Oath, patients continue to assert their right for full disclosure, especially when the information is perceived as bad news. Sell, Devlin, Bourke, Munro, Corris, and Gibson (1993) found that 46 out of 50 patients diagnosised with lung cancer wanted to know the truth about their diagnosis and felt

168

GILLOTTI

their physicians had done the right thing in telling them. Additionally, 31 of the 46 felt more reassured after hearing the diagnosis. Davis (1991) contended that humans are more resilient than may be thought and that individuals deserve to know the truth about their health status if they want it. The key factor is respecting the patient’s wish for disclosure. There are times when patients do not wish to know information, bad news in particular, due to various cultural values (Carrese & Rhodes, 2000). For example, Carrese and Rhodes (2000) found that the receipt of negative information and subsequent planning can conflict with traditional Navajo beliefs. The authors explored “culturally competent” strategies for these interactions (Carrese & Rhodes, 2000, p. 92). Because of the general movement toward disclosing bad news, health communication scholars are doing more research on clinicians’ approaches to the delivery of bad news and the obstacles inherent in this particular type of interaction (Gillotti & Applegate, 2000). Gillotti and Applegate (2000) reviewed the medical literature on the various obstacles, which include dealing with the uncertainty of predicting medical outcomes, feelings of failure on the part of health care providers, dealing with the expressed emotions of both patient and provider, and lack of training in the delivery of bad news. Much of the literature on bad news delivery is atheoretical. However, Ptacek and Eberhardt (1996) and Gillotti and Applegate (2000) offered different theoretical frameworks for understanding and guiding the delivery of bad news. Ptacek and Eberhardt argued that, due to the stressful nature of the interaction for both the provider and the patient, bad news delivery is best understood using a stress and coping model. By contrast, Gillotti and Applegate argued that, due to the individual differences in communication competence between the provider and the patient, bad news delivery is best conceptualized from a constructivist, patient-centered perspective. Building on this perspective, Gillotti, Thompson, and McNeilis (2001) examined bad news delivery from a competence perspective. The literature on bad news delivery reveals minimal theory development and little insight into the connection between bad news delivery and medical decisions. Several authors have made only passing reference to future treatment plans and options once the news is delivered (Brewin, 1991; Davis, 1991; Fallowfield, 1993; Faulkner et al., 1995; Kaiser, 1993; Quill & Townsend, 1991; Statham & Dimavicius, 1992). Although much has been written on the subject of medical decision-making, few studies have explored the relationship between initial bad news delivery and the ultimate effect on the patient’s treatment decisions. One piece of advice that transcends debate over disclosure and interactional difficulties in the delivery of bad news was offered by Rabow and McPhee (1999) when they said, “To manage bad news well, the clinician must place his or her relationship with the patient, the strength and reality of their human bond, over the insecurity of disease, the threat of dissolution, and the fear of death” (p. 263). Having established the historical trend toward truth-telling and the obligation to protect the patient from harm while respecting the patient’s right to self-determination, an explanation of the ethical foundations of informed consent follows. INFORMED CONSENT “The most important single contribution of research ethical codes for protection of human subjects to clinical practice is the doctrine of informed consent” (Kagarise & Sheldon, 2000, p. 39).

The concern for patient rights and autonomy evolved from the horrors of the Second World War and the Nuremberg Trials that followed, in which physicians were held accountable

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

169

for the medical experiments they performed on prisoners—experiments in direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath (Dennis, 1999; Kagarise & Sheldon, 2000; Woodward, 1999). Kagarise and Sheldon (2000) provide an excellent review of the historical events leading to the current concern for patient rights. Additionally, they provide a theory of translational ethics to address the protection of human subjects in clinical practice. Initially it was the 10 Nuremberg principles that set the expected standards of behavior for physicians (Kagarise & Sheldon, 2000): After the Nuremberg trials, in 1947, 10 principles of conduct expected of physicians in the conduct of research on human subjects were described in the Nuremberg Code on the Ethics of Human Research: voluntary consent; an expected beneficial outcome; prior experimentation on animals; avoidance of unnecessary pain and horror; avoidance of risk or disablement; risk taking not to exceed expected advantages; protection against the possibility, however slight, of injury, disablement, or death; scientifically and technically qualified experimenters; the subject’s freedom to retract consent; and the experimenter’s obligation to stop the experiment when continuation will result in participant injury or death (p. 39).

Although the tenets of the Nuremberg Code can be found in operation in medical and social science research today, between 1947 and 1975 the code was generally not adhered to in research endeavors (Kagarise & Sheldon, 2000). In 1948, the World Health Organization issued the Declaration of Geneva, which was based on the Hippocratic Oath and the Nuremberg Code, to address physician professionalism outside of research, and the International Code of Medical Ethics was constructed in 1949 (Kagarise & Sheldon, 2000). Medical ethics reached a turning point in 1975 with the Declaration of Helsinki, which emphasized the importance of conducting proper research in accordance to the Nuremberg Code. These documents laid the foundation for current conceptions of medical ethics (Goldman, 1980; Kagarise & Sheldon, 2000; Woodward, 1999). Woodward (1999) claimed that, although the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki are different documents, they share a similar concern for the protection of patient rights and the rights of research participants, placing these rights above scientific and societal advancement. Dennis (1999) discussed the decisions made between 1905 and 1914 that form the legal grounding for informed consent in the United States. These decisions set precedent for future legislation. One key document was the Belmont Report of 1974, written by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. This report increased the public’s concern for patient rights and autonomy (Kagarise & Sheldon, 2000). Recent legislation pertinent to patient rights includes the Patient Self-Determination Act, which was passed as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (Young & Jex, 1992). “The Act follows a historical trend led by doctrines of informed consent and increasing patient autonomy regarding rights to accept or refuse medical treatment to execute advance directives” (Young & Jex, 1992, p. 107). According to Young and Jex (1992), the act requires medical facilities to adhere to the following stipulations: First, written documentation must be provided to patients upon admission regarding their right under the law to accept or refuse medical treatment and to execute advance directives. Patients must also be given written information on the policies of the institution regarding the implementation of such rights. Patients must be asked whether or not they have an advance directive, and their answers should be documented in the medical record. Execution

170

GILLOTTI

of advance directives can in no way be required as a condition of providing medical treatment. Each institution must also ensure compliance with state law (statutory or case law) respecting advance directives. (p. 108)

Shapiro (1992) examined issues not clearly addressed by the Patient Self-Determination Act. These issues include patient advocates making decisions when the patient is unable; the transfer of patients to other facilities and the adherence to the patient’s advance directive; the ambiguity of the advance directive reflecting the patient’s actual wishes; advance directives that are broader than state statutes; the obligation of psychiatric facilities to adhere to such directives; age limitations for advance directives; and finally instances where the physician does not have a copy of the advance directive. After 50 years of doctrine and legislation, patient autonomy and patient rights continue to be the focus of research. Issues involving informed consent include the adequacy of hospital consent forms (Bottrell, Alpert, Fischbach, & Emanuel, 2000); obtaining informed consent from vulnerable groups (Dennis, 1999); concern for proper obtainment of consent (Bottrell et al., 2000; Kirsch, 2000); obtaining consent by proxy (Lashley, Talley, Lands, & Keyserlingk, 2000); ensuring the protection of patient medical information (Longhway, 1999); obtaining consent for tissue research (Pentz, Young, Amos, Hess, Wei, & Anderlik, 1999); and educating medical students and residents on obtaining informed consent (Angelos, DeRosa, Derossis, & Kim, 1999; Roberts, Mines, Voss, Koinis, Mitchell, Obenshain, & McCarty, 1999). Interestingly, Woodward (1999) claimed that the expediency of institutional reviews and the rush to advance medicine contribute to the weakening of human subject protection: “It is the rapid march of science itself that is largely responsible for the pressures to weaken subject protections” (p. 1948). Systematically addressing the various stipulations of the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki, Woodward (1999) examined various factors affecting the protection of human subjects. He cited increased medical research funding, computer technology, and new research technology as factors leading to a demand for larger participant pools, easier subject recruitment, and easier access to patient medical records. All of these factors set the stage for possible violation of patient rights as outlined by the above documents. Further, Woodward suggested that the demands on institutional review boards, which are set up to protect patient and participant rights, may make it difficult to perform adequate and thorough reviews of research protocols. Finally, he argued that the line between clinical practice and medical research is blurring: “The expansion of research using a variety of imaging and monitoring devices, human biological materials, and information processing technologies may, before long, turn every patient into a research subject (or rather, research object) simply by virtue of a decision to seek medical care” (p. 1952). Not surprisingly, he called for a renewed commitment to the protection of human subjects. While his perspective may seem alarming, Woodward’s (1999) reasoning punctuates the continued debate between altruistic research endeavors and the immediate benefit to the patient/research participant. Shuchman (1999) reports on several media stories about the unethical enlisting of psychiatric patients into clinical trials which resulted in patient deaths and subsequent attempts by the physicians involved to cover up their participation. Kirsch (2000) argued that informed consent has become an exercise in legal protection rather than a tool to inform patients of various risk factors. He stated that he received no formal training on how to obtain consent and that the emphasis in practice is to “document” the consent, not actually “obtain it” (p. 588). Further, he argued that the very signing of

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

171

an informed consent form demonstrates a “trust deficit” between physician and patient (p. 588). He concluded by claiming that informed consent is the foundation of medical ethics, emphasizing that both physicians and patients will benefit from taking the issue more seriously. Bottrell et al. (2000) conducted a content analysis of 540 informed consent forms from 157 hospitals across the nation. The researchers hypothesized that the informed consent forms would not meet the accepted standards. The results indicated that, although 96% of the forms adequately indicated the nature of the procedure, they did not always clearly state the risks, benefits, and alternatives. In fact, only 26% of the forms included all four items. Echoing Kirsch’s (2000) concern, the authors suggested that the current forms do not facilitate the process of gaining truly informed consent (i.e., they do not help the patient make an informed decision). They propose an alternative form that covers the procedure, risks, benefits, and alternatives. Although many clinicians have never received formal training in informed consent procedures, researchers are studying the communication skills of current medical students and their ability to obtain informed consent. Roberts et al. (1999) conducted a study of 71 senior medical students using videotapes of standardized patient interactions. The students’ task was to obtain informed consent for a cardiac catheterization from a standardized patient expressing concern about the procedure. The patient rated each student on informed consent procedures and communication skills. The students received high scores on both checklists, and the authors suggested using this form of ethical competency assessment in medical education. Also, they noted that obtaining informed consent requires more than communicative abilities alone. On the other hand, the findings confirm the correlation between the physician-patient relationship, communication skills, and obtaining informed consent (Roberts et al., 1999). Summary

The research cited in the preceding sections provides the historical foundations for the ethical delivery of diagnostic and prognostic information between physician and patient. Clearly, there are many legal and ethical considerations involved in medical disclosure, in particular, the delivery of bad news, and these should govern the decisions of clinicians on whether to provide patients with information. Although the practice of medical disclosure has shifted over time—from the withholding of information for the protection of patient well-being to the giving of information for the same reason—respect for the Hippocratic Oath remains steadfast, as indicated by the modern doctrine of informed consent. The next step is to consider the influence of information on medical decision-making. MEDICAL DECISION-MAKING

Once patients have been provided information about their condition, they have to process that information to decide their best course of action. According to Braddock, Edwards, Hasenberg, Laidley, and Levinson (1999), little is known about the discussions taking place between physicians and patients to ensure that the patients are informed and participate as equals in the decision-making process. They therefore analyzed 1,057 interactions that occurred during clinical office visits in order to assess informed decision-making between patients and physicians. The authors developed seven criteria for defining informed decision-making, including patient participation and preferences; discussion of the nature of the decision; and discussion of risks, benefits, alternatives, uncertainties, and

172

GILLOTTI

patient understanding. A content analysis of the interactions revealed there were 3,552 clinical decisions made but only 9% fully met the seven criteria. The authors concluded that more effort needs to be devoted to meeting all the criteria, even for low-complexity decisions. Foley (1999) encouraged physicians, patients, and families to work together in communicating specific goals for treatment. There are times when patients can no longer make decisions for themselves and must rely on family members to be their advocates. The most common documents for prearranging life-sustaining treatments are advance directives, living wills, and powers of attorney for health care (Gordon & Tolle, 1991). Even with one of these documents in place, family members must know the patient’s wishes, as they will most likely serve as decision-making surrogates when the patient no longer is able to communicate. Sulmasy, Terry, Weisman, Miller, Stallings, Vettese, and Haller (1998) studied the accuracy of family members’ substituted judgments for patients with terminal illnesses. These authors found that patient surrogates were only 66% correct in predicting the patient’s wishes. They concluded that a variety of factors impact the accuracy of surrogate judgments and that accuracy would improve if clinicians had more frank discussions with terminally ill patients about their prognosis. Another factor impacting end-of-life decisions is managed care. Kuczewski and DeVita (1998) found that patients and family members need to know the financial ramifications of treatment options in end-of-life care but that whose responsibility it is to provide this information is often unclear. They present a poignant case study where the ethical consultant for the hospital was called in by the hospital social worker to speak to the family of a terminally ill patient. The social worker was concerned that the patient’s length of stay had become too long and that reimbursement would not be provided to the patient by the insurance company. The social worker did not clearly communicate that this was the concern and instead told the consultant the family was “conflicted.” The financial concerns were not communicated to the family, nor to the physician, and thus were not factored into subsequent decisions about hospice care. Kuczewski and DeVita call for disclosure of significant billing information so that family members can include this information in the decision-making process. Cases like this demonstrate the ongoing need for open communication between providers, patients, and families. Provider-patient partnerships have been advocated in other articles (Brody, 1980; Kasper, Mulley, & Wennberg, 1992; Quill, 1983). Kasper et al. (1992) developed the Shared Decision-Making Program, which is an interactive video program used jointly by clinicians and patients to discuss treatment options. Additionally, researchers have addressed a variety of other decision-related topics, including decision-making assistance for elderly cancer patients (Lewis, Pearson, Corcoran-Perry, & Narayan, 1997); decisionmaking and CPR (Kerridge, Pearson, Rolfe, & Lowe, 1998); the impact of emotion on patient decision-making (Redelmeier, Rozin, & Kahneman, 1993; P. A. Shapiro & Muskin, 1993); and decision-making, consent, and resuscitation (Ardagh, 1999). Clarke and Evans (1998) explained that there are many obstacles to medical decisionmaking, including the complexity of interpreting the statistical results of medical research to determine the best treatment options, the influence of the media on patient perceptions of options, physician preferences for certain treatments and procedures, the language with which options are communicated and framed in terms of uncertainty and risk, patient and physician emotions, and cost. There is yet an entirely separate body of research devoted to end-of-life decisions. Researchers have addressed issues related to self-determination and advance directives

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

173

(Basile, 1998; Ersek, Kagawa-Singer, Barnes, Blackhall, & Koenig, 1998; Nolan & Bruder, 1997; Ott, 1999; Srebnik & La Fond, 1999), the impact of managed care on end-of-life decisions (Kuczewski & DeVita, 1998), discussions of pain management with terminal illness (Foley, 1999), the ethical and legal issues involved in physician-assisted suicide (Gostin, 1997; McCue & Cohen, 1999; Meisel, Jernigan, & Youngner, 1999; Ryan, 1998), patient education on life-sustaining treatments (Brandenburg & Gifford, 1997), patient attitudes about life-sustaining treatments (Blackhall, Frank, Murphy, Michel, Palmer, & Azen, 1999), end-of-life decisions in critical care units (Sprung & Oppenheim, 1998), end-of-life decisions for nephrology patients (Cooper, 1998; Loftin & Beumer, 1998), protocols for making end-of-life decisions (Fry, 1998; Stoeckle, Doorley, & McArdle, 1998), and medical education and end-of-life decisions (Danis, Federman, Fins, Fox, Kastenbaum, Lanken, Long, Lowenstein, Lynn Rouse, & Tulsky, 1999; Gordon & Tolle, 1991; Hayes, Stoudemire, Kinlaw, Dell, & Loomis, 1999). Common to all of the articles is a concern for the protection of self-determination. Gostin (1997) provided a detailed history of legal cases addressing end-of-life issues ranging from withholding treatment to physician-assisted suicide. In regard to refusal of treatment, Gostin states that the courts have ruled that the right to refuse treatment is protected by the U.S. Constitution, specifically the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the same time, the Supreme Court found that assistance in committing suicide is not a protected liberty of the Due Process Clause. McCue and Cohen (1999) detailed Sigmund Freud’s battle with cancer and his eventual voluntary active euthanasia to raise some interesting questions about the protection of selfdetermination in the dying process. It has been pointed out that terminally ill patients may make irrational decisions to end their own lives. However, the authors suggested that some terminally ill patients make the decision to commit active euthanasia well before the disease and/or depression over the illness could affect their capacity to decide such things: “Just as Freud chose to live as long as life was personally meaningful, and die the death he chose at the hands of his trusted physician, Max Schur, we believe that it is inevitable that more terminally ill patients will demand physician assistance in a quick, controlled, and reconciled death when life’s potential has been exhausted and death is imminent” (p. 1521). Physician-assisted suicide is only one end-of-life option, and clearly it is not within the scope of this chapter to even begin to explore the ethical, legal, and moral ramifications of the right to die. People obviously disagree over the role clinicians should play in active euthanasia. However, what is unequivocal and reiterated by all the authors cited above is the need to protect the right of patients to make their own end-of-life decisions. There are specific guidelines for clinicians to help patients and family members make these often difficult decisions (Blatt, 1999; Fry, 1998). Fry (1998) suggested that nurses have four responsibilities in end-of-life decisions: to be a patient advocate, to relieve the patient’s pain and suffering, to provide comfort, and to avoid active euthanasia or assisted suicide. According to Fry, nurses have an ethical obligation to make sure that patients and family members are fully informed of all treatment options and that the patients are as comfortable and free from pain as possible. Blatt (1999) suggested several strategies for helping family members make medical decisions for the patient. First, the health care providers need to establish a relationship with the family members. Second, those providers who have been caring for the patient consistently should be the ones to deliver information to the family. Third, the providers, if necessary, should help the family members come to a consensus. Finally, once a decision has been reached, the providers should support the family’s decision.

174

GILLOTTI

Summary

Clearly, knowing how much information, what information, when to give it, and how to deliver diagnostic news entailing potential negative outcomes is an ongoing challenge for clinicians as they continue to uphold current ethical and legal standards. Besides the obstacles to bad news delivery described by Gillotti and Applegate (2000), the obstacles to decision-making described by Clarke and Evans (1998), and the ethical and legal obligations described by Goldman (1980), Kagarise and Sheldon (2000), and Gostin (1997), clinicians are faced with myriad communicative challenges as they attempt to assist patients in making medical decisions. Given the need to weigh difficult and uncertain outcomes based on the information provided to patients by physicians, coupled with the values and beliefs about life and death that patients bring with them to each interaction, perhaps the issues involved in medical decision-making are best understood from the perspective of problematic integration theory (Babrow, 1992; Babrow et al., 2000). PROBLEMATIC INTEGRATION THEORY

According to Babrow et al. (2000), problematic integration theory is a general theory that addresses uncertainty and communication. Babrow (1992) stated that there are two assumptions that are integral to the theory. First, people have a probabilistic orientation to the world, in which certain outcomes arise. Second, people have an evaluative orientation toward possible outcomes. The health care context lends itself to the application of this theory because of the inherent uncertainty of health care and the probabilistic nature of treatment options. Babrow et al. (2000) stated that probabilistic and evaluative orientations are integrated into experience. Hence, communication can simultaneously influence the probability of an outcome as well as the evaluation of that outcome. “For now it is enough to note that communication patterns can shape the structures we use to interpret messages about probability and value” (Babrow, 1992, p. 101). With this in mind, Babrow suggested that integration of probability and value becomes more difficult with divergence, meaning that the more probable an outcome is and the more negative its evaluation, the more difficult it will be to integrate the outcome into experience. “A basic integrative predicament arises when there is a discrepancy between what we believe to be so and what we want to be so (either retrospectively, in the present, or prospectively)” (p. 100). Babrow et al. (2000) stated that persons experiencing medical problems are confronted with a multitude of integrative dilemmas. In addition to the synergistic role of communication and its influence on probability and evaluation, a person’s emotions affect the process, since they can shape communication and interpretation (Babrow, 1992). This highlights the importance of this theory for understanding bad news delivery and decision-making, particularly end-of-life decisionsmaking, as these explanations of illness will inevitably be laden with emotion (Clark & Evans, 1998; DiMatteo, 1979; Gillotti & Applegate, 2000; Lown, 1996; Redelmeier et al., 1993; P. A. Shapiro & Muskin, 1993). Babrow et al. (2000) argued that how uncertainty is interpreted in this context depends on what information is provided to the patient. They discussed several message features that are key to reducing uncertainty, including clarity, completeness, volume, accuracy, source ethos, ambiguity, applicability, and consistency. Importantly, Babrow et al. recognized the relativity of the interpretation of each of these features by suggesting that what is too much information for one person is not enough for another. Babrow (1992) discusses the importance of the rhetorical choices made by communicators. “Depending on their

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

175

awareness of its disturbing potential, communicators make rhetorical choices in coping with the difficulties inherent in expressing news of diverging probability and evaluation” (Babrow, 1992, p. 105). Thus, the language the provider uses to communicate diagnostic and prognostic news and the treatment options available to the patient are crucial to the patient’s ability to make reasonable decisions. How people make decisions has been studied for centuries. Although some people base their decisions upon logic and reason, others base their decisions upon what is reasonable to them (Perelman & Tyteca, 1969). In other words, logic is not always the guiding factor, in decision-making; rather, what is reasonable to individuals is a guiding factor, and reasonableness is relative to individuals and their values and beliefs. “Common sense regularly opposes facts to theories, truths to opinions, and that which is objective to that which is not. By this opposition it indicates what opinions are preferred to others, whether or not the preference be based on generally accepted criteria” (Perelman & Tyteca, 1969, p. 511). What is crucial to this rhetorical perspective is the understanding that individuals’ value systems arise from their language communities (Perelman & Tyteca, 1969). What language is used to present options for a decision becomes crucial, and thus the rhetor must pay attention to the audience. This recognition of the importance of the audience of a medical message and of the values that patients bring to medical interactions is embedded in problematic integration theory and provides insight into the complexity of medical decision-making. CONCLUSION

There are several themes that emerge from the literature on medical disclosure, bad news delivery, informed consent, end of life decisions and problematic integration theory. These themes include a concern for the ethical obligation of physicians to disclose diagnostic and prognostic information to patients even when the news is bad; a movement away from medical paternalism to patient self-determination and control; the need for patient advocacy by family members and care providers; and a recognition that many factors, such as affect, communication, attitude toward risk, the physician-patient relationship, and patient beliefs affect medical decision-making. This review uncovers the foundational legal and ethical doctrines that underpin the concern for patient self-determination. While the current trends favor patient autonomy, we must keep in mind that sometimes others must make decisions for us when we are unable. The balancing act between truth and hope, autonomy and dependency, is often tough to negotiate, especially with end-of-life decisions. Unfortunately, medicine is not an exact science in which all outcomes are known. Medical care providers can only aid in patient decision-making through open and honest communication. As providers seek to assist patients in making decisions, both providers and patients might benefit by taking to heart the following sentiment: “Clinicians are not responsible for knowing the answers to patients’ deeply personal and existential questions; they are called on to be present as witnesses to their patients’ suffering and to respect the vulnerability created by the news they bear” (Rabow & McPhee, 1999, p. 263). REFERENCES Angelos, P., DaRosa, D. A., Derossis, A. M., & Kim, B. (1999). Medical ethics curriculum for surgical residents: Results of a pilot project. Surgery, 126, 701–705. Ardagh, M. (1999). Resurrecting autonomy during resuscitation: The concept of professional substituted judgment. Journal of Medical Ethics, 25, 375–378.

176

GILLOTTI

Ashworth, P. D., Longmate, M. A., & Morrison, P. (1992). Patient participation: Its meaning and significance in the context of caring. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 17, 1430–1439. Babrow, A. S. (1992). Communication and problematic integration: Understanding diverging probability and value, ambiguity, ambivalence, and impossibility. Communication Theory, 2, 95–130. Babrow, A. S., Hines, S. C., & Kasch, C. R. (2000). Managing uncertainty in illness explanation: An explanation of problematic integration theory. In B. B. Whaley (Ed.), Explaining illness: Research, theory, and strategies (pp. 41–67). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bain, D. J. G. (1976). Doctor-patient communication in general practice consultations. Medical Education, 10, 125–131. Barnlund, B. C. (1976). The mystification of meaning: Doctor-patient encounters. Journal of Medical Education, 51, 716–725. Basile, C. M. (1998). Advance directives and advocacy in end-of-life decisions. Nurse Practitioner, 23(5), 44–60. Beckman, H., Markakis, K., Suchman, A., & Frankel, R. (1994). American Journal of Gastroenterology, 89, 662–664. Blackhall, L. J., Frank, G., Murphy, S. T., Michel, V., Palmer, J. M., & Azen, S. P. (1999). Ethnicity and attitudes towards life sustaining technology. Social Science and Medicine, 48, 1779–1789. Blatt, L. (1999). Working with families in reaching end-of-life decisions. Clinical Nurse Specialist, 13, 219–223. Bottrell, M. M., Alpert, H. Fischbach, R. L., & Emanuel, L. L. (2000). Hospital informed consent for procedure forms: Facilitating quality patient-physician interaction. Archives of Surgery, 135, 26–31. Braddock, C. H., Edwards, K. A., Hasenberg, N. M., Laidley, T. L., & Levinson, W. (1999). Informed decision making in outpatient practice. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 2313–2320. Branch, W. T., & Malik, T. K. (1993). Using “windows of opportunities” in brief interviews to understand patients’ concerns. Journal of the American Medical Association, 269, 1667– 1668. Brandenburg, M., & Gifford, J. (1997). Developing a multidisciplinary brochure to teach patients and families about life-sustaining treatments. Dimensions of Critical Care Nursing, 16, 328–332. Brewin, T. B. (1991). Three ways of giving bad news. Lancet, 337, 1207–1210. Brody, D. S. (1980). The patient’s role in clinical decision-making. Annals of Internal Medicine, 93, 718–722. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1978). Universals in language use: Politeness phenomena. In E. Goody (Ed.), Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction (pp. 256–289). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Buckman, R. (1992). How to break bad news: A guide for health care professionals. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cardello, L. L., Ray, E. B., & Pettey, G. R. (1995). The relationship of perceived physician communicator style to patient satisfaction. Communication Reports, 8, 27–37. Carrese, J. A., & Rhodes, L. A. (2000). Bridging cultural differences in medical practice: The case of discussing negative information with Navajo patients. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 15, 92–96. Charlton, R. C. (1992). Breaking bad news. Medical Journal of Australia, 157, 615–621. Clarke P., & Evans, S. H. (1998). Surviving modern medicine. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

177

Coleman, P. G., & Shellow, R. A. (1995). Privacy and autonomy in the physician-patient relationship. Journal of Legal Medicine, 16, 509–543. Cooper, M. C. (1998). Ethical decision making in nephrology nursing for end-of-life care: A responsibility and opportunity. American Nephrology Nurses’ Association Journal, 25, 603–608. Crockford, E. A., Holloway, I. M., & Walker, J. M. (1993). Nurses’ perceptions of patients’ feelings about breast surgery. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 18, 1710–1718. Danis, M., Federman, D., Fins, J. J., Fox, E., Kastenbaum, B., Lanken, P. N., Long, K., Lowenstein, E., Lynn, J., Rouse, F., & Tulsky, J. (1999). Incorporating palliative care into critical care education: Principles, challenges, and opportunities. Critical Care Medicine, 27, 2005–2013. Davis, H. (1991). Breaking bad news. Practitioner, 235, 522–526. Deering, C. G. (1999). Self-disclosure with patients. American Journal of Nursing, 99, 34–39. Dennis, B. P. (1999). The origin and nature of informed consent: Experiences among vulnerable groups. Journal of Professional Nursing, 15, 281–287. DiMatteo, M. R. (1979). A social-psychological analysis of physician-patient rapport: Toward a science of the art of medicine. Journal of Social Issues, 35, 12–33. Edlich, R. F., & Kubler-Ross, E. (1991). On death and dying in the emergency department. Journal of Emergency Medicine, 10, 225–229. Eggly, S. Afonso, N., Rojas, G., Baker, M., Cardozo, L., & Robertson, R. S. (1997). An assessment of residents’ competence in the delivery of bad news to patients. Academic Medicine, 72, 397–399. Emanuel, E. J., & Emanuel, L. L. (1992). Four models of the physician-patient relationship. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267, 2221–2226. Epstein, R. M., Campbell, T. L., Cohen-Cole, S. A., McWhinney, I. R., & Smilkstein, G. (1993). Perspectives on patient-doctor communication. Journal of Family Practice, 37, 377– 388. Ersek, M., Kagawa-Singer, M., Barnes, D., Blackhall, L., & Koenig, B. A. (1998). Multicultural considerations in the use of advance directives. Oncology Nursing Forum, 25, 1683–1690. Fallowfield, L. (1993). Giving sad and bad news. Lancet, 341, 476–478. Faulkner, A., Argent, J., Jones, A., & O’Keefe, C. (1995). Improving the skills of doctors in giving distressing information. Medical Education, 29, 303–307. Foley, K. (1999). A 44-year-old woman with severe pain at the end of life. Journal of the American Medical Association, 281, 1937–1945. Fry, S. (1998). Guidelines for making end-of-life decisions. International Nursing Review, 45, 143–144, 151. Gillotti, C. M. (1996). Individual differences in the delivery of bad news among third year medical students to patients. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky, Lexington. Gillotti, C. M., & Applegate, J. L. (2000). Explaining illness as bad news: Individual differences in explaining illness-related information. In B. B. Whaley (Ed.), Explaining illness: Research, theory, and strategies (pp. 101–120). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gillotti, C. M., Thompson, T. L., & McNeilis, K. (2001). Communicative competence in the delivery of bad news. Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 54, pp. 1011–1023. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Goldman, A. H. (1980). The moral foundations of professional ethics. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.

178

GILLOTTI

Gordon, G. H., & Tolle, S. W. (1991). Discussing life-sustaining treatment: A teaching program for residents. Archives of Internal Medicine, 151, 567–570. Gostin, L. O. (1997). Deciding life and death in the courtroom. Journal of the American Medical Association, 278, 1523–1528. Graham, J. R. (1991). Touching and imparting of bad news. Lancet, 337, 1608–1609. Greene, K. (2000). Disclosure of chronic illness varies by topic and target: The role of stigma and boundaries in willingness to disclose. In S. Petronio (Ed.), Balancing the secrets of private disclosures (pp. 123–135). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Greenfield, S., Kaplan, S., & Ware, J. E. (1985). Expanding patient involvement in care: Effects on patient outcomes. Annals of Internal Medicine, 102, 520–528. Hall, J. A., Epstein, A. M., DeCiantis, M. L., & McNeil, B. J. (1993). Physicians’ liking for their patients: More evidence for the role of affect in medical care. Health Psychology, 12, 140–146. Hayes, R. P., Stoudemire, A. S., Kinlaw, K., Dell, M. L., & Loomis, A. (1999). Changing attitudes about end-of-life decision making of medical students during third-year clinical clerkships. Psychosomatics, 40, 205–211. Helman, C. G. (1985). Communication in primary care: The role of patient and practitioner explanatory models. Social Science and Medicine, 20, 923–931. Kagarise, M. J., & Sheldon, G. F. (2000). Translational ethics: A perspective for the new millennium. Archives of Surgery, 135, 39–45. Kaiser, R. M. (1993, October). The challenge of breaking bad news. Hospital Practice, pp. 8–14. Kasper, J. F., Mulley, A. G., & Wennberg, J. E. (1992, June). Developing shared decisionmaking programs to improve the quality of health care. QRB, pp. 183–190. Kerridge, I. H., Pearson, S., Rolfe, I. E., & Lowe, M. (1998). Decision making in CPR: Attitudes of hospital patients and healthcare professionals. Medical Journal of Australia, 169, 128–131. Kirsch, M. (2000). The myth of informed consent. American Journal of Gastroenterology, 95, 588–589. Krahn, G. L., Hallum, A., & Kime, C. (1993). Are there good ways to give “bad news”? Pediatrics, 91, 578–582. Kuczewski, M. G., & DeVita, M. (1998). Managed care and end-of-life decisions: Learning to live ungagged. Archives of Internal Medicine, 158, 2424–2428. Lashley, M., Talley, W., Lands, L. C., & Keyserlingk, E. W. (2000). Informed proxy consent: Communication between pediatric surgeons and surrogates about surgery. Pediatrics, 105, 591–597. Laurent, C. (1991). Breaking bad news. Nursing Times, 87(12), 24–28. Lewis, M., Pearson, V., Corcoran-Perry, S., & Narayan, S. (1997). Decision making by elderly patients with cancer and their caregivers. Cancer Nursing, 20, 389–397. Loftin, L. P., & Beumer, C. (1998). Collaborative end-of-life decision making in end stage renal disease. American Nephrology Nurses’ Association Journal, 25, 615–617. Longhway, C. H. (1999). Preserving patient privacy. American Journal of Nursing, 99(10), 14. Lown, B. (1996). The lost art of healing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Maynard, D. W. (1989). Notes on the delivery and reception of diagnostic news regarding mental disabilities. In D. T. Helm, W. T. Anders, A. J. Meehan, & A. W. Rawls (Eds.), The interactional order: New directions in the study of social order (pp. 54–67). New York: Irvington. Maynard, D. W. (1991). Bearing bad news in clinical settings. In B. Dervin & M. J. Voigt (Eds.), Progress in communication sciences, (Vol. 10, pp. 143–172). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

179

McCue, J. D., & Cohen, L. M. (1999). Freud’s physician-assisted death. Archives of Internal Medicine, 159, 1521–1525. McGee, D. S., & Cegala, D. J. (1998). Patient communication skills training for improved communication competence in the primary care medical consultation. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 26, 412–430. McLauchlan, C. A. J. (1990). Handling distressed relatives and breaking bad news. British Medical Journal, 301, 1145–1149. Meisel, A., Jernigan, J. C., & Youngner, S. J. (1999). Prosecutors and end-of-life decision making. Archives of Internal Medicine, 159, 1089–1095. Miranda, J., & Brody, R. V. (1992). Communicating bad news. Western Journal of Medicine, 156, 83–85. Mitsuya, H. (1997). Telling the truth to cancer patients and patients with HIV-1 infection in Japan. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 809, 279–289. Mystakidou, K. (1996). Disclosure of diagnostic information to cancer patients in Greece. Palliative Medicine, 10, 195–200. Nolan, M. T., & Bruder, M. (1997). Patients’ attitudes toward advance directives and end-of-life treatment decisions. Nursing Outlook, 45, 204–208. Novack, D. H., Volk, G., Drossman, D. A., & Lipkin, M. (1993). Medical interviewing and interpersonal skills teaching in US medical schools: Progress, problems, and promise. Journal of the American Medical Association, 269, 2101–2105. Ott, B. B. (1999). Advance directives: The emerging body of research. American Journal of Critical Care, 8, 514–519. Parrott, R., Duncan, V., & Duggan, A. (2000). Promoting full and honest disclosure during conversations with health care providers. In S. Petronio (Ed.), Balancing the secrets of private disclosures (pp. 137–148). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pearse, P., & Cooper, C. (1993). Breaking bad news. Medical Journal of Australia, 158, 137. Pentz, R. D., Young, L. N., Amos, C. I., Hess, K. R., Wei, Q., & Anderlik, M. R. (1999). Informed consent for tissue research. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 1625. Perelman, C. H., & Tyteca, L. O. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Ptacek, J. T., & Eberhardt, T. L. (1996). Breaking bad news: A literature review. Journal of the American Medical Association, 276, 496–502. Quill, T. E. (1983). Partnerships in patient care: A contractual approach. Annals of Internal Medicine, 98, 228–234. Quill, T. E., & Townsend, P. (1991). Bad news: Delivery, dialogue, and dilemmas. Archives of Internal Medicine, 151, 463–468. Rabow, M. W., & McPhee, S. J. (1999). Beyond breaking bad news: How to help patients who suffer. Western Journal of Medicine, 171, 260–263. Rappaport, W., & Witzke, D. (1993). Education about death and dying during the clinical years of medical school. Surgery, 113, 163–165. Redelmeier, D. A., Rozin, P., & Kahneman, D. (1993). Understanding patients’ decisions: Cognitive and emotional perspectives. Journal of the American Medical Association, 270, 72–76. Roberts, L. W., Mines, J., Voss, C., Koinis, C., Mitchell, S., Obenshain, S. S., & McCarty, T. (1999). Assessing medical students’ competence in obtaining informed consent. American Journal of Surgery, 178, 351–354. Rosenfeld, L. B. (2000). Overview of the ways privacy, secrecy, and disclosure are balanced in today’s society. In S. Petronio (Ed.), Balancing the secrets of private disclosures (pp. 3–17). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

180

GILLOTTI

Roter, D., & Frankel, R. (1992). Quantitative and qualitative approaches to the evaluation of the medical dialogue. Social Science and Medicine, 34, 1097–1103. Roter, D. L., Hall, J. A., & Katz, N. R. (1988). Patient-physician communication: A descriptive summary of the literature. Patient Education and Counseling, 12, 99–119. Ryan, C. J. (1998). Pulling up the runaway: The effect of new evidence on euthanasia’s slippery slope. Journal of Medical Ethics, 24, 341–344. Schofield, M. J., Walkom, S., & Sanson-Fisher, R. (1997). Patient-provider agreement on guidelines for preparation for breast cancer treatment. Behavioral Medicine, 23, 36–45. Sell, L., Devlin, B., Bourke, S. J., Munro, N. C., Corris, P. S., & Gibson, G. J. (1993). Communicating the diagnosis of lung cancer. Respiratory Medicine, 87, 61–63. Shapiro, P. A., & Muskin, P. R. (1993). Patient decision making. Journal of the American Medical Association, 270, 2432. Shapiro, R. (1992). Unanswered questions surrounding the Patient Self-Determination Act. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 1, 117–119. Shuchman, M. (1999). Patients for sale: The seamy side of clinical trials. Western Journal of Medicine, 171, 130–131. Sloan, D. A., Donnelly, M. B., Johnson, S. B., Schwartz, R. W., & Strodel, W. E. (1994). Assessing surgical residents’ and medical students’ interpersonal skills. Journal of Surgical Research, 57, 613–618. Speck, P. (1991). Breaking bad news. Nursing Times, 87, 25–26. Sprung, C. L., & Oppenheim, A. (1998). End-of-life decisions in critical care medicine: Where are we headed? Critical Care Medicine, 26, 200–202. Srebnik, D. S., & La Fond, J. Q. (1999). Advance directives for mental health treatment. Psychiatric Services, 50, 919–925. Statham, H. & Dimavicius, J. (1992). Commentary: How do you give bad news to parents? Birth, 19, 103–104. Stewart, M., Brown, J. B., Weston, W. W., McWhinney, I. R., McWilliam, C. L., & Freeman, T. R. (1995). Patient-centered medicine: Transforming the clinical method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stiles, W. B., & Putnam, S. M. (1989). Analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior in doctorpatient encounters. In M. Stewart & D. Roter (Eds.), Communicating with medical patients (pp. 211–222). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Stoeckle, M. L., Doorley, J. E., & McArdle, R. M. (1998). Identifying compliance with endof-life care decision protocols. Dimensions of Critical Care Nursing, 17, 314–321. Street, R. L. (1992). Analyzing communication in medical consultations: Do behavioral measures correspond to patients’ perceptions? Medical Care, 30, 976–989. Sulmasy, D. P., Terry, P. B., Weisman, C. S., Miller, D. J, Stallings, R. Y., Vettese, M. A., & Haller, K. B. (1998). The accuracy of substituted judgments in patients with terminal diagnoses. Annals of Internal Medicine, 128, 621–629. Tardy, C. H. (2000). Self-disclosure and health: Revisiting Sidney Jourard’s hypothesis. In S. Petronio (Ed.), Balancing the secrets of private disclosures (pp. 111–122). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Thomasma, D. C. (1994). Telling the truth to patients: A clinical ethics exploration. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 3, 375–382. Thompson, T. L. (1994). Interpersonal communication and health care. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 696–725). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Waitzkin, H. (1985, June). Information giving in medical care. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 26, 81–101.

8. MEDICAL DISCLOSURE AND DECISION-MAKING

181

Wasserman, R. C., & Inui, T. S. (1983). Systematic analysis of clinician-patient interactions: A critique of recent approaches with suggestions for future research. Medical Care, 21, 279–293. Weijts, W. (1994). Responsible health communication: Taking control of our lives. American Behavioral Scientist, 38, 257–270. Weiss, S. J. (1986). Consensual norms regarding patient involvement. Social Science and Medicine, 22, 489–496. Welch Cline, R. J., & McKenzie, N. J. (2000). Dilemmas of disclosure in the age of HIV/AIDS: Balancing privacy and protection in the health care context. In S. Petronio (Ed.), Balancing the secrets of private disclosures (pp. 71–82). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Woodward, B. (1999). Challenges to human subject protections in US medical research. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 1947–1952. Young, E. W., & Jex, S. A. (1992). The Patient Self-Determination Act: Potential ethical quandaries and benefits. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2, 107–115.

9 Children, Older Adults, and Women: Impact on Provider-Patient Interaction Jon F. Nussbaum Penn State University

Sandra Ragan University of Oklahoma

Bryan Whaley University of San Francisco

This chapter introduces three underrepresented populations within health communication research. Both the health issues and the communication factors that are related to patients who are children, elderly, or women have not been the focus of much scholarly activity until quite recently. Many of the major health communication issues that are faced by these individuals on a daily basis are unique and can create complex interactive dilemmas for both the person who is seeking help and those professionals who are attempting to provide quality care. PROVIDER INTERACTIONS WITH PEDIATRIC PATIENTS

Effective provider-patient interaction, regardless of how defined, is formidable under the best of communicative conditions. This venture becomes particularly challenging when the patients are children. Pediatric patients’ lack of illness knowledge and life experiences as well as their ever-changing cognitive and linguistic development make message production tailored for illness interaction extremely ambitious. As arduous a process as interacting with children about illness appears to be, this discourse is claimed an essential component of their health-related experience. For instance, children’s understanding of illness and the medical setting is thought to be primary to their adherence to medical regimens and advice, self-management, and stress reduction (e.g., Burbach & Peterson, 1986; Eiser, 1985a,b,c; Eiser & Eiser, 1987; Potter & Roberts, 1984). Dorn (1984) posits the importance of this phenomenon: “how effectively one communicates can affect children’s reactions to procedures, compliance with therapy, and knowledge about health and illness. . . . How one

183

184

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

approaches the child, the techniques used, and the language employed determine the degree of success or failure in these interactions” (p. 325). Adults’ interaction with children about illness is often characterized by the following strategy: “Adults often assume that if they tell a child something—explaining it calmly and rationally—the child will comprehend” (Steward & Regalbuto, 1975, p. 146). As evident, disparity exists between what children want or need and the messages providers create during interaction. At this juncture, theorizing and research concerning patient-provider interaction and concerning children have served more a heuristic than pragmatic function. Specifically, the existing contributions to this literature have been scant and often anecdotal, leaving providers in want of more specific guidelines for interaction. However, what has been offered regarding theory and strategies for message production is rich with potential (see Whaley, 2000, for detailed discussion of this literature). Theoretical Foundation(s) for Provider Interaction with Children

Stage theory (Bibace & Walsh, 1979, 1980, 1981; Piaget, 1930; Werner, 1948) has served as the conceptual base for research concerning interacting with children in health settings. Specifically, by understanding how children conceptualize disease and illness, researchers can estimate children’s comprehension of illness (Perrin & Perrin, 1983) and extract interaction strategies that are age- and developmentally appropriate (Goldman, WhitneySaltiel, Granger, & Rodin, 1991; Eiser, 1985a,b,c; Eiser & Eiser, 1987; Eiser, Patterson, & Tripp, 1984; see Eiser, 1985a,b,c, for reviews of sociological approach contributions to children’s concepts of illness). Bibace and Walsh (1981) suggested that children’s conceptualization of illness lies on a continuum of three levels—prelogical (ages 2 to 6 years), concrete-logical (ages 7 to 10 years), and formal-logical (ages 11 and older)—which differ developmentally and qualitatively; moreover, each level has two sublevels of explanations, rendering six types of explanations of illness by children (see also Eiser, 1985a,b,c, and Whaley, 2000, for more detailed discussions). The younger children at the prelogical stage conceptualize illness as phenomenism—sickness is caused by a force external to them, but they are incapable of explaining the mode by which the agent worked (“How do people get colds?” “From the sun.” “How does the sun give you a cold?” “It just does, that’s all”; Bibace & Walsh, 1981, p. 36). For the older children at the prelogical level, the governing explanation for sickness is contagion—the agent or source of illness is caused by entities that are in the immediate proximity to the child but not in actual contact (e.g., “How do people get colds?” “When someone else gets near them”; Bibace & Walsh, 1981, p. 36). Youngsters at the concrete-logical stage suggest that sickness occurs via contamination (transmission by physical contact—e.g., touching, rubbing; that is, “How do people get them [colds]?” “You’re outside without a hat and you start sneezing. Your head would get cold, the cold would touch it, and then it would go all over your body.”). (Bibace & Walsh, 1981, p. 36). More advanced illness causation within the concrete-logical stage is characterized by internalization. Here, children depict illness as an external agent that by obtaining bodily entry (e.g., inhaling, swallowing) inhabits the body internally (though they are vague on how illness affects them internally; Bibace & Walsh, 1981): How do people get colds? “In winter, they breathe in too much air into their nose, and it blocks up the nose.” How does this cause colds? “The bacteria gets in by breathing. Then the lungs get too soft [child exhales], and it goes to the nose.” How does it get better? “Hot fresh air, it gets in the nose and pushes the cold air back.” (Bibace & Walsh, 1981, p. 37)

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

185

Finally, pediatric patients at the formal-logical stage conceptualize illness as a physiological phenomemon—external culprits affecting the functioning of internal bodily parts and/or organs in a “step by step internal sequence or events culminating in that illness” (Bibace & Walsh, 1981): How do people get colds? “They come from viruses, I guess. Other people have the virus, and it gets into your blood stream and it causes a cold.” (p. 37)

As children advance within the formal-logical level, they progress from physiological to psychophysiological explanations of illness, where psychological factors (i.e., thoughts, feelings) are perceived to contribute to physical demise: What is a heart attack? “It’s when your heart stops working right. Sometimes it’s pumping too slow or too fast.” How do people get a heart attack? “It can come from being all nerve-racked. You worry too much. The tension can affect your heart.” (Bibace & Walsh, 1981, p. 38)

Piagetian theory of development (e.g., Piaget, 1930) has dominated contemporary research concerning patient-provider interaction. Again, the rationale for the research concerning children’s conceptualizations of illness is, from this literature, to begin extrapolating message strategies for provider interactions with pediatric patients. However, the stage approach, its credence and subsequent application to yielding interaction strategies, has been subject to considerable question (Burbach & Peterson, 1986; Eiser, 1985a,b,c, 1988, 1989a,b; Eiser & Eiser, 1987; Eiser, Havermans, & Casas, 1993) and the efforts of Carey (1985) and Vygotsky (1962) have been suggested to be superior alternatives in advancing this literature (see Rushforth, 1999, for excellent history, discussion, and issues of debate concerning theorizing and researching about children’s conceptualization of illness). Interaction Strategies for Providers with Pediatric Patients

As mentioned, the impetus for understanding how children conceive and explain illness is to, theoretically, discern message strategies for interaction. This path of proposed achievement has fallen short of formable advances. For instance, as evident from the literature concerning children’s understanding of illness, researchers are continuing to grapple with theoretical and methodological issues to advance this domain of inquiry. Hence, attempting to discern patient-provider interaction strategies from the existing corpus of knowledge has been limited by previous theorizing (i.e., using stage approach), coupled with a relatively scant number of empirical investigations to discern strategies and effectiveness. However, the existing literature concerning interaction strategies for providers with children is informative theoretically, pragmatically, and heuristically. Interaction suggestions for providers can be categorized as (a) general strategies for interaction, (b) scripts, (c) use of tropes, and (d) vocabulary choice (detailed in Whaley, 2000). General Considerations of Pediatric-Provider Communication. Prior to interaction, providers are encouraged to consider the personality and experience, cognitive and mental level, religious, and cultural aspects of pediatric clients when considering message strategies of interaction (e.g., Bannard, 1987; Beales, Lennox Holt, Keen, & Mellor, 1983; Dorn, 1984; Eiser, 1985a,b,c; Elsberry & Sorensen, 1986). Whitt, Dysktra, &

186

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

Taylor (1979), in addition, assert the importance of parental consultation in more accurately ascertaining these factors. Specific suggestions have been posited for providers’ assessment of pediatric clients’ degree of health understanding. For instance, providers could appraise children’s conception or representation of their medical condition by having these clients draw pictures or asking them to verbally depict what they believe is the nature of their illness (e.g., perceptions of what is making them sick and the organs involved; Bannard, 1987; Dorn, 1984). Eiser and colleagues (e.g., Eiser & Eiser, 1987; Eiser, Havermans, & Casas, 1993) asserted that determining a child’s experience and knowledge of his or her ailment, rather than age or Piagetian stage (e.g., Bannard, 1987), is a superior method of gauging the child’s level of illness understanding. In summary, the aforementioned message receiver variables are core to any goaloriented interaction and are especially useful to consider when providers design messages for the specific purposes of interacting with pediatric clients about health-related information. More contextual considerations are also essential to provider-pediatric interaction. Here, scripts appear to be of considerable interactive usefulness. Script/Schemata Use When Interacting. Research suggests that considering children’s health-related schemas and scripts of pediatric clients when interacting with children may prove helpful. For instance, Eiser, Eiser, and Lang (1989) found that when children were asked to depict what occurs when someone (a) doesn’t feel well, (b) goes to the doctor, (c) goes to the dentist, (d) goes to the hospital, and (e) has an operation, their scripts were generally in accord with the conventional succession of episodes or events (see Eiser et al., 1989 for age-related response differences). Further work concerning pediatric descriptions of objects and the sequencing of events during medical examinations and within hospitals reveals children’s knowledge is generally correct, events are sequenced accurately, and this increases with age (Eiser, 1989a,b; Eiser, Eiser, & Jones, 1990). Figurative Language Use When Interacting. Using comparisons (e.g., metaphors, analogies) is an intuitive and repeatedly employed message strategy for interacting with pediatric clients about health-related knowledge and events (e.g., Analogies Enhance Teaching Efforts, 1996; Bannard, 1987; Beales et al., 1983; Eiser, Eiser, & Hunt, 1986a, 1986b; Elsberry & Sorensen, 1986; Harmon & Hamby, 1989; Nichter & Nichter, 1986; Potter & Roberts, 1984; Whitt, et al., 1979). For example, Harmon and Hamby (1989) suggested something of the following when interacting about diabetes: In insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM), the pancreas does not make insulin. Insulin is needed to carry glucose from the blood into the cells where it is used as energy. Since there is no insulin, the glucose stays in the blood and the cells begin to starve. One way to understand this is to think of the blood vessels as streets, the cells as houses, and the glucose as cars that travel on the street. Insulin acts as the driveways which allow the cars to leave the street and go into the garages. In IDDM, the cars stay on the street because there are no driveways (or insulin) to carry the glucose into the cell. (p. 413)

The suggestions concerning using figurative language to interact with children are dominated by anecdotal evidence. A limited number of empirical investigations have been conducted to examine the credence of these suggestions, with findings being tentative (e.g., Eiser et al., 1986b; Potter & Roberts, 1984; see Eiser et al., 1986a for essentials on developmental changes in children’s tropes to describe body parts). Whaley (1994), while

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

187

supporting the use of figurative language when interacting with pediatric patients, noted that metaphors and analogies come in different forms with different pragmatic functions and suggested health providers to take heed of these complexities when interacting with children (see Eiser et al., 1986a, 1986b; Whaley, 1994, 2000, for the specific examples and concerns about using figurative language with pediatric clients). Vocabulary. Consideration of word choice is especially consequential when interacting about health-related material with children or when children are attendant. For instance, the literature commonly tells of the five-year-old girl who was told her knee was “inflamed,” which she understood as her joint was “in flames” beneath her skin. As such, she was frightened of the possibility that her leg would burn in its entirety (Beales et al., 1983). Hence, using such words as “dye,” “drawing” blood or fluid, or “burning” sugar (i.e., homonyms) should be done with caution and may require discussion for clarity of meaning when interacting with younger patients, especially (Bannard, 1987; Whitt et al., 1979). Interacting with Pediatric Patients—Conclusion

The current literature and research results concerning patient-provider interaction with children appears to be what Whitt et al. (1979) had in mind years ago when they suggested. In spite of commonplace admonitions to “speak at the child’s level” and “be accurate,” the clinical literature provides few illustrative examples for parents, physicians and pediatric nurses who seek to ameliorate children’s distorted perceptions of bodily disorders. This dearth of information is not entirely surprising. For all the literature on the clinical phenomenon, there is little theoretical structure to guide the task of providing explanations of illness which are both accurate and within the child’s cognitive capacity for understanding. (p. 331, italics added)

This continued state of affairs should by no means be a reflection on the scholars involved in this research. Investigating any communicative or social concern with children is an extremely challenging theoretical and methodical endeavor, in addition to the obvious taxing nature of the time, effort, and expense to conduct noteworthy studies. Those scholars who endure these factors and make laudable contributions (e.g., Eiser and colleagues) are to be commended and encouraged. Despite such efforts, however, there still exists a considerable amount of theorizing and investigations concerning patient-provider interaction strategies with children. Key to beginning systematic research concerning explaining illness to children is evaluating the literature (several scholars have) and performing the research. OLDER ADULTS

The prediction that those individuals aged 65 and over will constitute close to 22% of the population within the United States by the year 2030 (U.S. Senate special Committee on Aging, 1991) has heightened the awareness among scholars, practitioners, and “ordinary folks” that our society is becoming increasingly more mature. This aging of America has spawned many myths centered on the notion that the process of growing old cannot possibly be a positive experience and surely will be a time of great sadness,

188

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

depression, and failing physical capacities. Quite to the contrary, social scientific research focusing on the physical as well as the psychological well-being of older adults has shown that the aging process can be accomplished with high levels of good health, with close and very satisfying personal relationships and can be a time of great personal fulfillment (Nussbaum, Pecchioni, Robinson, & Thompson, 2000). At the same time, it is quite apparent that older adults require access to a much larger number of health care services than do younger individuals and that the demographic trends point to an even greater demand of appropriate and effective health care services by these older adults in the coming years (Beisecker & Beisecker, 1996). For instance, Manton and Suzman (1992) speculated that the number of physician visits by older adults will double by 2040, with the greatest increase in physician visits coming from those over 75. Health communication scholars can no longer ignore the fact that a rather large percentage of health care is currently and will in the future be directed toward the special needs of an aging population. The Special Health Needs of Older Adults

Older adults suffer from more chronic or long-term illness than do younger adults or children and that percentage increases with age (Burham, 1974; Eisdorfer & Cohen, 1980; U.S. Census Bureau, 1996). In addition, as we age past 75, we are more likely to present several chronic conditions to the physician simultaneously. The most common of these chronic conditions include heart problems, arthritis and rheumatism, visual impairment, diabetes, hearing impairment, and hypertension (National Center for Health Statistics, 1990). Stahl and Feller (1990) reported that even though older adults do suffer from more chronic diseases than do younger adults, most older adults manage these diseases quite well and can continue to live quite well. Acute illnesses or short-term health problems such as broken bones and influenza are not more likely to occur within older adults. However, when an older adult does suffer from a broken bone or from the “flu,” it will take a significantly longer time to recover and there is a much greater chance of serious complications emerging from the acute illness than there are within a younger population (Nussbaum et al., 2000; Wilder, 1974a, 1974b). The mental health of older adults has received increased and rather intense scrutiny from both medical researchers and the popular press, in some part, because of the increase in reported cases of Alzheimer’s disease. This may reflect the media attention given to former President Ronald Regan and his struggle with Alzheimer’s. Nevertheless, Gatz, Kasl-Godley, and Karel (1996) reported that only about 1% of individuals between the ages of 60 and 70 suffer from some impairment in mental functioning, with this percentage increasing to about 25% for those 85 years of age and older. The occurrence of dementia or chronic brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, as well as the severity of these mental disorders, does appear to increase with age. Notice that the percentage of older individuals suffering from impairment of their mental capabilities is nowhere near the 100% or even 50% level that would be the result if the myth of a perfect correlation between growing old and severe loss of mental capabilities were true. Depression has often been identified as the biggest mental health problem facing the elderly (Nussbaum et al., 2000). However, Holzer, Leaf, and Weissman (1985) reported that depression is no more common among noninstitutionalized older adults than among younger individuals. Gatz et al. (1996) reported that depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia affect about 5% of the noninstitutionalized population of older adults and

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

189

that this percentage is significantly smaller than the percentage of younger individuals suffering from the same mental health disorders. Much like the physical health problems affecting older adults, mental health problems in old age are rather complex and can lead to much more serious health problems that are often life threatening if not managed appropriately. Age-Related Cognitive Changes

Cognitive psychologists have studied the age-related changes in cognition and have linked these changes to our ability to communicate effectively (Nussbaum, Hummert, Williams, & Harwood, 1996). Susan Kemper and her colleagues (Kemper, 1992; Kemper, Keynette, Rash, O’Brien, & Sprott, 1989) have documented declines in working memory capacity and processing speed that affect syntactic and discourse processing abilities for older adults. In addition, older adults are plagued more than younger adults by problems in retrieving proper names (Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991; Crook & West, 1990). It should be noted that age-related declines in language production, language processing, and name retrieval do not affect older adults equally. Wingfield, Wayland, and Stine (1992) suggested that, while it may be true that younger adults are generally better able to recall information than older adults, these same older adults appear to achieve a coherence in interpreting informationally rich statements in a way that is qualitatively different and possibly “better” than younger adults. Older adults may learn to use their limited processing abilities more efficiently than younger adults and thus minimize the physical cognitive declines associated with the aging process. In addition, when older adults are asked to produce narratives in an experimental condition, these narratives tend to be more interesting and clearer than narratives produced by younger subjects (Kemper et al., 1989). Presbycusis and Verbosity

Age-related hearing loss, presbycusis, has been studied quite extensively for the past three decades (Villaume, Brown, & Darling, 1994). Current conceptualizations of presbycusis focus not only on the decrease in hearing sensitivity experienced by older adults but also on the reduced ability to understand speech in terms of distinguishing among phonemes and ultimately meanings. It is a fact that older adults are more likely to have some degree of hearing impairment than younger individuals. Whereas surveys estimate a 5% rate of hearing impairment for young adults, older adults experience a hearing impairment rate of 25% up to 40% (Villaume et al., 1994). Presbycusic listeners experience greater hearing loss for high-frequency than for low-frequency tones. “Diminished sensitivity for these higher-pitched sounds has significant implications for how elderly persons may apprehend the content of speech by detecting, discriminating, and recognizing words, phrases, and sentences” (Villaume et al., 1984, p. 85). Gold, Andres, Arbuckle, and Schwartman (1988) conceptualized off-target verbosity to describe the talk of older adults who produce extreme amounts of irrelevant speech. Offtarget verbosity is characterized by not only an abundance of speech but also by a series of loosely associated verbalizations that stray more and more from the original topic. Gold, Arbuckle, and Andres (1994) reported that from 16% to 21% of the older population can be labeled as speakers with off-target verbosity. Villaume et al. (1994) speculated that the daily functioning of older adults with high levels of off-target verbosity can be

190

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

negatively affected by the reactions of others who grow fatigued and become irritated by the disjoined talk. In addition, off-target verbosity may lead to conclusions that the older adult with off-target verbosity is not functioning competently. Institutionalization

At any one point in time, approximately 4% of those individuals aged 65 or older live in long-term care facilities (nursing homes) (Administration on Aging, 1998). Such a figure may be misleading since about 20% of all older adults will eventually die within a nursing home (Kastenbaum & Candy, 1973). The relocation of a frail older adult to a nursing home can be quite stressful. Nussbaum et al. (2000) have discussed the lack of participation by the older adult who is being relocated, the physical condition of the older adult, the lack of sufficient physical, psychological, and social care within the longterm care facility, the “interactive starvation” within the facility because of the rules that dominate the nursing home environment, and the support provided by the family as important factors associated with a successful transition to a long-term care facility. Beyond the social-psychological factors associated with residing within a nursing home, the United States remains one of only a few civilized countries that does not have a government-sponsored long-term care policy. The lack of this policy creates a financial burden for the older resident or the family who cares for the nursing home resident that almost certainty leads to impoverishment. Nussbaum (1981, 1983) investigated the communicative behavior of residents within nursing homes. He concluded that residents within nursing homes live in a world of near “interactive starvation” created by things such as the architecture of the facility, strict rules that forbid talk between staff and residents, the overuse of medication that “knocks out” residents who could communicate effectively, and conversational topics that concentrate upon disease or events within the nursing home. Stereotyping and Ageism

Robert Butler (1969) coined the term ageism to connote the wholesale discrimination against all elderly individuals. From language that refers to older adults as “geezers,” “goats,” “coots,” or “hags” to corporate policies that force early retirement due to myths about productivity and aging to misdiagnoses based upon mistaken assumptions of the human aging process, ageism can be a substantial barrier to successful aging. Mary Lee Hummert and her colleagues (Hummert, 1994; Hummert, Shaner, & Garska, 1995; Hummert & Nussbaum, 2000) have focused their research on identifying the stereotypes that individuals hold toward the elderly. The most commonly held negative stereotypes held by others toward older adults include older adults as severely impaired, despondent, shrewish/curmudgeonly, and reclusive. Positive stereotypes include goldenager, perfect grandparent, and John Wayne conservative. Both interactive context and the characteristics of the older adult will activate the stereotyping process. The Communication Predicament of Aging Model has been proposed by Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci, and Henwood (1986) to describe how younger adults are affected by ageist stereotypes during intergenerational interactions. In an attempt to accommodate the older interactant, the younger interactant may change his or her communicative behavior toward the older interactant in ways that may be quite detrimental to the self-concept of that older adult. Patronizing speech directed toward older residents of nursing homes is one form of communication behavior predicted by this model.

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

191

Medicare and Managed Care

Medicare is an entitlement program for adults 65 years of age and older and some individuals who have disabilities. Medicare was established in the 1960s to provide quality, lowcost health care to all older adults. The Health Care Financing Administration administers Medicare and sets all reimbursement rates to hospitals as well as to health care providers. Since the early 1960s, Medicare operated, for the most part, as a fee-for-service plan. The federal government recognized that health care costs related to Medicare were growing much too fast. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 established Medicare + Choice plans, the only HMO/managed care option for older adults (additional Managed care plans such as PPOs will soon be available as well). The Balanced Budget Act was passed in an attempt to cut federal reimbursements for Medicare in an effort to rein in out-of-control health care costs. Feder and Moon (1998) reported that as of 1998 more than six million older adults participate in managed care through the Medicare program. The greatest benefit within a managed care system can be for those patients (most notably the elderly) who are particularly vulnerable to chronic conditions, who rely on more than one provider, who can benefit from preventive services, and whose health status can use effective management. The promise of Medicare + Choice offers the potential for quality health care with reduced costs for both older adults and all tax payers. The promise of the Medicare system has in some part been realized. Older adults are living much longer, healthier lives in part because of Medicare. However, the cost overruns are too much for many politicians and tax payers to bear. Many politicians and economists (such as those in the Concord Coalition) are suggesting that our country can no longer afford Medicare and are seeking massive reforms that question why older adults should receive this entitlement. In addition, the shift from a fee-for-service operation toward managed care does not sit well with providers or some older adults with incomplete understandings of the managed care process. In addition, a recent trend to cancel managed care service to older adults within rural areas because of low reimbursement rates is causing great alarm. Finally, the oft-cited “problems” of managed care such as lack of health care provider choice, limited referrals, and very minimal interaction time with the physician are magnified with an older population. The Health Care Provider–Older Adult Relationship

Each of the issues discussed thus far within this section of the chapter concerning health communication and older adults ultimately affects the “special” relationship older adults have with their health care providers. From the numerous chronic conditions the older adult presents at the medical encounter to the issue of institutional and individual ageism to the Medicare system itself, the health provider–older adult relationship is quite unique. Excellent literature reviews of this interaction appear elsewhere (Haug & Ory, 1987; Beisecker & Thompson, 1995; Nussbaum et al., 2000), nevertheless, several important factors that play a significant role in effective communication within the health care provider–older adult relationship need to be discussed. First, as Beisecker and Thompson (1995) and Nussbaum et al. (2000) reported, older adults are typically satisfied with their medical encounters within the health care system. Factors such as whether older adults feel that their needs are being addressed by the physician, whether they have received sufficient emotional support from the medical staff, whether the physician or a nurse has discussed appropriate treatment, whether medical interactions are appropriately long and not rushed, and whether physicians interact utilizing

192

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

appropriate immediacy behaviors and physically attend to the patient are all related to higher satisfaction levels with medical encounters among older adults. Second, an older patient’s compliance with a treatment regimen can be a significant problem (Haug & Ory, 1987). This is especially true given the multiple chronic conditions and the subsequent complex drug treatments older adults are expected to follow. Coe (1987) found that much nonadherence to treatments within the older population may be due to a lack of understanding of the proper instructions on what to do with the medications, rather than a willful noncompliance to appropriately follow the physicians directives. Beisecker and Thompson (1995) concluded that the research clearly supports the relationship between effective communication within the older patient–physician interaction and older patient adherence with medication regimens. Third, the interaction between older adults and their health care providers may be significantly different than similar interactions with younger adults. Older adults have been found to ask fewer questions, need longer interactions to ask important questions regarding their health, give less information to the health care provider, and are much less assertive than younger adults within a medical encounter. In addition, research by Adelman, Greene, and Charon (1991) found physicians to be more condescending, abrupt, and indifferent toward their older patients when compared to their younger patients. This pattern of difficult interactions between older adults and their younger physicians fits quite nicely into a general interactive difficulty found within intergenerational interactions (Williams & Nussbaum, 2000). Nussbaum et al. (2000), Williams and Nussbaum (2000), and others have placed some of the blame for these ineffective, intergenerational interactions onto both the ageist attitudes held by health care providers and the willingness to believe these negative attitudes and accept this less than appropriate behavior on the part of the older patients. Fourth, older adults are often accompanied by a family member or friend to the medical encounter. A physician who is expecting a dyadic medical encounter is now placed into a triadic encounter. The companion can significantly change the dynamic of the medical encounter. Often, the companion is more assertive than the older patient. The companion will ask more questions, will cause the medical encounter to last significantly longer, and will expect more information regarding the health of the older patient than the older patient normally seeks. Research by Labrecque, Blanchard, Ruckdeschel, and Blanchard (1991) and Glasser, Prohaska, and Roska (1992) indicated that physicians provide more information when a companion is present and that the companion can solicit a “better explanation” from the physician concerning the health status of the older patient. In addition, Morgan and Zhao (1993) reported that companions can help the older patient to comply with appropriate medical regimens. Finally, interdisciplinary care teams are quickly becoming the normal care providers for older adults who are in need of continuous care for extended periods of time (Nussbaum, Pecchioni, & Crowell, in press). These care teams are often led by a primary care physician, who may be trained in geriatric medicine, and made up of professionals such as social workers, nurses, nutritionists, physical and occupational therapists, psychologists, and a pharmacist. These interdisciplinary teams typically meet once every two weeks to discuss each older patient and to determine an appropriate plan for care. Efficient and effective meetings of the team are dependent upon communicative skills not often taught in these particular disciplines. In addition, family members and in some instances the patient are called into the team meetings to provide additional information or to help in the decision-making process. Once again, this setting can be very intimidating not only for the family members and the older patient, but also for many of the

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

193

health professionals who are of lower status and may not feel free to voice an opposing opinion. Effective small group communication skills can be an essential ingredient within the process of effective delivery of health care within these interdisciplinary teams. WOMEN’S HEALTH COMMUNICATION

Dr. Richard M. Glass, in his foreword to Whaley’s recently edited volume Explaining Illness (2000), notes that “this book . . . concerns the complexities involved in communicating and understanding explanations for illness among different age groups, cultures, and individuals. These are issues of great importance for physicians and other health professionals and also for patients, which includes all of us” (p. xi). Whereas most of the recent discussions of gender differences in communication lead us to the conclusion that alleged, substantive behavioral differences between women and men have not been empirically validated (e.g., see Canary & Emmers-Sommer, 1997) and that women and men, regardless of John Gray’s popular notion, do not hail from different planets, there is nonetheless a need to discuss women patients as a special audience for health care communication and women doctors as unique professionals. The existence of at least three medical journals, Women and Health, Women’s Health Issues, and the Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association, in addition to several recent publications by health communication researchers (Gabbard-Alley, 1995, 2000; Beck, Ragan, & Du Pre, 1997; Parrott & Condit, 1996) attest to this need. It arises from two primary factors in addition to women’s unique reproductive health care needs: the historical treatment of women by the medical profession and the special challenges for women in health care interactions. Historical Treatment of Women by the Medical Profession

As the history of women has been fraught with inequality, so too has the history of women’s medical care. Numerous researchers have pointed to the problems women traditionally have faced in seeking medical care, problems ranging from the medicalization of natural reproductive processes, such as childbirth (and hence the performance of frequently unnecessary surgeries, i.e., hysterectomies and caesarean sections), to the overprescription of valium and other tranquilizing drugs for the alleged mental health problems of women (problems that historically have been dismissed by male physicians as women’s hysteria, even when legitimate physiological and psychological symptoms were present) to the exclusion of women from clinical trails (such that many recommendations for the treatment of heart disease, several cancers, and other illnesses can be made assuredly for male patients only, given that women were excluded from the research programs and clinical trials that led to these recommendations) (see, for example, Corea, 1977; Fisher, 1984, 1993, 1995; Todd, 1989, 1993; and West, 1984, 1993). While it is true that life expectancy for females is approximately 7 years longer than it is for men, women also experience more health problems than men and seek a physician’s care far more frequently. This is most likely due to sociological rather than to biological reasons, since women are socialized to find the “sick role” more socially acceptable than men do (Gabbard-Alley, 2000). But while women engage more frequently in health care interactions than do their male counterparts, these interactions may look different from men’s health care interactions; moreover, these differences can affect women’s health care outcomes in substantive ways.

194

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

Women’s Health Care Interactions

In her recent reviews of health communication and gender, Gabbard-Alley (1995, 2000) points to several differences in the communication patterns of female and male patients and female and male physicians. While no research studies exist that have uncovered the effects of differential communication patterns on female and male patients’ health outcomes, it is possible that such patterns may yield important consequences for women’s and men’s health. Gabbard-Alley (1995, 2000) notes that there continues to be a concern about whether gender should even be considered as a variable in health communication research. Yet meta-analytic studies conducted by Hall and her colleagues (Hall, Roter, & Katz, 1988; Hall et al., 1990) discovered that gender was a significant variable for some behaviors in health care encounters. For example, male and female physicians give more information to female than to male patients (Hall et al., 1988, 1990). Female patients ask their physicians more questions and talk more than male patients (Wallen, Waitzkin, & Stoeckle, 1979; Waitzkin, 1984, 1985), presumably because women are more concerned with and more knowledgeable about health issues (Wallen et al., 1979; Coope & Metcalfe, 1979; Buller & Buller, 1987). At least two studies found that women patients receive more time, more explanations, and more nondiscrepant responses from their physicians than men do (Waitzkin, 1984, 1985). The preceding findings might suggest that women patients are advantaged over their male counterparts in health care interactions. Yet other researchers point out that although women ask more questions than men, health care providers tend to give shorter and less technical answers to women’s questions than to men’s (Wallen et al., 1979). Gabbard-Alley (1995) suggested that the greater information received by women might be a function of their more frequent requests for information, not the amount of information volunteered by physicians. In her most current review of the literature in gender and health communication, Gabbard-Alley (2000) pointed to a study (Bernzweig, Takayama, Phibbs, Lewis, & Pantell, 1997) that suggested that male pediatricians give more information to boys and female pediatricians give more information to girls; moreover, “male physicians engaged in the least amount of conversation with girls in substantive medical communication” (pp. 152–153). She also cites Meeuwesen, Schapp, and van der Staak (1991) who found that both male and female physicians are more attentive to male patients. Gabbard-Alley (1995) concluded: “Overall, these mixed findings show that although women spend more time involved in communication acts in health contexts, for whatever reasons, their concerns are taken less seriously than are those of men” (p. 39). Several other researchers concur with Gabbard-Alley that girls and women may be short shrifted in medical interaction, particularly those feminist scholars who, in their investigation of health care encounters between women patients and male physicians, note that these physicians trivialize or dismiss women’s health concerns in the micropolitics of interaction (e.g., Corea, 1977; Davis & Fisher, 1993; Fisher, 1986, 1991, 1993, 1995; Todd, 1989, 1993; Todd & Fisher, 1993). These scholars believe that male-female power imbalances in the macrostructure of our society get reflected and reified in such microstructures as health care interactions. For example, Todd’s (1989) analysis of communication interaction between women and their male physicians found that physicians uttered all of the orders and requests in health care encounters. Beck et al. (1997) noted the empirical support for more symmetrical interactions between female doctors and their patients than between male doctors and their’s (Smith Du Pre & Beck, 1996; West, 1984). Other studies suggest that nurse practitioners, generally female, may interact with their

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

195

patients in less dominant, more equitable ways than male M.D.s (Beck & Ragan, 1995; Drass, 1988, Fisher, 1995; Ragan, Beck, & White, 1995). Differences in Communication Styles of Male and Female Physicians

In Gabbard-Alley’s (2000) review of the effects of gender on health care communication, she pointed to several notable differences in the communication styles of female and male health care providers: (1) female physicians spend more time with patients than their male counterparts and engage in more communication (Roter, Lipkin, & Korsgaard, 1991; Bernzweig et al., 1997); (2) female physicians give more statements of objective information than male M.D.s (Meeuwesen et al., 1991), communicate with more taskfocused exchanges, e.g., question asking and information giving (Roter et al., 1991), and ask more questions having biomedical content than male physicians (Hall, Irish, Roter, Ehrlich, & Miller, 1994); (3) female physicians use less technical language or jargon than males (Gabbard-Alley, 1995), while male physicians use more interpretations and advisements than females (such strategies being used to control the patient’s behavior by making judgments about the patient, labeling his or her behavior, and giving him or her advice, commands, and suggestions) (Meeuwesen et al., 1991); (4) female physicians spend more time in the discussion of family information or social matters (Bertakis, Helms, Callahan, Azari, & Robbins, 1995) and, in general, have more psychosocial content in their communication with patients than male physicians (Hall et al., 1990; Roter et al., 1991). In accordance with this last finding, Gabbard-Alley (2000) also reported that female physicians disclose more (Meeuwesen et al., 1991), make more use of partnership communication (Meeuwesen et al., 1991), use more facilitative responses to patients (Hall et al., 1994), and spend more time developing rapport with patients, as well as giving patients more information about the history and nature of the illness (Bernzweig et al., 1997). Overall, Gabbard-Alley (2000) concluded that both female physicians and female patients are more effective communicators than their male counterparts in health care interactions. Yet, according to Du Pre (2000), other research reports do not reveal marked differences in the ways that female and male physicians communicate with their patients. She noted in her review of physicians’ communication styles the following differences: women M.D.s display more interest in patients’ social and psychological worlds, possibly due to their training as primary caregivers, e.g., pediatricians, family practitioners, and so on (Roter et al., 1997; Novack et al., 1997); female M.D.s are more likely than their male colleagues to suggest preventive health screenings (Novack et al., 1997); and female medical students are more egalitarian than their male classmates (Crandall, Volk, & Loemker, 1993). Du Pre (2000) cautioned that “gender is only part of the story. . . . Medical socialization, professional constraints, and personal style may mitigate differences between male and female speech” (p. 184). Gabbard-Alley (2000) noted that the context of the health care interaction and the sociological gender rather than the biological sex of the health care provider are confounding variables that must be examined “before any strong general conclusions can be drawn concerning how the gender of the patient or physician affects the communication interaction in the medical visit” (p. 162). Thus, cultural expectations and gender–role stereotypes continue to shape our beliefs that there are significant differences in women’s and men’s communication behaviors in health care and in all contexts, despite equivocal empirical findings. Based on the research summaries above, challenges for women patients in health care encounters are possibly augmented when the provider is male, particularly if a woman

196

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

has been socialized to believe that men are more powerful than women in the culture at large and that M.D.s are more powerful than their patients. If, in addition, women patients practice traditionally “feminine” behaviors, such as politeness, compliance, and nonassertiveness in their medical interactions with male physicians, they are even more unlikely to participate in the partnership model of health care advocated by several researchers as optimal (Thompson, 2000; Beck et al., 1997; Sharf & Street, 1997). As Beck et al. (1997) noted, “such interactional patterns [those comprised of traditionally feminine verbal and nonverbal behaviors] contribute to a dynamic where the patient relinquishes her status as an active participant and becomes a passive object of medical attention” (p. 21). Beck et al. (1997) noted further that some women’s proclivities to play an inactive and nonassertive role in their health care interactions (as well as some M.D.s’ sexist treatment of their women patients) have disadvantaged them in several key areas: they lack the medical information they need for good health, they do not take advantage of preventative health screenings, such as mammograms and pap smears, and they frequently have been misdiagnosed. Although more than one-half of U.S. women use their OB-GYNs as their primary physicians, apparently few of these M.D.s offer their patients basic counseling on such health issues as osteoporosis, physical abuse, and mental health (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 1993). With regard to preventive screenings, Lurie et al. (1993) discovered that less than one-half of surveyed internists and family practitioners practiced American Cancer Society standards in conducting pap smears and breast examinations; interestingly and alarmingly, doctors under 38 years old screened the least for these diseases. Women who are elderly, have lower incomes, and are non-Caucasian are particularly vulnerable in this respect; these women are the least likely to receive adequate health information and preventative screenings (Fox, Siu, & Stein, 1994; Landen & Lampert, 1992; National Institutes of Health, 1996). In this age of health consumerism, women patients are responsible for educating themselves about their bodies and the health concerns they uniquely face. Yet if a woman’s socialization encourages silence and compliance in the face of male authority figures, her being armed with health knowledge will not necessarily produce the additional health information and preventative screenings that she needs from her M.D. Women must empower themselves to assume a partnership role in their health care interactions, to actively, persistently ask for the exams and tests that an M.D. may be reluctant to perform or order. (The current practice of managed care makes this achievement even more difficult, as physicians are monetarily rewarded by some insurers’ contracts for NOT ordering what the health maintenance organizations deem as unnecessary tests.) Beck et al.’s (1997) recent book on women’s health communication suggests, through an examination of discourse in several contexts of women’s health care—a public university health facility, an Indian health clinic, a female family M.D.’s office, a Catholic hospital, and a privately owned, for-profit hospital—that patients can indeed demonstrate the speech behaviors that create partnership, that enable them to be coparticipants in the multiple goals of health care encounters: diagnosis, treatment, education, relationship. The premise of this book is that health care interactions, rather than being institutionally prescribed by traditional roles for patients and providers, are instead unique, emergent social constructions, shaped by the communicative activities of both caregiver and patient. Since provider and patient display and achieve their multiple goals for the health care encounter through their verbal and nonverbal communication, such communication behaviors can be learned and refined, both by health care practitioners and by patients.

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

197

Conclusions

The historical treatment of women, both in health care and in other settings, as well as the unique challenges women face in health care interactions mandate a consideration of women patients as a special audience for health care providers. Yet both medical students and women patients must be better educated for their respective roles in health care encounters before a patient-centered, partnership model of health care can be achieved. In an age of medical consumerism, women must empower themselves not only to be knowledgeable about their health care but also to take interactive risks in their health care encounters: to question their M.D.s about recommended surgeries that might prove unnecessary, even when questions are discouraged; to ask their health care providers for the time needed to discuss their health concerns beyond the presenting symptom; to voice assertively their dissatisfaction when they believe their medical complaints are being trivialized; and, finally, to seek other health care providers’ care when current practitioners are unyielding in their authoritative, patronizing styles of interaction. Concomitantly, medical students and practicing M.D.s must be trained to adopt partnership communication patterns with their patients, particularly with their female patients. While female physicians are more likely to engage in this pattern of interaction with both their male and female patients, and while the larger numbers of female students now enrolling in medical school (42% of entering medical students were female in 1998, according to the American Medical Association) will eventually promote equity in the gender distribution of M.D.s, male doctors continue to be in the vast majority of medical practitioners: the AMA (1998) projects that whereas 33% of U.S. physicians will be female by the year 2010, only 19% were female in 1994. Although many male doctors practice patient-centered medicine and are well attuned to their female patients’ unique medical challenges, more and more women patients are seeking female M.D.s and special centers for women’s medical care. According to Dr. Justine Trott, president-elect of the American College of Women’s Health Physicians (a group of about 250 physicians nationwide), “Women’s health is not just about women, it is about viewing health and well-being from the perspective of women” (Zibart, 2000, p. 1). Trott critiques the current medical model for its promulgation of the myth that, since women’s and men’s physiologies are identical, save for their respective reproductive systems, women and men thus should present the same symptoms for the same diseases and respond to treatments in virtually the same manner. It has been only recently acknowledged, for example, that women present with markedly different symptoms than men in their experiencing of coronary artery disease. Whereas “common knowledge” has told us that a heart attack is signaled by excruciating chest pains and intense chest pressure, apparently many women experience myocardial infarction with far milder symptoms. “Unless physicians are trained to recognize these differences and respond to them, they are not adequately providing the health care women need and deserve,” says Trott (Zibart, p. 1). Thus, she is heading an effort to develop a medical school curriculum around women-specific physiology that will result in an independent specialization for “women’s health,” as we have done for pediatrics, geriatrics, and internal medicine. Whether a “women’s health” medical specialty is required for optimal health care for women, or whether both male and female physicians merely need to become more conscious of women’s unique physiology and psychology and women patients’ attendant needs for patient-centered health interactions, it is highly probable that the practice of

198

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

health care in our future will attend more to women’s health needs than it has in the past. This, we trust, will promote better health care for both women and men. CONCLUSION

Children, older adults, and women are often confronted with a multitude of unique health care dilemmas. In many ways, these children, older adults, and women offer the most interesting, the most challenging, and the most frustrating of health care opportunities for providers. In many of the same ways, children, older adults, and women present health communication scholars with a complex yet fascinating context with which to study how the medical establishment attempts to communicate effectively in their quest for highquality care. As has been mentioned in the above text, while we do know that each of these populations of patients requires special attention because of its age, gender, or numerous physical, psychological, or social factors that are age- and gender-related, very little “special attention” has been given by clinician educators to modify the interactive behavior of health care professionals that specifically focuses on improving communication with patients who are children, older adults, or women. If nothing else is certain, it should be quite clear that a child does need communicative competencies on the part of the professional provider to help him or her better understand and cope with a serious illness. A woman does need the male physician to spend more time on basic preventive counseling and to better adapt to the traditionally less assertive nature of this women patient. The older adult does need the physician to understand the multiple chronic disorders that affect the him or her while simultaneously communicating competently with a companion. Health communication research is only beginning to isolate and locate the communicative circumstances and opportunities that unique populations of patients bring to the examining room. The quality of care provided to children, older adults, and women will be improved, at least to some extent, by future health communication researchers identifying how these populations demand more competent communication interactions and then suggesting how both patient and provider can enter into a more effective health care interaction. REFERENCES Adelman, R. D., Greene, M. G., & Charon, R. (1991). Issues in physician-elderly patient interaction. Ageing and Society, 2, 127–148. Administration on Aging. (1998). Profile of older americans 1998. [Online]. Available: http//www.aoa.dhhs.gov/aoa/stats/profile. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists. (1993, October 29). Poll shows women rely on OB-GYNs for primary care (news release). Washington, DC: Author. American Medical Association. (1998). [Online]. Available: http://www.AMA-ASSN.ORG/. Analogies enhance teaching efforts. (1996). Patient Education Management, 3, 143–144. Bannard, J. R. (1987). Children’s concepts of illness and bodily function: Implications for health service providers caring for children with diabetes. Patient Education and Counseling, 9, 275–281. Beales, J. G., Lennox Holt, P. J., Keen, J. H., & Mellor, V. P. (1983). Children with juvenile chronic arthritis: Their beliefs about their illness and therapy. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, 42, 481–486. Beck, C., & Ragan, S. L. (1995). The impact of relational activities on the accomplishment

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

199

of practitioner and patient goals in the gynecologic examination. In G. Kreps & D. O’Hair (Eds.), Communication and health outcomes (pp. 73–86). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Beck, C. S., Ragan, S. L., & Du Pre, A. (1997). Partnership for health: Building relationships between women and health caregivers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Beiseker, A. E., & Beisecker, T. D. (1996). Research issues related to physician-elderly patient interactions. Research on Aging, 18, 3–8. Beisecker, A. E., & Thompson, T. L. (1995). The elderly patient-physician interaction. In J. F. Nussbaum & J. Coupland (Eds.), Handbook of communication and aging research (pp. 397–416). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bernzweig, J., Takayama, J. I., Phibbs, C., Lewis, C., & Pantell, R. H. (1997). Gender differences in physician-patient communication: Evidence from pediatric visits. Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, 151, 586–591. Bertakis, K. D., Helms, L. J., Callahan, E. J., Azari, R., & Robbins, J. A. (1995). The influence of gender on physician practice style. Medical Care, 4, 407–416. Bibace, R., & Walsh, M. E. (1979). Developmental stages of children’s conceptions of illness. In G. Stone, F. Cohen, & N. Adler (Eds.), Health psychology: A handbook (pp. 285–301). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Bibace, R., & Walsh, M. E. (1980). Development of children’s conceptions of illness. Pediatrics, 66, 912–917. Bibace, R., & Walsh, M. E. (1981). Children’s conceptions of illness. In R. Bibace & M. E. Walsh (Eds.), Children’s conceptions of health, illness, and bodily functions (pp. 31–48). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Buller, M. K., & Buller, D. B. (1987). Physicians’ communication style and patient satisfaction. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 28, 375–388. Burbach, D. J., & Peterson, L. (1986). Children’s concepts of physical illness: A review and critique of the cognitive-developmental literature. Health Psychology, 5, 307–325. Burham, C. E. (1974). Edentulous persons: United States-1971. (Vital and Health Statistics, series 10, No. 89). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Burke, D. M., MacKay, D. G., Worthley, J. S., & Wade, E. (1991). On the tip of the tongue: What cases word finding failures in young and old adults? Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 542–579. Butler, R. (1969). Ageism: Another form of bigotry. The Gerontologist, 9, 243–246. Canary, D., & Emmers-Sommer, T. (1997). Sex and gender differences in close relationships. New York: Guilford Press. Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coe, R. M. (1987). Communication and medical care outcomes: Analysis of conversations between doctors and elderly patients. In R. A. Ward & S. S. Tobin (Eds.), Health in aging (pp. 180–193). New York: Springer. Coope, J., & Metcalfe, D. (1979). How much do patients know? A MCQ paper for patients in the waiting room. Journal of the Royal College of General Practice, 29, 482–488. Corea, G. (1977). The hidden malpractice: How American medicine treats women as patients and professionals. New York: William Morrow. Crandall, S. J., Volk, R. J., & Loemker, V. (1993). Medical students’ attitudes toward providing care for the underserved: Are we training socially responsible physicians? Journal of the American Medical Association, 269, 2519–2523. Crook, T. H., & West, R. L. (1990). Name-recall performance across the adult lifespan. British Journal of Psychology, 81, 335–349. Davis, K., & Fisher, S. (Eds.). (1993). Negotiating at the margins: The gendered discourses of power and resistance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

200

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

Dorn, L. D. (1984). Children’s concepts of illness: Clinical applications. Pediatric Nursing, 10, 325–327. Drass, K. E. (1988). Discourse and occupational perspective: A comparison of nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Discourse Processes, 11, 163–181. Du Pre, A. (2000). Communicating about health: Current issues and perspectives. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. Eisdorfer, C., & Cohen, D. (1980). The issue of biological and psychological deficits. In E. Borgatta & N. McCluskey (Eds.), Aging and society: Current research and policy perspectives (pp. 49–70). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Eiser, C. (1985a). Changes in understanding of illness as the child grows. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 60, 489–492. Eiser, C. (1985b). Children’s understanding of medical procedures. The Practitioner, 229, 371–373. Eiser, C. (1985c). The psychology of childhood illness. New York: Springer-Verlag. Eiser, C. (1988). Do children benefit from psychological preparation for hospitalization. Psychology and Health, 2, 133–138. Eiser, C. (1989a). Children’s concepts of illness: Towards an alternative to the “stage” approach. Psychology and Health, 3, 93–101. Eiser, C. (1989b). “Let’s play doctors and nurses”: A script analysis of children’s play. Early Child Development and Care, 49, 17–25. Eiser, C. (1994). Making sense of chronic disease. The eleventh Jack Tizard Memorial Lecture. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 35, 1373–1389. Eiser, C., & Eiser, J. (1987). Explaining illness to children. Communication and Cognition, 20, 277–290. Eiser, C., Eiser, J., & Hunt, J. (1986a). Developmental changes in analogies used to describe parts of the body: Implications for communicating with sick children. Child: Care, Health and Development, 12, 277–285. Eiser, C., Eiser, J., & Hunt, J. (1986b). Comprehension of metaphorical planations of illness. Early Child Development and Care, 26, 79–87. Eiser, C., Eiser, J. R., & Jones, B. A. (1990). Scene schemata and scripts in children’s understanding of hospital. Child: Care, Health, and Development, 16, 303–317. Eiser, C., Eiser, J. R., & Lang, J. (1989). Scripts in children’s reports of medical events. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 4, 377–384. Eiser, C., Havermans, T., & Casas, R. (1993). Healthy children’s understanding of their blood: Implications for explaining leukaemia to children. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 63, 528–537. Eiser, C., & Kopel, S. J. (1997). Children’s perceptions of health and illness. In K. J. Petrie & J. A. Weinman (Eds.), Perceptions of health and illness: Current research and applications (pp. 47–76). Canada: Harwood Academic Publishers. Eiser, C., Patterson, D., & Tripp, J. H. (1984). Illness experience and children’s concepts of health and illness. Child: Care, Health and Development, 10, 157–162. Elsberry, N. L., & Sorensen, M. E. (1986). Using analogies in patient teaching. American Journal of Nursing, 86, 1171–1172. Feder, J., & Moon, M. (1998). Managed care for the elderly: A threat or a promise? Generations, 22, 6–10. Fisher, S. (1984). Doctor-patient communication: A social and micro-political performance. Sociology of Health and Illness, 6, 1–29. Fisher, S. (1986). In the patients’ best interests. Women and the politics of medical decisions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

201

Fisher, S. (1991). A discourse of the social: Medical talk /power talk /oppositional talk. Discourse and Society, 22, 157–182. Fisher, S. (1993). Doctor talk /patient talk: How treatment decisions are negotiated in doctorpatient communication. In A. D. Todd & S. Fisher (Eds.), The social organization of doctorpatient communication (pp. 161–182). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Fisher, S. (1995). Nursing wounds: Nurse practitioners/doctors/women patients/and the negotiation of meaning. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Fox, S. A., Siu, A. L., & Stein, J. A. (1994). The importance of physician communication on breast cancer screening of older women. Archives of Internal Medicine, 154, 2058–2068. Gabbard-Alley, A. S. (1995). Health communication and gender: A review and critique. Health Communication, 7, 1, 35–54. Gabbard-Alley, A. S. (2000). Explaining illness: An examination of message strategies and gender. In B. B. Whaley (Ed.), Explaining illness: Research, theory and strategies (pp. 147–170). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gatz, M., Kasl-Godley, J. E., & Karel, M. J. (1996). Aging and mental disorders. In J. E. Birren & K. W. Schaie (Eds.), Handbook of psychology and aging (4th ed., pp. 365–382). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Glasser, M., Prohaska, T., & Roska, J. (1992). The role of the family in medical care-seeking decisions of older adults. Family and Community Medicine, 15, 59–70. Gold, D. P., Andres, D., Arbuckle, T. Y., & Schwartzman, A. (1988). Measurement and correlates of verbosity in elderly people. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 43, P27–P33. Gold, D. P., Arbuckle, T. Y., & Andres, D. (1994). Verbosity in older adults. (1994). In M. L. Hummert, & J. F. Nussbaum (Eds.), Interpersonal communication in older adulthood: Interdisciplinary theory and research (pp. 107–129). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Goldman, S. L., Whitney-Saltiel, D., Granger, J., & Rodin, J. (1991). Children’s representations of “everyday” aspects of health and illness. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 16, 747–766. Hall, J. A., Irish, J. T., Roter, D. L., Ehrlich, C. M., & Miller, L. H. (1994). Gender in medical encounters: An analysis of physician and patient communication in a primary care setting. Health Psychology, 13, 384–392. Hall, J. A., Palmer, R. H., Orav, E. J., Hargraves., J. L., Wright, E., & Louis, T. A. (1990). Performance quality, gender, and professional role. Medical Care, 28, 489–501. Hall, J. A., Roter, D. L., & Katz, N. R. (1988). Meta-analysis of correlates of provider behavior in medical encounters. Medical Care, 26, 657–675. Harmon, C. C., & Hamby, J. (1989). Utilizing analogies in diabetes education. Diabetes Educator, 15, 413. Haug, M. R., & Ory, M. G. (1987). Issues in elderly patient-provider relations. Research on Aging, 9, 3–44. Holzer, C. E., Leaf, P. J., & Weissman, M. M. (1985). Living with depression. In M. R. Haug, A. B. Ford, & M. Shafor (Eds.), The physical and mental health of aged women (pp. 101– 116). New York: Springer. Hummert, M. L. (1994). Physiognomoc cues to age and the activation of stereotypes of the elderly in interaction. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 39, 5–20. Hummert, M. L., & Nussbaum, J. F. (2000). Aging, communication, and health: A multidisciplinary perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hummert, M. L., Shaner, J. L., & Garska, T. A. (1995). Cognitive processes affecting communication with older adults: The case for stereotypes, attitudes, and beliefs about communication. In J. F. Nussbaum & J. Coupland (Eds.), Handbook of communication and aging research (pp. 105–132). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

202

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

Johnson, S. B. (1984). Knowledge, attitudes and behavior: Correlates of health in childhood diabetes. Clinical Psychology Review, 4, 503–524. Kastenbaum, R. J., & Candy, S. E. (1973). The 4% fallacy: A methodological and empirical critique of extended care facility population statistics. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 4, 15–71. Kemper, S. (1992). Language and aging. In F. I. M. Craik & T. Salthouse (Eds.), Handbook of aging and cognition (pp. 213–270). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kemper, S., Keynette, D., Rash, S., O’Brien, K., & Sprott, R. (1989). Lifespan changes to adults’ language: Effects of memory and genre. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 49–66. Labrecque, M. S., Blanchard, C. G., Ruckdeschel, J. C., & Blanchard, E. B. (1991). The impact of family prescence on the physician-cancer patient interaction. Social Science and Medicine, 33, 1253–1261. Landen, M., & Lampert, K. (1992). Cervical cancer screening: At the patient’s or the health system’s convenience? The IHS Primary Care Provider, 10, 174–179. Lurie, N., Slater, J., McGovern, P., Ekstrum, J., Quam, L., & Margolis, K. (1993). Preventive care for women: Does the sex of the physician matter? New England Journal of Medicine, 329, 478–482. Manton, K. G., & Suzman, R. (1992). Forecasting health and functioning in aging societies: Implications for health care and staffing needs. In M. G. Ory, R. P. Abeles, & P. D. Lipman (Eds.), Aging, health and behavior (pp. 327–357). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Meeuwesen, L., Schapp, C., & van der Staak, C. (1991). Verbal analysis of doctor-patient communication. Social Science and Medicine, 32, 1143–1150. Morgan, D. L., & Zhao, P. Z. (1993). The doctor-caregiver relationship: Managing the care of family members with Alzheimer’s disease. Qualitative Health Research, 2, 133–164. National Center for Health Statistics. (1990). Current estimates from the national health interview survey, 1989. (Vital and Health Statistics, Series 10, No. 176). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. National Institutes of Health. (1996, April 6). NIH panel urges wider screening for cervical cancer (news release). Bethesda, MD: Author. Nichter, M., & Nichter, M. (1986). Health education by appropriate analogy: Using the familiar to explain the new. Convergence, 19, 63–71. Novack, D. H., Suchman, A. L., Clark, W., Epstein, R. M., Najberg, G. E., & Kaplan, C. (1997). Calibrating the physician: Personal awareness and effective patient care. Journal of the American Medical Association, 278, 502–510. Nussbaum, J. F. (1981). Interactional patterns of elderly individuals: Implications for successful adaptation to aging. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. Nussbaum, J. F. (1983). Relational closeness of elderly interaction: Implications for life satisfaction. The Western Journal of Speech, 47, 229–243. Nussbaum, J. F., Hummert, M. L., Williams, A., & Harwood, J. (1996). Communication and older adults. In B. Burleson (Ed.), Communication yearbook, 19 (pp. 1–47). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Nussbaum, J. F., Pecchioni, L. L., Robinson, J. D., & Thompson, T. T. (2000). Communication and aging (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Nussbaum, J. F., Pecchioni, L., & Crowell, T. (2001). The older patient-health care provider relationship in a managed care environment. In M. L. Hummert & J. F. Nussbaum (Eds.), Aging, communication, and health: A multidisciplinary perspective (pp. 23–42). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

9. IMPACT ON PROVIDER-PATIENT INTERACTION

203

Parrott, R. L., & Condit, C. M. (1996). Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Perrin, E. C., & Perrin, J. M. (1983). Clinicians’ assessments of children’s understanding of illness. American Journal of Diseases of Children, 137, 874–878. Phibbs, C., Lewis, C., & Pantell, R. H. (1997). Gender differences in physician-patient communication. Evidence from pediatric visits. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 151, 586–591. Piaget, J. (1930). The child’s conception of physical causality. London: Kegan Paul. Potter, P. C., & Roberts, M. C. (1984). Children’s perceptions of chronic illness: The roles of disease symptoms, cognitive development, and information. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 9, 13–27. Ragan, S. L., Beck, C., & White, M. D. (1995). Educating the patient: Interactive learning in an OB-GYN context. In G. H. Morris, & R. J. Chenail (Eds.), The talk of the clinic: Explorations in the analysis of medical and Therapeutic discourse (pp. 185–208). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Redlich, F. C. (1970). The doctor and his patient: Explaining illness. Psychiatry in Medicine, 1, 171–185. Roter, D. L., Lipkin, M. Jr., & Korsgaard, A. (1991). Sex differences in patients’ and physicians’ communication during primary care medical visits. Medical Care 19, 11, 1083–1093. Roter, D. L., Stewart, M., Putnam, S. M., Lipkin, M. Jr., Stiles, W., & Inui, T. S. (1997). Communication patterns of primary care physicians. Journal of the American Medical Association, 277, 350–357. Rushforth, H. (1999). Communicating with hospitalized children: Review and application of research pertaining to children’s understanding of illness. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 40, 683–691. Ryan, E. B., Giles, H., Bartolucci, G., & Henwood, K. (1986). Psycholinguistic and social psychological components of communication by and with the elderly. Language and Communication, 6, 1–24. Sharf, B. F., & Street, R. L. (1997). The patient as a central construct: Shifting the emphasis. Health Communication, 9, 1, 1–11. Smith Du Pre, A., & Beck, C. (1996). Enabling patients and physicians to pursue multiple goals in health care encounters: A case study. Health Communication, 8, 73–90. Solomon, J. (1986). Children’s explanations. Oxford Review of Education, 12, 41–51. Stahl, S. M., & Feller, J. R. (1990). Old equals sick: An ontogenetic fallacy. In S. M. Stahl (Ed.), The legacy of longevity: Health and health care in later life (pp. 21–34). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Steward, M., & Regalbuto, G. (1975). Do doctors know what children know? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 45, 146–149. Thompson, T. L. (2000). The nature and language of illness explanations. In B. B. Whaley (Ed.), Explaining illness: Research, theory, and strategies (pp. 3–40). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Todd, A. D. (1989). Intimate adversaries: Cultural conflict between doctors and women patients. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Todd, A. D. (1993). Exploring women’s experiences: Power and resistance in medical discourse. In A. D. Todd & S. Fisher (Eds.), The social organization of doctor-patient communication (pp. 267–285). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Todd, A. D., & Fisher, S. (Eds). (1993). The social organization of doctor-patient communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

204

NUSSBAUM, RAGAN, WHALEY

U.S. Census Bureau. (1996). 65+ in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, Special Studies, P23–190). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, 1991. Villaume, W. H., Brown, M. H., & Darling, R. (1994). Presbycusis, communication, and older adults. In M. L. Hummert & J. F. Nussbaum (Eds.), Interpersonal communication in older adulthood: Interdisciplinary theory and research (pp. 83–106). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Waitzkin, H. (1984). Doctor-patient communication: Clinical implications of social scientific research. Journal of the American Medical Association, 252, 2441–2446. Waitzkin, H. (1985). Information giving in medical care. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 26, 81–101. Wallen, J., Waitzkin, J. H., & Stoeckle, J. (1979). Physician stereotypes about female health and illness. Women and Health, 4, 1135–1145. Werner, H. (1948). Comparative psychology of mental development. New York: Science Editions. West, C. (1984). When the doctor is a “lady”: Power, status, and gender in physician-patient encounters. Symbolic Interaction, 7, 1, 87–106. West, C. (1993). Reconceptualizing gender in physician-patient relationships. Social Science & Medicine, 36, 1, 57–66. Whaley, B. B. (1994). “Food is to me as gas is to cars??”: Using figurative language to explain illness to children. Health Communication, 6, 193–204. Whaley, B. B. (1999). Explaining illness to children: Advancing theory and research by determining message content. Health Communication, 11, 185–193. Whaley, B. B. (Ed.) (2000). Explaining illness: Research, theory and strategies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Whitt, J. K., Dykstra, W., & Taylor, C. A. (1979). Children’s conceptions of illness and cognitive development: Implications of pediatric practitioners. Clinical Pediatrics, 18, 327–339. Wilder, C. S. (1974a). Acute conditions: Incidence and associated disability: United States, July 1971 to June 1972. (Vital Health and Statistics, Series 10, No. 88). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Wilder, C. S. (1974b). Limitation of activity and mobility due to chronic conditions: United States-1972. (Vital Health and Statistics, Series 10, No. 96). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Williams, A., & Nussbaum, J. F. (2000). Intergenerational communication across the life span. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wingfield, A., Wayland, S. C., & Stine, E. L. (1992). Adult age differences in the use of prosody for syntactic parsing and recall of spoken sentences. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 47, 350–356. Zibart, Rosemary. (2000, August 11). “Women’s Health.” The Santa Fe New Mexican.

III Social and Community Health Issues Alicia M. Dorsey

As the breadth of chapters in the present volume attests, the field of health communication has expanded greatly over the past two to three decades. As the chapters in the previous sections demonstrate, although we have identified many important links between communication practices and health, there still exists a wealth of unanswered questions related to this complex relationship in traditional medical settings, such as health care facilities, or within the context of a health care provider–client interface. In addition, although consistent findings related to the role of mass media in influencing health behavior exist, there are also an infinite number of questions yet unanswered related to the role of health messages transmitted to a variety of target audiences through mass media channels or a host of new technologies, as outlined in the section following this one. These sections of the present volume certainly highlight the mainstays of the field of health communication. However, recent years have seen a broadening of contexts within which scholars investigate the inherent relationships between communication and health. Two such contexts are highlighted in the present section of this handbook. First, over the years we have seen a heightened level of activity focused on the community context in attempts to address “local” health and public health-related issues. There has been an emerging recognition, particularly within underserved and hard-to-reach areas, that perhaps the most hopeful health interventions are those planned and executed by communities themselves. The ultimate effectiveness of this process of coming together as a community to tackle specific health concerns—separating the symptoms of a problem from the actual sources of the problem, identifying strategies for addressing these key issues, and negotiating resources to support the efforts—clearly is predicated on the emergent communication practices within and throughout the community. This unique and vital context has only recently been a focus of extensive communication investigation. A second evolving context for health communication investigation involves a closer examination of the role of informal talk within the context of social relationships on our health and well-being. We have long recognized the power of social support. However,

205

206

PART III: SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY HEALTH ISSUES

only in recent years has communication scholarship begun to attempt to examine and document the complexity and power of social contact in health and illness. The five chapters presented in this section explore these relatively new and certainly fruitful domains of investigation. They collectively examine the wide range of contexts within which both formal and informal communication practices influence the health of individuals and communities. The chapters also collectively challenge researchers to continue pursuing applied research in our efforts not only to better understand the role of communication in health, but also to identify specific strategies for improving the overall health of individuals in society. OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

The first three chapters within the unit explore the complex yet necessary act of engaging in community-based activities in efforts to promote health and healthy behaviors. In his chapter “The State of the Art and the State of the Science of Community Organizing,” James W. Dearing examines the gulf between the extant community-organizing literature and the emergent community-organizing practices. He highlights the importance of adopting a more holistic, social ecological approach to community change in both our examinations of problems facing communities as well as potential changes. Similarly, Clifford W. Scherer and Napoleon K. Juanillo explore both the theory and practice of community participation in efforts to understand and manage risk within community settings. This chapter provides both an overview of important aspects of community involvement as well as the evolution of risk assessment and risk communication. The third chapter examining community-based strategies for health communication highlights the importance of working with “marginalized” groups. Here Leigh Arden Ford and Gust A. Yep outline many of the differences between working in and working with communities in efforts to communicate about health with unique populations. Beyond the goals of providing an overview of present theory, research, and practice related to this area, this particular chapter strives to sensitize researchers and practitioners to the complexities of sociocultural, economic, and political contexts within which health communication efforts must be positioned. Each of these three chapters presents a strong case for the importance of actively engaging community members in efforts to promote health and healthy behaviors. They very clearly provide a realistic picture of the challenges of not only engaging in communitybased health communication research, but also in facilitating community-based action. The second context explored in the collection of chapters to follow is that of social relationships. Both chapters examine the role of informal or social interaction in the health and illness of individuals. Terrance L. Albrecht and Daena J. Goldsmith provide an overview of the prominent literature on social support and social networks and their impact specifically on individuals’ health and well-being. Finally, Rebecca J. Welch Cline provides a new look at the role of “everyday interpersonal communication” in health. This particular chapter uses social influence as a theoretical framework for exploring the link between everyday talk and health, specifically regarding HIV/AIDS.

10 The State of the Art and the State of the Science of Community Organizing James W. Dearing Ohio University

The practice of community organizing can change quickly. Practitioners react—sometimes instantly—when they perceive that some aspect of what they do could produce better results if modified. When people are not being persuaded, the appeal is altered. If no one is showing up, new points of contact are tried. If a program officer can be convinced, a different approach is tried. Good practitioners are masters of trial and error and experimentation. Their decisions are based on personal experience with the health problem, knowledge of the community in question, memory of previous social change initiatives, and advice from practitioner-colleagues. Occasionally, codified book knowledge from their formal training plays a part in determining strategies; more often, it does not (Dearing et al., 1996). For them, knowledge resides in the community. Community organizers are social change artists. The state of good practice is the state of the art. Research about community organizing as accumulated in scholarly journals and books changes slowly. The studies take a long time to conceptualize, fund, conduct, and publish. Then other scholars have to read the publications and use them to inform their own work. Researchers are trained to be skeptical and seek validation of concepts and relationships from multiple studies. Good researchers are masters of caution and are meticulous about variation. Their decisions are based on what has been tested before and carefully reasoned hunches about what should work and why. For many scholars, knowledge resides in the literature. The state of good research is the state of the science. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the state of the art and the state of the science of community organizing. I do this by focusing on what Coleman (1973) considered the major distinction among theories of change: Whether the locus of change is vested in the social conditions that give rise to a problem, or in the individuals who experience the problem.

207

208

DEARING

Most of the current scholarship about community organizing, the purposive stimulation of organizations and or of individuals in order to improve certain conditions experienced in a community, is concerned with (1) individual attitude and behavior change campaigns or (2) community empowerment through grassroots initiation and activity. Attitude and behavior change campaigns, the traditional province of communication campaigns, typically involve institutional sources of expertise in the form of external change agencies or local technical professionals who seek a degree of community sponsorship so that the subsequent effort can be labeled “community based” whether there is much authentic community involvement or not (Labonte, 1997). Most behavior change campaigns identify problems as the responsibility of individuals in a community and the solutions to those problems as existing elsewhere, with change experts, who guide campaign development. This type of community organizing is what Rothman (1970) termed social planning. Currently at least as dominant is scholarship about community and individual empowerment through grassroots organizing. This scholarship, termed by some as community building (Walter, 1997), is often normative in its appeal for scholars to take action in the name of community development. Grassroots organizing scholarship identifies the causes of problems at the level of institutions (for example, unresponsive local government administrators) and solutions at the level of individuals, specifically self-organizing community residents. This is analogous to what Rothman (1970) referred to as social action. So scholarship about community organizing resides in two distinct camps, with sharply divergent notions of what community organizing means. And this scholarship is not as far along the learning curve as we might like. According to Berkowitz (2000), writing in the Handbook of Community Psychology, this is even the case among community psychologists who have been in the forefront of much of the research about community organizing: Psychology does not have an established base of direct evidence from experimental or controlled field studies of community organization that informs us, with precision, as to what kinds of organizational attempts work best, and how. (Italics in the original) (p. 335)

Meanwhile, the state of the art—actual organizing—is rapidly moving elsewhere. Community change practitioners, including the deterministic efforts of those with the resources to fund homespun efforts at community development (chiefly private foundation decision makers), are increasingly turning to social ecology interventions. These attempts at community development, not represented in Rothman’s (1970) seminal typology of community organizing, identify both the causes and the solutions of community problems at the level of institutions and organizations (see Table 10.1). Individuals in communities often have important, meaningful roles in these initiatives, but this type of community organizing is not based in individual-level phenomena. Whereas scholars such as Abraham Wandersman, Robert Goodman, and Allan Cheadle (Wandersman, Goodman, & Butterfoss, 1997; Cheadle et al., 1994) are contributing to our collective knowledge of whether and why social ecology–based initiatives might work and just how we ought to measure them, there are large gaps in our understanding of social ecology initiatives. Opportunities abound for health communication scholars and practitioners to make important contributions to our collective knowledge about community organizing from a social ecology perspective.

10. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

209 TABLE 10.1

Locus of Problems and Solutions in Community Organizing The Solution Is . . . In Individuals

In Institutions

The Problem Is . . . In Individuals

Self-Help

Behavior Change Campaigns

In Institutions

Grassroots Activism

Social Ecology Interventions

Table adapted from Medved et al. (2001).

COMMUNITIES AND ORGANIZED SYSTEMS

A community is an informally organized set of loose associations among residents (McKnight, 1994). Based on intrinsic and shared interests, people gather in voluntary association (de Tocqueville, [1835] 1945). As citizens (a political term meaning “one who controls”) rather than clients (with the Greek root “one who is controlled”), residents are free to be creative, communicate together, and express feelings, subject to normative influences. This use of the term community is consistent with classical definitions in the community development literature that identify people, place, social interaction, and psychological identification as necessary elements of a community (Christenson & Robinson, 1989). Communities coexist with organized systems (such as local health care systems), the latter that function to control resources in order to produce standardized practices and outcomes.1 Organized systems depend upon consumers (i.e., clients) to buy and or use their products and services. For example, a local education system may include public and private schools, school districts and policy boards, state, county, and city jurisdictions that provide funding and maintain oversight of school curricula and performance, parentteacher organizations, and teacher unions as well as children and their parents. McKnight (1994) argued that when encroached upon by efficient, powerful organized systems, voluntary associations (our shared experience as community members) contract; pervasive organized systems can lead to unhealthy communities by replacing citizen consent with controlled consumers; rather than behaving as active citizens, residents behave passively as clients. This disequilibrium, the same condition that scholars, practitioners, and social change advocates have noted as a crisis of civil society (Putnam, 2000), is the targeted locus of change of so-called civil investing, community building, and comprehensive community initiatives, which seek to strengthen communities and their voluntary associations in order to keep powerful and efficient organized systems in check. Walsh (1997) refered to more than 50 initiatives sharing this approach. 1 These interorganizational systems are analogous to what Kaufman (1959) referred to as “development in the community” as opposed to “development of the community” (p. 8). Wilkinson (1991), a student of Kaufman’s, used the terms social field to describe organized systems such as the local education system and community field to refer to community associations. Such theorizing draws on Lewin’s (1951) concept of field theory, that an individual’s action is determined by the environmental forces surrounding him or her. Lewin derived his concept from physical properties of magnetic fields.

210

DEARING

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

For many people, community organizing brings to mind images of the lone and reluctant crusader, a person with no particular technical skills who has been personally and irrevocably wronged by a powerful and shady organized interest. Many such David and Goliath images are grounded in experience. Activists, working in association with other like-minded individuals, form grassroots social movements that can force the reconsideration if not outright redress of social problems by making them public, political issues, moving from marginalized complaint to mainstream institutionalization (Gamson, 1992; McCarthy & Zald, 1977). Community organizing through grassroots social movements is not easy; such efforts often languish for years. But the steps necessary to create a successful grassroots social movement are fairly well-codified. More problematic and at least as prevalent is community organizing that involves organized interests (such as the U.S. National Cancer Institute) that are external to the community(ies) in question. External sponsorship raises a host of problems concerning citizen participation (Cheadle et al., 1997; Dearing, Larson, Randall, & Pope, 1998; Perlstadt, Jackson-Elmoore, Freddolino, & Sturdevant Reed, 1999). It is then that the adversarial process of community change that characterizes social movements is necessarily overlaid with the need to collaborate and negotiate as the interests of an external change agency are fitted, often poorly so, with those of local residents and organizations, some of whom support a change objective, others who do not (Payne, 1999; Selznick, 1949). External change agencies bring money and access to technical resources that communities cannot hope to amass themselves. Community members—organizations and individuals both—bring the promise of participation, local legitimization, and sustainability that external sponsors cannot hope to buy. Matching the interests, needs, and wants of external sponsors and community members increases the complexity and heightens expectations to the challenge of community organizing, especially for large-scale community initiatives that involve coordination and/or standardization across multiple sites, require extensive citizen learning to participate, and in which external sponsors presuppose genuine citizen interest (Medved, Morrison, Dearing, Larson, Cline, & Brummans, 2001). STATE-OF-THE-SCIENCE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

Theorists of purposive community organizing have drawn heavily on the field’s practical history in social work in America. Rothman’s (1970) much cited typology distinguished among: (1) locality development, the building of group identity and community cohesion; (2) social planning, in which rational action is undertaken to address needs identified by technical experts; and (3) social action, to redress a problem but more fundamentally shift the balance of community power so that the problem would not again arise. Locality development was a collaborative response by community organizations; social planning, a top-down, usually government-led approach to the identification and remediation of community problems; and social action, a bottom-up, grassroots approach based in confrontation that exposed social injustice, such as filthy water, nonexistent sewer systems, and unpaved roads in minority neighborhoods. Practitioners and scholars delineate time-ordered steps for achieving changes. Bracht and Kingsbury (1990), for example, proposed the following stages and each stage’s key elements:

10. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

211

1. Community analysis (consisting of defining the community, collecting data, assessing community capacity, assessing community barriers, assessing readiness for change, and synthesizing data and setting priorities); 2. Design and initiation (consisting of establishing a core planning group and selecting a local organizer/coordinator; choosing an organizational structure; identifying, selecting, and recruiting organization members; defining the organization’s mission and goals; clarifying roles and responsibilities of board members, staff, and volunteers; and providing training and recognition); 3. Implementation (generating broad citizen participation, developing a sequential work plan, and using comprehensive, integrated strategies); 4. Program maintenance-consolidation (integrating intervention activities into community networks, establishing a positive organizational culture, and disseminating results); 5. Dissemination-reassessment (updating the community analysis, assessing effectiveness of interventions/programs, charting future directions and modifications, and summarizing and disseminating results).

Other scholars identify similar steps. Wagenaar, Gehan, Jones-Webb, Toomey, & Forster (1999), in writing about community mobilization, listed seven: Community assessment, creation of a core leadership group, development of a plan of action, attraction of mass support, implementation of the action plan, organizational maintenance and change institutionalization, and evaluation of intervention and outcomes. Evolution in scholarly thinking regarding community organizing parallels what has occurred in the field of international development studies over the last 40 years. Whereas scholars initially saw a large role for more industrially developed countries and international aid and change agencies in furthering the development of less industrially developed countries, empirical studies of international development did not support modernization hypotheses (Mowlana & Wilson, 1990). The negative and unintended consequences of technologically led change (such as malnutrition due to the introduction of new rice strains and new processing techniques) led development scholars, especially those from less industrially developed countries, to conceptualize active citizen participation and individual control over life circumstances as the keys to development, regardless of whether a society or community “modernized” or not (Bordenave, 1976). Villagers could, for example, reject urban sprawl, snarled traffic, and air pollution, but still choose to eradicate schistosomiasis. An internal locus of control— within one’s community as well as within oneself—came to define what development should mean (Freire, 1990; Galtung, 1980). Like the field of international development, literature about community organization has now come to strongly emphasize self-help and self-determination as preferred routes to community organization. While some community organization researchers such as Bracht and Kingsbury (1990) and the mobilization perspective of scholars such as Wagenaar et al. (1999) integrate meaningful roles for community residents on the one hand and external change agencies and technical experts on the other, the field of community organization is now dominated by a more strident scholarly belief that change initiation, ownership of change efforts, and benefit as a result should be of and by community residents, to the exclusion of external change agencies and other technical experts (such as local epidemiologists or public health officials) unless the latter’s role is limited to that of listener, facilitator, and discussant (Pilisuk, McAllister, & Rothman, 1996).

212

DEARING

This resident-centric perspective of community development has been termed community building. A number of recent theorists of community organizing focus on the building of community from within. Their emphases on empowerment, feminist perspective, marginalized groups, and conflict-based social action to redistribute power within communities can be understood as reactions against models of community organization that centrally involve external change agencies and direction (as opposed to support) from trained specialists, as well as the inauthentic forming of “partnerships” between powerful change agencies and relatively disempowered communities (Labonte, 1997). Community building as an alternative to or a type of community organizing is roughly parallel to the progression of thinking in the field of international development, where the responsibility for change (i.e., those who must initiate and organize the change effort) in communities has moved from system and policy levels of society to the level of individual community members, while the objects of change (the practices or beliefs of the units targeted to change) have moved in just the opposite direction, from the individual level to the institutional level. Currently, it is difficult to find examples of public health interventions that do not emphasize the personal responsibility of individuals and/or the importance of community participation in intervention (Guttman, 2000). In summary, the state of the science of community organization and international development studies has largely moved from (a) institutional responses directed at changing individual behavior, as in traditional communication campaigns, to (b) individual organized responses directed at changing institutional behavior, as in grassroots social movements. STATE-OF-THE-ART COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

Practitioners and their sponsors (especially including program officers in private foundations) are experimenting with a systemic approach to community improvement that identifies the locus of both problems and of solutions at the level of institutions. Concerned by research suggesting a disintegration of the public sphere in communities (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Putnam, 2000), and inspired by cases of successful neighborhood renewal through the establishment of supportive social environments (Schorr, 1997), these state-of-the-art practitioners and their benefactors are testing a social ecology perspective as a basis for community improvement. Proponents of these initiatives seek shifts in interorganizational relations, social norms, and public and organizational policies (Mathews, 1997; Ridings, 1997) that, if successfully altered, may operate systemically to change the structure of a local system and/or of a local community so that its capacity to function effectively is increased and its network of social relations is improved, which may then support the achievement of substantive objectives such as better health (Baker et al., 1994). The Annie E. Casey Foundation provides a case in point. In 22 of America’s most troubled big city neighborhoods, Annie E. Casey is investing up to 500 million dollars over 10 years to strengthen the social infrastructure of neighborhoods so that children and their families have a better chance of intellectual, social, and economic prosperity (Sommerfeld, 1999). The program, Making Connections, takes a general rather than project-specific approach to neighborhood improvement. Many grant makers have concluded that piecemeal efforts supported by foundations in response to single-issue requests from grantees demonstrate little, if any, sustained improvement after grants end. After-school care, for example, is inextricably tied to issues of employment, single-parent families, K-12 school policy, and neighborhood opportunities for children. Funding a project that seeks to improve after-school care by only addressing one of these issues may achieve project objectives

10. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

213

but not affect the problem of after-school care because all the other factors that contribute to kids arriving home to an empty apartment persist. Lasting behavior change is unlikely when the intervention in question does not address the social environment that sanctions risky behavior. Making Connections involves community activists, social service groups, religious institutions, employers, and families in the expansion of job opportunities, the reinforcement of neighborhood institutions, and a strengthening of social networks, so that participants and others will come to newly value their collective efficacy as members of neighborhoods. From a social ecological perspective, researchers have studied community coalition action (Goodman, Wandersman, Chinman, Imm, & Morrissey, 1996; Wandersman et al., 1996), public policy (Milio, 1988), institutional policy and routines (Wagenaar et al., 1999), and community and organizational indicators of normative conditions (Cheadle et al., 1994; Cheadle, Wagner, Koepsell, Kristal, & Patrick, 1992). The operative assumption of a social ecological perspective is that individual behavior is importantly determined by environmental opportunities and constraints, as well as individual perceptions of socially shared norms (Goodman et al., 1996; Kelly, 1966). Changes in social ecology can be recorded by collecting data about, for example, grocery store sales of low-fat foods, prevalence of graffiti, number of small business start-ups, number of community gardens, homicide and suicide rates, pedestrian traffic, drug use, and theft incidence (Cheadle et al., 1992; Gladwell, 2000). When a social ecology perspective drives the development of a change initiative, substantive change (such as better individual health) is not the primary objective. Rather, proponents seek to convene local community partnerships that in turn give rise to a variety of projects so that individuals and organizational decision makers in the community perceive broad-based public concern for a general issue-set. The emphasis of a social ecology health initiative is often on the supportive conditions that will enable progressive action by agencies and individuals to improve community and personal health. These supportive conditions are of two types: (1) a community’s capacity to collectively take action, and (2) social capital that exists between community members and organizations. Social ecology health initiatives typically seek to increase community capacity and improve social capital. COMMUNITY CAPACITY

Community capacity is the sum and interaction of several types of assets held within a community. Together, these assets represent a community’s capacity for betterment. Building one or more dimensions of community capacity, with an emphasis on systemic change, is the particular goal of social ecology initiatives. The results of a two-day symposium convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1995 (Goodman et al., 1998) identified dimensions of community capacity as citizen participation and leadership, skills, resources, social and interorganizational networks, sense of community, understanding of community history, community power, and community values. These dimensions, and hence the concept of community capacity, were meant to be inclusive of three other popular concepts in the published literature about community improvement: community competence, sense of community, and empowerment (Parker, Eng, Schulz, & Israel, 1999; Plas & Lewis, 1996). To this list of dimensions should be added collective efficacy, a group’s shared belief in its conjoint capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given levels of attainments (Bandura, 1997). Collective efficacy is important to community

214

DEARING

performance in strengthening capacity assets because when people hold stronger beliefs about their abilities as a collective, they will be more likely to achieve collective desired outcomes. Efforts to improve community capacity typically involve community members who come together in some variant of a partnership, coalition, or alliance. The purpose of these groups is to share information, coordinate resources efficiently and make decisions (Sigmond, 1995), and implement projects, each of which is an attempt to improve some aspect of a broadly defined problem (such as community environmental quality). These community partnerships or coalitions act as decision-making bodies to prioritize problems, consider and propose strategies by which each project can best achieve goals and objectives, generate new resources, delegate responsibility, implement projects, assess progress, and sustain the progressive actions they have begun. Community partnerships are an especially open type of organization that exist to marshal resources and commitment, implement plans, and achieve goals (Wandersman et al., 1997). Successful completion of coalition or partnership tasks requires community stakeholders to know one another and communicate on a basis of shared trust and to be competent to carry out project activities. It is a community’s capacity to organize that is often most at issue in social ecology health initiatives. SOCIAL CAPITAL

The dimensions of community capacity that are most important for achieving systemic change in a community are citizen participation and leadership, resources, social and interorganizational networks, and community power. Collectively, these four dimensions of community capacity represent a community’s social capital. Social capital can be defined as resources embedded in a social structure that are accessed and or mobilized in purposive actions (Lin, 1999). A community’s social capital is both its network of relevant social relations as well as what is available through that network for the use of network actors. Availability of social capital is dependent on one’s position within a network; network structure both enables and constrains one’s opportunity to access and use resources. While social capital is often written about as a “public” good (Coleman, 1988), clearly some actors have differential access to more of it than others, based on who they are and who they know (Portes & Landolt, 1996). Social capital can be put to a range of productive uses, from good to bad. A community high in social capital can be a community that is insular, closed, and isolationist (Portes & Sensenbrenner, 1993). A network high in social capital can be a network that actively excludes others. Communities as a whole benefit the most when their networks are diverse, inclusive, flexible, horizontal (linking those of similar status or in similar structural positions), and vertical (linking those of different status or in different structural positions); tie together organizations; and span other communities (Flora, 1998). So the social capital goal for a community is not simply more of it—increased frequency of interorganizational interactions or increased trust in interorganizational relationships, for example—but rather improved social capital, by connecting certain segments of the community that had previously not had access to information and other sorts of resources. In communities, social capital can be operationalized as the informal and formal relationships that span people, organizations, and agencies, and what is available through them, such as obligations, expectations (i.e., norms), and trust that can come to characterize those relations (Coleman, 1988). Informal relational assets include the personal contacts who can be accessed through community members’ social networks, as well

10. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

215

as the routinized but not institutionalized relationships between people in agencies and organizations. Formal relational assets include interagency agreements, memorandums of understanding between organizations, and contracts (Wall, Ferrazzi, & Schryer, 1998). The social capital accumulated through these relationships can be of two types: It can result from “reciprocity transactions,” when people do favors for others, and from “enforceable trust,” when people act in response to system or community norms that prescribe their action for the benefit of others (Frank & Yasumoto, 1998). Seen in terms of social capital, community problems, such as crime or teenage pregnancy, become problems of community disorganization. Organization—strengthened relationships and better use of existing resources—becomes the solution (Skogan, 1988). IMPLICATIONS FOR STATE-OF-THE-SCIENCE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

Externally led initiatives that take a social ecology approach to strengthening social capital and increasing community capacity represent an innovation in community organizing. To health communication researchers, they present the following challenges: 1. Many of the difficulties of community participation in initiatives that involve an external change agency concern community stakeholders’ reactance toward the imposition of a rational planning model typically imposed by external sponsors who are interested in demonstrable rapid progress. For them, progress is defined as moving from one set of decisions or activities on to another so that prior decisions and activities are not revisited if at all possible. Axinn and Axinn (1997) proposed that the historical record of community development (as well as their own experience as development scholars and community-organizing practitioners) supports a cyclical model in which communities and other units of analysis modulate between conditions of underdevelopment, appropriate development, and overdevelopment. This type of recursive model of community change not only implies that decisions about change will be revisited, but also that decisions will be made anew, time and time again, as new community participants cycle into community decision-making processes and as changing environmental conditions bring new issues to the fore in communities. Such a perspective is an important corrective to models of community organizing that detail a progression of step-by-step organizing activities. Many community members do not accept strict linear notions of planned change, especially those members most prized by change sponsors (Medved et al., 2001). The high degree of rational planning that defines time-ordered modeling runs counter to the orientation of community members who are not professionally trained. While some community participants readily appreciate the familiar efficiency of linear thinking—the paid representatives of public health departments and private businesses—the infected, affected, and traditionally underrepresented participants in the collaborative planning coalitions often prefer to behave as if they are party to a long-running dialogue in which participants need to periodically reestablish their commitment, demonstrate trust, and renew social bonds, just as in other facets of life. That is, community participants to change initiatives tend to treat their involvement as a dynamic relationship rather than an institutional prerogative, even when institutional partners are involved. 2. The relationships that are at first structured and then that emerge linking external change agencies and communities together in the change process are as important to study as is what then happens in the communities where interventions are put into the field. Nearly all the literature about coalitions, partnerships, and collaboratives focus on the relations among community stakeholders as they begin to work collectively, or not (Kreuter, Lezin, & Young, 2000), at the

216

DEARING

expense of studying in any serious way interactions and evolving relations between external change agencies and communities, which, in many ways, is a broader overarching concern (Cheadle et al., 1997). It is only by studying communication at this intersystemic level that key issues of control, community ownership, implementation support and technical assistance, and sustainability and institutionalization can be better explained. 3. The social ecology perspective on community interventions requires health communication researchers to use mixed-method research designs that are far more complex in their conduct, analyses, and interpretations than are single-method studies. If one is to capture the effects, for example, of personal networks and reference groups upon individual decision making, as well as model the effects of changes in local public policies on private businesses that newly delimit the health behavior choices of individuals, a health communication researcher may need command of sociometric analysis, psychometric and media consumption survey research, and nonreactive archival-based community indicators in order to piece together a composite of data that could fully test the social ecology perspective. Multiple methods may produce data that converge; more commonly, the researcher must explain discrepancies between findings across methods, which adds explanatory power to any analysis but takes more time and care (Jick, 1979). The implication here is a need for either (1) scholars who are comfortable and competent with multiple, often maximally different methods, or (2) scholars ready and willing to work in teams that bring together different sorts of specialists. My experience studying a social ecology initiative suggests that the research process required is quite like mounting a legal case, in which many sources of evidence are accumulated for the purpose of supporting statements and recommendations. 4. The reconceptualization of community competencies from process, progress variables to outcome, output variables has dramatic implications for health communication research. This change deemphasizes the demonstrable achievement of improved health status of individuals (which most campaign designs do not include sufficient time to capture even if they do occur) in favor of generic, relational variables that measure a community’s ability to organize. Like impact analysis, this shift will raise the level of analysis from the individual and group to the interorganizational system and the community. This shift implies change in data sources and data types as well as level of analysis and will necessitate health communication researchers with different skill sets.

IMPLICATIONS FOR STATE-OF-THE-ART COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

How do systemically directed, social ecology interventions like comprehensive community initiatives affect the practice of community organizing? 1. External change agencies play a major role in the change process. Their presence sets in motion a whole range of strategies to interest, persuade, and involve community members in the change objective that are not necessary when a change is initiated from within a community. Undoubtably, this dynamic complicates the task of the organizer. When an external change agency is involved, health communication practitioners can be viewed with pessimism by community residents as well as by local organized interests who may be less than convinced of the change agency’s motivations. Thus the health communication practitioner’s role becomes a persuasive one in addition to serving as intermediary between the external funder and local stakeholders, and organizing local participation. 2. When community capacities become the focal desired change, the purpose of the initiative can easily escape the comprehension of many community residents or simply not be considered to be important. Health communication practitioners can find and recruit passionate spokespersons for a cause who can, by virtue of their belief, convince others to expend the energy necessary to move an initiative ahead. But spokespersons will more readily be found for substantive social

10. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

217

problems experienced in a community (i.e., migrant farm worker health and safety) than for amorphous objectives such as heightened trust, social support, and extended and diversified interorganizational relations. Practitioners will find it essential to envelop community capacity interventions in substantive projects to which residents can easily relate. 3. Practitioners who operationalize social capital concepts in ways that are meaningful and useful to individuals will ease their tasks of organizing. Disaggregated from collectives to the level of individuals, social capital can be operationalized as social leverage and social support (de Souza Briggs, 1998). Social leverage consists of valuable information that one can use to, for example, get a new job or find out about new opportunities (Granovetter, 1973). Social support consists of emotional and other resources that trusted others possess and share with friends, such as listening and commiserating, encouragement, transportation, gifts, or loans, to cope (Espinoza, 1999). The more tangible the effects of improved capacities can be made to individuals, the greater success organizers will experience. 4. Health communication practitioners should begin their work with serious attention to the outcomes that external change agencies are ultimately most interested in: sustainability and institutionalization of initiative objectives. These outcomes are possible for both the community capacity functions of coalitions and partnerships (such as more inclusive interorganizational networking) as well as for the substantive health improvement projects to which partnerships give rise (such as mobile dental vans for low-income neighborhoods). Thus practitioners must reorient themselves from expecting to work mostly with audiences at risk of illness or in need of disease prevention toward working with and between agencies and organizations that operate programs for people at risk and in need.

REFERENCES Axinn, G. H., & Axinn, N. W. (1997). Collaboration in international rural development. New Delhi: Sage. Baker, E. L., Melton, R. J., Stange, P. V., Fields, M. L., Koplan, J. P., Guerra, F. A., & Satcher, D. (1994). Health reform and the health of the public: Forging community health partnerships. Journal of the American Medical Association, 272, 1276–1282. Bandura, A. (1997). Self efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 477. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1985). Habits of the heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berkowitz, B. (2000). Community and neighborhood organization. In J. Rappaport, & E. Seidman (Eds.), Handbook of community psychology (pp. 331–357). New York: Kluwer Academic. Bordenave, J. D. (1976). Communication of agricultural innovations in Latin America: The need for new models. Communication Research, 3(2), 135–154. Bracht, N., & Kingsbury, L. (1990). Community organization principles in health promotion: A five-stage model. In N. Bracht (Ed.), Health promotion at the community level (pp. 66–88). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cheadle, A., Beery, W., Wagner, E., Fawcett, S., Green, L., Moss, D., Plough, A., Wandersman, A., & Woods, I. (1997). Conference report: Community-based health promotion—state of the art and recommendations for the future. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 13, 240–243. Cheadle, A., Psaty, B., Curry, S., Wagner, E., Diehr, P., Koepsell, T., Kristal, A., & Patrick, D. (1994). Community-level assessment of the health-promotion environment in restaurants. American Journal of Health Promotion, 9(2), 88–91.

218

DEARING

Cheadle, A., Wagner, E., Koepsell, T., Kristal, A., & Patrick, D. (1992). Environmental indicators: A tool for evaluating community-based health-promotion programs. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 8, 345–350. Christenson, J. A., & Robinson, J. W., Jr. (1989). (Eds.). Community development in perspective. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Coleman, J. S. (1973). Conflicting theories of social change. In G. Zaltman (Ed.), Processes and phenomena of social change (pp. 61–74). New York: Wiley. Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95–S120. Dearing, J. W., Larson, R. S., Randall, L. M., & Pope, R. S. (1998). Local reinvention of the CDC HIV Prevention Community Planning Initiative. Journal of Community Health, 23, 113–126. Dearing, J. W., Rogers, E. M., Meyer, G., Casey, M. K., Rao, N., Campo, S., & Henderson, G. M. (1996). Social marketing and diffusion-based strategies for communicating health with unique populations: HIV prevention in San Francisco. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 343–363. de Souza Briggs, X. (1998). Brown kids in white suburbs: Housing mobility and the many faces of social capital. Housing Policy Debate, 9(1), 177–221. de Tocqueville, A. ([1835] 1945). Democracy in America. New York: Harper and Row. Espinoza, V. (1999). Social networks among the urban poor: Inequality and integration in a Latin American city. In B. Wellman (Ed.), Networks in the global village (pp. 147–184). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Flora, J. L. (1998). Social capital and communities of place. Rural Sociology, 63, 481–506. Frank, K., & Yasumoto, J. Y. (1998). Linking action to social structure within a system: Social capital within and between subgroups. American Journal of Sociology, 104, 642–686. Freire, P. (1990). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Galtung, J. (1980). The true worlds. New York: Free Press. Gamson, W. A. (1992). Talking politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gladwell, M. (2000). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. Boston: Little, Brown. Goodman, R. M., Speers, M. A., LcLeroy, K., Fawcett, S., Keger, M., Parker, E., Rathgeb Smith, S., Sterling, T. D., & Wallerstein, N. (1998). Identifying and defining the dimensions of community capacity to provide a basis for measurement. Health Education & Behavior, 25, 258–278. Goodman, R. M., Wandersman, A., Chinman, M., Imm, P., & Morrissey, E. (1996). An ecological assessment of community-based interventions for prevention and health promotion: Approaches to measuring community coalitions. American Journal of Community Psychology, 24(1), 33–61. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties hypothesis. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1380. Greer, A. L. (1988). The state of the art versus the state of the science: The diffusion of new medical technologies into practice. International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 4, 5–26. Guttman, N. (2000). Public health communication interventions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 107. Jick, T. D. (1979). Mixing qualitative and quantitative methods: Triangulation in action. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, 602–611. Kaufman, H. E. (1959). Toward an interactional conception of community. Social Forces, 38, 8–17.

10. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

219

Kelly, J. G. (1966). Ecological constraints on mental health services. American Psychologist, 21, 535–539. Kreuter, M. W., Lezin, N. A., & Young, L. A. (2000). Evaluating community-based collaborative mechanisms: Implications for practitioners. Health Promotion Practice, 1, 49–63. Labonte, R. (1997). Community, community development, and the forming of authentic partnerships. In M. Minkler (Ed.), Community organizing & community building for health (pp. 88–102). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers. New York: Harper. Lin, N. (1999). Building a network theory of social capital. Connections, 22(1), 28–51. Mathews, D. (1997). Changing times in the foundation world. National Civic Review, 86, 275–280. McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. N. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory. American Journal of Sociology, 82, 1212–1241. McKnight, J. L. (1994). Two tools for well-being: Health systems and communities. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 10(3), 23–25. Medved, C. E., Morrison, K., Dearing, J. W., Larson, R. S., Cline, G., & Brummans, B. (2001). Paradox in community health improvement initiatives: Communication and collaboration in a managed care environment. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 29, 137– 152. Milio, N. (1988). Making healthy public policy; developing the science by learning the art: An ecological framework for policy studies. Health Promotion, 2, 263–274. Mowlana, H., & Wilson, L. J. (1990). The passing of modernity. New York: Longman. Parker, E. A., Eng, E., Schulz, A. J., & Israel, B. A. (1999). Evaluating community-based health programs that seek to increase community capacity. New Directions for Evaluation, 83, 37–54. Payne, C. A. (1999). The challenges of employing performance monitoring in public health community based efforts: A case study. Journal of Community Health, 24, 159–170. Perlstadt, H., Jackson-Elmoore, C., Freddolino, P. P., & Sturdevant Reed, C. (1999). Citizen participation in health planning: A case study of changing delivery systems. Research in Sociology of Health Care, 16, 75–98. Pilisuk, M., McAllister, J., & Rothman, J. (1996). Coming together for action: The challenge of contemporary grassroots organizing. Journal of Social Issues, 52, 15–37. Plas, J. M., & Lewis, S. E. (1996). Environmental factors and sense of community in a planned town. American Journal of Community Psychology, 24(1), 109–143. Portes, A., & Landolt, P. (1996). The downside of social capital. The American Prospect, May-June, X3-21, 94. Portes, A., & Sensenbrenner, J. (1993). Embeddedness and immigration: Notes on the social determinants of economic action. American Journal of Sociology, 98, 1320–1350. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: Civic disengagement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ridings, D. S. (1997). Philanthropy in action: Building community. National Civic Review, 86, 281–286. Rothman, J. (1970). Three models of community organization practice. In F. M. Cox, J. L. Erlich, J. Rothman, & J. E. Tropman (Eds.), Strategies of community organization (pp. 20–36). Itasca, IL: Peacock. Schorr, L. B. (1997). Common purpose: Strengthening families and neighborhoods to rebuild America. New York: Anchor. Selznick, P. (1949). The TVA and the grassroots. Berkeley: University of California Press.

220

DEARING

Sigmond, R. M. (1995). Back to the future: Partnerships and coordination for community health. Frontiers of Health Services Management, 11(4), 5–36. Skogan, W. G. (1988). Community organizations and crime. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research, 10 (pp. 39–78). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sommerfeld, M. (1999). Casey goes to bat for families. The Chronicle of Philanthropy, XI, 17: 1, 9–10, 12, 14. Wagenaar, A. C., Gehan, J. P., Jones-Webb, R., Toomey, T. L., & Forster, J. L. (1999). Communities mobilizing for change on alcohol: Lessons and results from a 15-community randomized trial. Journal of Community Psychology, 27, 315–326. Wall, E., Ferrazzi, G., & Schryer, F. (1998). Getting the goods on social capital. Rural Sociology, 63, 300–322. Walsh, J. (1997). Community building in theory and practice: Three case studies. National Civic Review, 86, 291–314. Walter, C. L. (1997). Community building practice: A conceptual framework. In M. Minkler (Ed.), Community organizing & community building for health (pp. 68–83). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wandersman, A., Goodman, R. M., & Butterfoss, F. D. (1997). Understanding coalitions and how they operate. In M. Minkler (Ed.), Community organizing & community building for health (pp. 261–277). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wandersman, A., Valios, R., Ochs, L., de la Cruz, D. S., Adkins, E., & Goodman, R. (1996). Toward a social ecology of community coalitions. American Journal of Health Promotion, 10, 299–307. Wilkinson, K. P. (1991). The community in rural America. New York: Greenwood Press.

11 The Continuing Challenge of Community Health Risk Management and Communication Clifford W. Scherer Cornell University

Napoleon K. Juanillo Jr. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign INTRODUCTION

Progress in understanding and treating human disease has advanced to remarkable levels in recent decades. Understanding the relationship between lifestyles and health, the biology of the human body, development of designer drugs, alternative intervention strategies, and the genetic codes related to predispositions of various diseases have progressed; and they continue to progress at breakneck speed. As these advances are being made, it would appear that the level of uncertainty should decline, that individuals, groups, and communities should have more specific information on which to base health decisions, making not only easier decisions, but also more precise decisions about health and health protective behaviors. Ironically, this is seldom the case. Advances in medicine and other health sciences as well as in risk-assessment techniques have not necessarily resulted in decreasing the uncertainties we face as we resolve issues and questions about health. Einsiedel and Thorne (1999), for example, described the case of BRCA1, a gene identified as related to an increased chance of breast cancer. Rather than increasing certainty, the discovery of this gene has actually decreased certainty by increasing the number of questions needing answers. For example, questions now need to be answered specifying conditions under which the genetic code increases the likelihood of a particular type of cancer for a specific individual. At the same time there is increased uncertainty about how to identify susceptible individuals. Whereas our scientific and medical knowledge about health and disease has increased, health professionals and communicators are still frustrated because individuals do not behave “rationally”; they ignore medical advice, smoke, consume unhealthy diets, practice unsafe sex, and become overly concerned about what are, from a risk-assessment

221

222

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

perspective, minor risks. Individuals may worry about the risks of West Nile Virus with family or friends as they continue to smoke, consume high-fat foods, or ignore their doctor’s instructions. It can be argued that scientific advances have provided us with more sophisticated techniques of detecting and assessing hazards. The scientific paradox seems to hold true in that scientific progress has not only increased our capability to detect potential hazards, but it also uncovers previously unknown hazards. As our understanding of the world grows exponentially, we are likewise confronted with uncertainties that leave considerable space for conflicting interpretation. This almost daily barrage of uncertainties and the widespread media coverage they generate have led some of us to view ourselves as the victims rather than as partakers and beneficiaries of the advances in medical and health science (Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 1980). It ought to be clear, however, that the speed by which science uncovers new health hazards is not to be blamed for our inability to cope with risk information. Clearly, a critical issue that ought to be addressed is not about slowing down the science. What is really at issue is whether we have sufficient space to understand and talk about the specific prisms through which both the scientists/experts and the public view risk. Many of the disputes as well as charges of “irrationality” and ‘overreaction’ emanate from the dearth of forums that allow those involved to have an understanding of what constitutes their definitions of risk. It would indeed be unfortunate if the benefits from the advances and investments in the medical and health sciences would be less than optimum on account of one seemingly plain factor: poor communication. More than two decades have passed since the explosion of studies on risk-communication. Despite continued work in designing effective risk-communication strategies, we have moved only slowly toward even a feeble level of success. As a field of research, “Risk communication has undergone its own evolution” (Fischhoff, 1995, p. 137). Evidently, like any other scientific endeavor, each stage of exploring the dimensions of communicating risk has been accompanied by more complex questions and problems. Fischhoff (1995, p. 138) summarized the patterns and trends in the development of risk communication studies as follows: Stage 1 concentrated on getting the risk assessment right. “All we have to do is to get the numbers right,” to be able to make decisions related to risk. Stage 2 focused on issues of telling the public what the numbers were and explaining how they were determined. Stage 3 assumed that the need was to explain to the public what was meant by the numbers. For example, Johnson and Slovic (1995) reported on agency efforts to discuss uncertainties in health risk assessments aimed at reducing citizens’ perceptions of risk and to increase agency credibility. Stage 4 focused on comparative risks, explaining to the public that they’ve accepted similar risks in the past. Comparisons were made, for example between the risk from contaminated water and the risk from eating peanut butter (Fessenden-Raden, Fitchen, & Heath, 1987). Other literature explained that “one factor that inhibits public understanding of risk messages is that people often cannot easily relate the low—say, 1 in 10,000—risk probabilities presented to their everyday experience . . . thus this difficulty can be overcome by quantitative comparisons between familiar risks and less familiar risks” (National Research Council [NRC], 1989, p. 172).

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

223

Stage 5 was exemplified by efforts to show the public that the risk of a new technology, policy or practice was “a good deal for them,” that the risk from the new activity was lower than a common risk such as eating peanut butter, for example. Stage 6 was the beginning of efforts to respect the public. During this time efforts were focused on clarifying and understanding different interpretations of words and phrases, and in simplifying terminology used by risk practitioners when talking with the public (Jardine & Hrudey, 1997). Stage 7 began with efforts to move the public into a position as a legimitate partner in the decision making. And finally, Fischhoff noted, Stage 8 advocates all of the above.

While some of these stages appear to be extremely naive, it is important to note that risk communication emerged primarily from a scientific and technical perspective. Engineers and scientists were frustrated in their attempts to build nuclear power plants, dam rivers, or institute public health policies and were searching for a way to explain to policymakers and the public that the risks were acceptable. Judging from Fischhoff’s outline, however, one could detect the imperative to surpass traditional processes of disseminating information based on purely technical assessments of risk and to move on to a phase that emphasizes a more inclusive and holistic assessment of risk. This finds resonance in Tinker (1996), who observed in health communication programs, a “growing recognition among Public Health Service agencies of the need for communication methods that move beyond the ‘bean-counting’ of information dissemination to include a variety of theoretical models for assessing the influence of health risk communication on health behavior change” (p. 197). Leventhal, Kelly, and Leventhal (1999) noted, in the context of cancer control, that risk perceptions have only a weak relationship to prevention behaviors. In fact, a wide range of studies have found only very weak or, at best, moderately weak behavioral change as a result of change strategies. These studies range from child immunization, AIDS, breast cancer screening, smoking, and heart disease to West Nile Virus and food safety (see, for example, Aspinwall, 1999; Basen-Engquist & Parcel, 1992; Borzekowski, Flora, Feighery, & Schooler, 1999; Brown, 1991; Kelly, Zyzanski, & Alemagno, 1991; Orlandi, 1996; Strobino, Keane, Holt, Hughart, & Bernard, 1996). Other studies have added considerable depth to our understanding of how individuals perceive risk and how these perceptions influence health behaviors. Included are studies examining the patterns of how the media and journalists construct meaning (Friedman, Dunwoody, & Rogers, 1986; Nelkin, 1987), the social amplification of risk (Kasperson et al., 1988), and the far-ranging psychological studies that have helped us better understand individual cognitive processes related to risk perceptions, risk estimates, heuristics, and others (see, for example, Slovic, 1992). For the most part, however, risk perceptions and behaviors have been studied almost exclusively as individual cognitive mechanisms in which individuals collect and process information, form perceptions of risk, and behave as atomized units unconnected to a social system (Lee, 1998; Rothman & Kiviniemi, 1999; Scherer, 2000). Even where the social aspects are recognized, these linkages are generally regarded as influences such as perceived social norms or as simple sources of information, much as the mass media are recognized as sources. Psychological approaches utilizing the idea of social systems generally assume that direct communication from other individuals will influence a specific person but that individual cognitions are still central to the formation and maintenance of attitudes and behaviors (Bovasso, 1996). This approach

224

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

has yielded valuable insights into a number of mechanisms such as heuristics, faults in probabilistic reasoning, and optimistic biases. Psychological studies emerged early in risk communication primarily because communicators found it hard to explain why various audiences reacted in what seemed to be irrational ways. Why, for example, would communities accept a risk of one in a thousand in one situation but would be unwilling to accept a probability of one in a million in a different situation? Historically, policies and actions related to community health were often decided between government and industry experts. Industry responsible for soil, water, or air pollution would negotiate with the government regulatory agency as to what was acceptable. In other cases the health care industry would negotiate with government agencies as to what could be done to respond to a health crisis whether it was the result of human activity or a natural disaster. Rather quickly, however, public concern and opposition to resulting policies, regulations, and procedures grew. It became clear that solving disagreements between regulators, industry, and the public was difficult at best. Risk communication emerged as a way to begin explaining these policies to the public, and risk assessment emerged as the science to explain the probability of scientific uncertainty (Ohanian et al., 1997; Otway, 1987). Early risk-communication efforts focused almost exclusively on strategies for communicating to the public. Such rules as “speak clearly and with compassion” emerged as a way of more clearly communicating from the science community to the public. Some early risk literature even emphasized the need to “sell the public the facts.” The public, it was argued, needs persuasion, rather than education (NRC, 1989, p. 283). As a field of study, however, risk communication is rooted in the foundations of democracy. It embraces the assumption that for the public good, science must engage in its tasks (such as the estimate of public harm or the likelihood of harm) with a recognition that the outcomes have policy and behavioral implications (NRC, 1989; Otway & Thomas, 1982). The National Research Council (1989) noted that “to remain democratic, a society must find ways to put specialized knowledge into the service of public choice and keep it from becoming the basis of power for an elite” (p. 15). The underlying problem is often defined as lack of public understanding of risk or the public’s perception of risk (often defined as faulty) with the concomitant challenge to risk communication of making the message clearer, more persuasive, and more motivating. However, many decisions are under the control of officials, generally nonspecialists who are answerable to the public. Thus the communication of risks evolved from a need by scientists and risk-assessment experts to reassure and demonstrate to public officials and policymakers, as well as the public, that the science pointed to rational health protective public policies or behaviors. Research discourses about risk communication show a confluence of lessons learned about individual responses to risk and a progression toward empirical investigation of what actually concerns groups and communities and why (Bennett, 1999). Risk-communication studies now look at the concept of “rationality” in a broader sense as they consider both scientific and lay perspectives on risk and how a more interactive process might contribute to better understanding of risk and a more acceptable and rational risk management plan. Only recently, however, has there been work on the involvement of individuals in group participation strategies involving risk issues. Even these strategies, however, make tenuous assumptions about how the involvement of a small number of individuals may influence perceptions of the larger community. Rowan (1996) concluded that risk communication is most successful when individuals are empowered as opposed to when they are manipulated or coerced. It is the process of empowerment that may be central to achieving

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

225

change. Lewin (1948), for example, suggested that motivation for change must move beyond simple cognition. Individuals, he argued, do not change simply because they have more information. Change, Lewin suggested, occurs when social norms change through a shared learning experience. It is the same phenomenon noted by Talcott Parsons (1951), in his classic work, that behaviors do not occur singly and discretely, they are organized in systems. Going beyond the study of group influence on health decision making, there are studies that suggest wholesale public participation in shaping health policies and decisions as a key component of health decision making and management. This philosophical foundation presents a strong argument for community participation in health policy decision making. The remainder of this chapter focuses on exploring the philosophical foundations for community participation in health policy decisions. Particular attention is given to case studies that illustrate unique aspects of community decision making and risk management and help build a theoretical foundation for community health risk management and communication. MAPPING THE ORIGINS OF RISK COMMUNICATION: INTEGRATING THE HEALTH RISK ASSESSMENTS OF COMMUNITIES

Until recently there has been a strong fundamentalist reliance on science as both epistemological and institutional forms that subordinate other important reflexive domains (Welsh, 1995). As a consequence, responses to and understanding of health issues have been largely dependent on what the experts say. Thus, science and public policy have had a functional relationship for a considerable period. Regulatory decisions, based on data generated through scientific research, have indicated a relationship that relies on the competency and legitimacy of the scientific system as a producer of knowledge. Logical consistency has become a necessity, and science is seen as possessing the capability to make predictions with precision, scope, and accuracy, including prediction of the consequences of risk-management decisions and policies. Science, at least, draws upon an externally recognized set of claims to authority and understanding whereas nonscientific understandings are not bound by these claims (Brunner & Ascher, 1992; Eden, 1996; Plough & Krimsky, 1987). Hence, scientific analyses and results have been primordial in setting the agenda, defining the problem, shaping and evaluating solutions, and justifying the legitimacy of health policies. This particular view of putting risk assessment and management in the hands of experts is not without basis in political thought. Philosophers such as B. R. Berelson, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Betham, and Walter Lippmann argued for limited citizen participation. They claimed that involving citizens in day-to-day government affairs could impede the ability of technical experts to base decisions on their professional judgment. In addition, they felt that public involvement was costly and time consuming and could exacerbate conflict (Koontz, 1999). Managing risk through risk communication, in this context, is simply defined as a process by which government regulators and industry disseminate technical risk information and judgments of risk acceptability. The success of risk communication hinges on the degree to which public knowledge reflects or matches the technical rationality of risk and the extent to which popular behavior and attitudes are in harmony with scientific-technical values and principles. In this context, the social and cultural dimensions of risk are judged to be of marginal concern. Unfortunately, the elevation of so-called technical rationality as indispensable to health policy decisions has also meant downgrading the values, beliefs, and opinions held by

226

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

the public. It is not surprising, then, to see a number of risk-communication studies suggesting the need to upgrade the level of the public’s scientific literacy as an approach to bridging the divide between experts and the public. This approach relegates risk communication to a simplified process of giving information. Public inputs are not a crucial factor in the process. It is, as Kasperson (1986) put it, an agency-initiated process that has for its goals “correcting misperception,” “educating the public,” “reducing conflict,” “easing implementation,” or “increasing legitimacy” (p. 278). Participation in risk communication, in this context, is one of co-optation—a means for maximizing rationality, a catalyst for implementing health-risk-management decisions, and a means for changing public attitudes and behaviors to conform to what the experts have determined as desirable. Facilitating the process of arriving at acceptable policies to manage health risk relies, to a large extent, on how public perceptions of risk are understood and incorporated in the overall risk-assessment process. In the ongoing discourse about health risk assessment and management, two issues have become clear: (1) Individual and community concerns and ideas about risk are multidimensional, and (2) the task of incorporating these varied perspectives is complex, if not difficult. Public judgments about risk, as evidenced by risk-perception research utilizing the psychometric and cultural approaches, have shown that lay judgments do not correspond with those of experts who manage hazards based on their quantitative assessments of risk (Renn, 1998). Undoubtedly, the varied facets of risk perception have sparked numerous theoretical and methodological debates in determining the constitution of individual and public perceptions of risk. The evolution of studies and knowledge about public perception of risk, however, has also led to a growing appreciation of the critical role of psychosocial and cultural factors that influence the public’s understanding and assessment of, as well as responses to, health risks. In dispelling the conventional reductive-objective paradigm of science that aims at “objective” and “universal” truths as determined by scientists and experts (Schwab & Syme, 1997), these studies offer fresh insights into the challenges policymakers face in integrating lay assessments into health risk management and communication. Whether each of these perspectives can yield solid empirical predictions and data may not matter as much as the new track toward which they are steering the discourse on risk assessment, management, and communication. Notwithstanding the disagreements over methods and concepts in risk-perception discourse, there is still a strong basis for assuming that the public goes beyond science-based risk information in making decisions about their health. The need for good quantitative data on public risk perception should not preclude the imperative to understand the ways people think about and respond to risk. In the context of the transscientific considerations that the public uses to make judgments about health risks, this chapter argues that risk-management and -communication processes should now focus more on integrating these different types of perspectives. This chapter discusses the key concepts in participatory processes and the public forums that allow for the articulation of issues, concerns, and opinions of those affected by health risks. Retracing the Arguments for the Transscientific Nature of Risk

The first category of these studies has shown that individual interpretations of risk are influenced by a number of factors. Guided largely by the methods in psychometric approaches based on the pioneering work of Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein in the mid-1970s, these studies have focused on measuring the individual’s intuitive perceptions of risks. Social Theories of Risk by Krimsky and Golding (1992) provides a thorough

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

227

discussion and synopses of different theories of risk as well as paradigms of risk assessment. This section of the chapter only provides a brief review of the major arguments relating to the two dominant social perspectives on risk (see Krimsky and Golding [1992] for further elucidation on these topics). The psychometric paradigm was a broad strategy that used psychophysical scaling and multivariate analysis techniques to produce quantitative representations or “cognitive maps” of risk attitudes and perceptions (Slovic, 1987). Under this paradigm, it is argued that an individual’s assessments of risk are driven by such dimensions as “perceived dread,” “involuntariness,” “immediacy of effect,” “controllability,” and “catastrophic potential” (Marris, Langford, & O’Riordan, 1998; Marris, Langford, Saunderson, & O’Riordan, 1997). This line of study suggests that there is a belief that natural risks are generally more acceptable than manmade risks. Ball, Evans, and Bostrom (1998) noted that in a forum on polio vaccine policy, an advocate for alternative therapy argued that immunity acquired after natural infection is often preferable to aftereffects induced by the vaccine. For some parents, the vividness of some vaccination aftereffects like fever and fussiness in their infants is enough to cause hesitation in their acceptance of the benefits of vaccinations. Many dread paralytic polio and other types of serious adverse events that they believe are caused by immunization, notwithstanding scientific or clinical data that indicate either no evidence or insufficient evidence to establish causation. Furthermore, media’s attribution to the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine (DTwP) as the cause of deafness in a former Miss America has only amplified the fears and imaginability of the alleged risks associated with vaccination (Ball, Evans, & Bostrom, 1998). Progressing from the emphasis on cognitive psychology in examining individual risk perception, the second category of studies has focused on the underlying social and cultural values and contexts associated with risk perception (Rogers, 1997). The cultural paradigm, which originates from the cultural theory developed by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky (1982), argues that the societal arrangements and institutions predispose an individual’s view of risk. Thus, going back to the earlier example of vaccinations, although public health experts and doctors may emphasize the general effectiveness of vaccines in clinical and statistical terms, parents making decisions about vaccination may perceive risks in broader religious, cultural, and personal contexts (Ball, Evans, & Bostrom, 1998). The ways people think about risk have emerged from social and collective interactions, are based on cultural rationalizations, and are embedded in and are manifestations of shared ideology (Earle & Cvetkovich, 1997; Hiskes, 1998; Wildavsky, 1987). In other words, risk perceptions are not a sole byproduct of individual interpretations, but are also influenced by the predominant worldviews or cultural biases in which the individual participates or identifies with such as hierarchy, fatalism, individualism, and egalitarianism. Hierarchists work best in social environments where authority is maintained. Their capability to take risk depends on the presence of authority structures that support these risks. Egalitarians view risk taking as a collective endeavor that does not allow any one sector of the community to take on less of the risk than others. Individualists prefer self-regulation and are more willing to take risks. Fatalists view risk as external to society and as such individuals or communities are not agents who can determine potential hazards. Hence, an “act is culturally rational . . . if it supports one’s way of life” (Wildavsky, 1987, p. 6). It is therefore reasonable to assume that the public’s assessment of health risks, the human body, sexuality, time, life, suffering, death, and disease are not just private experiences. All have an intrinsic social dimension. The health conditions in which they take

228

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

place are often determined as much by cultural practices as by biological and environmental factors. Smoking, for example, though it has been assessed to be highly addictive and deleterious to human health, was generally accepted as part of social life as recently as 25 years ago. Similarly, the high incidence of modern-day scourges like AIDS, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases can only be understood in the context of new lifestyles and diet (Nakajima & Mayor, 1996). Public risk assessment that is based on cultural or communal worldviews leads us to consider the community as a potential determinant of how people make decisions about health risks and impresses upon us the importance of community-based interventions in health programs. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of the relationship between community-based and community-supported interventions is apparent in homeland security issues. If community food and water systems are to remain secure, every member of each community must not only understand and support the idea, but also actively participate. This development of a community culture to focus on community health and safety policies is not new, as will be pointed out. Along with cultural worldviews, risk perception is also determined by other social dimensions such as trust, blame, and accountability (Marris, Langford, & O’Riordan, 1998; Slovic, 1996, 1992). Public acceptance of health risk assessment is contingent on the perception of competence, objectivity, fairness, consistency, and credibility that the public holds for the sources of risk information (Renn & Levine, 1991). Moreover, public acceptance hinges on the extent of trust that the public holds in a regulatory body or industry. It also depends on the public’s experience with how these institutions have handled risk events in the past. For example, mistrust of the medical system by some African Americans has been identified as a barrier to optimal health care and participation in clinical trials, thus the Clinton administration’s formal apology for the Tuskagee Syphilis Study (Ball, Evans, & Bostrom, 1998). Not surprisingly, increasing public mistrust about health claims reflects the overall decline in public trust in scientists and experts, government officials, and most other sources of authority (Greenberg & Williams, 1999). Accordingly, public trust in the opinions expressed by friends, nonexperts, and citizens groups, and even concerned celebrities, seems to be increasing. Data from surveys have shown that confidence in government and industry has diminished considerably during the past 30 years (Peters, Covello, & McCallum, 1997). Whether recent events and the resulting public increase in trust in government represent a short-term change or a long-term credibility gain cannot yet be assessed. However, it seems to stand to reason that unless government agencies restructure their ways of involving citizens in the decision-making process, the gains may be short term. Negotiating Health Risk Assessment: In Search of Workable Forums in the Public Sphere

The ongoing debate on how to define health risks and what constitutes appropriate and acceptable health-risk-management policies can be classified as a contention between two dominant and contrasting types of language: (1) the scientific-managerial language, and, (2) the pluralist or communitarian language (Williams & Matheny, 1995). The current impasse is largely due to the competition between these languages, each one claiming proprietorship in rationalizing and articulating the dynamics of health regulation. Using empirical data from risk-perception studies, advocates for lay participation in health risk assessment and management claim that the scientific-managerial language cannot stand on the assumption that its methods are neutral and, therefore, capable of

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

229

forming an objective basis for health risk assessment and management. They argue that the definition of public interests and the search of optimal policies cannot be left in the hands of scientific or technical experts who focus on health risk assessment based on the accuracy of laboratory research, disease surveillance, and epidemiological studies. They disagree with the notion that absolute standards of rationality can be invoked to assess the response to risk or that a single definition of what counts as rational behavior is achievable (Hiskes, 1998). Risk, from this perspective, is the product of constant interaction, not an immutable characteristic of an inanimate physical system (Hiskes, 1998; Jasanoff, 1993). Thus, it cannot be assumed that science can yield value-free results and information that are totally inseparable from political and social realities as well as the inherent struggles and conflict within the scientific community itself. On the other hand, those who speak on behalf of scientific health risk assessment argue that the pluralist language has failed to consider basic technical or scientific facts, thus defeating its own goals of balancing contending interests, providing due process to all valid public concerns, and devising holistic risk management policies. The public, it has been noted, fail to hold significant stores of scientific and technical knowledge that are useful for making sound decisions on policies (Pierce, Steger, Steel, & Lovrich, 1992). Advocates for scientific health risk assessment contend that risk evaluation that is informed solely by individual interpretation and cultural viewpoints does not constitute a legitimate basis for risk management. Moreover, they consider as quixotic all communitarian efforts in risk assessment and risk management, whereby the perspectives of affected sectors, both scientific and lay, are considered and incorporated into policy. In a society that is increasingly confronted by technically complex policy questions, issues have been raised about the feasibility of nurturing the democratic ideal of public control (Pierce et al., 1992). The complexity of some health risk issues like the AIDS epidemic or cancer may not lend itself to protracted processes of consensus building, and even then the compromises made in such discussions may not yield the best results in the long term. Unfortunately, however, the discourse about health risk has not gone beyond the reiteration of “scientific” and “cultural” positions in risk assessment. So far this debate seems to have only resulted in a strengthening of intractable epistemological positions that points out the inadequacy of one perspective to legitimize risk assessment and management and the weaknesses of the dialogic process itself (Juanillo, 1994). However, there can be no resolution if the discourse continues to run along the disputes of “legitimacy.” In lieu of pursuing the debate as to which perspective can adequately capture the foundation for risk management policy, it might be more beneficial as an initial step to recognize the underlying assumptions about the epistemological moorings of each language. The stubbornness of the expert versus lay rivalry that mars talks about sound policies may be due to the lack of explicit acknowledgment and discussion of these epistemological differences in the first place (Williams & Matheny, 1995). Recognizing that not any one language works toward “objectivity” but instead only provides us with legitimate tools for competing in a political dialogue will give way toward constructing a paradigm of policymaking that goes beyond the usual dichotomies between scientific (objectivist) and lay (relativist) perspectives. The data and insights generated by the studies on risk perception now serve as a useful building block for rationalizing health interventions that involve issue stakeholders in devising programs that benefit them. It is important to note that the emergence of so-called relativist perspectives in health risk evaluation is not just an offshoot of empirical research in the social sciences. The notion of public involvement in health risk assessment is also very much a product of the times. Increased access to information facilitated by new information and communication

230

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

technologies has also enhanced the public’s awareness of the issues that affect their daily lives. As Thomas (1995) argued, “broader access (to information) undermines the centralized control of information that was a principal basis for centralized decision making” (p. 6). Consequently, for some sectors of the public, increased awareness has led to demands for involvement in forming decisions on how to resolve these issues (Thomas, 1995). The NRC of the National Academy of Sciences, in a seminal report on risk (Stern & Fineberg, 1996), suggested the need to integrate scientific analysis with collective and public deliberation in considering issues pertaining to risk. In contrast to the usual “decide-announce-defend” approach often employed by governmental agencies, the NRC has recommended integrating science-based risk assessment with formal and informal processes for collectively considering or discussing issues by a range of interested and affected issue stakeholders (Chess, 2000; Stern & Fineberg, 1996). Indeed, Chess (2000) contended that the discourse has moved from whether there should be public participation in health risk assessment and management, toward the imperative of “getting the right participation” and “getting the participation right.” Thus, worth pursuing are more pragmatic questions such as: (1) What processes can guarantee all-inclusive and open discussion of important, multiple, and possibly irreconcilable perspectives as well as legitimate concerns? (2) What are the means by which affected individuals or interest groups are able to acquire, process, and apply relevant information so that they can effectively participate in the discussion of complex issues relating to health risk? Research literature has yielded a number of insights that have proven useful in addressing questions on the processes and forums for public participation. In terms of participatory forums, some popular options have included: (1) key contacts, (2) public meetings, (3) advisory committees or councils, (4) citizen surveys, (5) citizen contacts, (6) citizen juries, and (7) negotiation and mediation (Chess, 2000; Thomas, 1995). Other more intense mechanisms have been developed, but have not been applied to risk or health situations. (See, for example, Greenwood & Levin, 1998; Maestro-Scherer & Rich, 2001b; Rich, Scherer, Maestro-Scherer, & Michell-Nunn, 2002). It has been noted, however, that a specific mechanism for participation does not, in or by itself, determine the outcome of a participatory effort. The timing and context of the participatory activity might be a better predictor of the outcome. Successful outcomes are more likely to happen when there is public involvement and consultation in the early stages of decision making such as during problem identification. Participatory mechanisms must be used in consonance with providing time for more interaction, information exchange, deliberation, and the development of mutual understanding among the diverse parties involved. Moreover, other contextual factors such as the history of the issue, cultural representations of the human body and disease, the level of conflict involved, and the nature of the health-risk dispute may also influence the outcome of the participatory activity, and consequently, the public’s approach to action, prevention, and treatment (Chess, 2000; Nakajima & Mayor, 1996). Three Cases of Community Involvement in Health Risk Assessment and Management: Actualizing the Ideal

A number of health programs have gained significant successes by increasing public participation and involvement in health risk assessment and management. A commonly described example is Finland’s North Karelia project on heart disease prevention in the 1980s, which was initiated and supported by the community (Schwab & Syme, 1997). Citizens petitioned for the intervention upon learning that their coronary heart disease mortality rate was the highest in the world.

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

231

Focus on Kids. Another example is “Focus on Kids,” an intervention and research project targeting low-income, urban, African American preadolescents and adolescents. The project is built on the foundations of community partnership with a community advisory board (Galbraith & Ricardo, 1996). With the long-term goal of reducing HIV risk behaviors, the Focus on Kids project formulated varying short-term goals depending on the needs expressed by the community and incorporated community and family values, social influences, decision making, and interaction skills to address issues of sexual behavior, substance use, and drug trafficking (Galbraith & Ricardo, 1996). Community inputs were fused with initial project plans as community residents became involved in the project as “community ethnographers” and consultants, members of the community advisory board, and a youth board, and participants in focus group discussions. Overall, community members helped in the identification and recruitment of youth to take part in the project as well as in ensuring that the interventions were relevant in terms of timing, language, and culture. Thus, by grounding the project in the cultural constructs of the community and engendering public participation in the design and delivery of health interventions, the project team was able to reach a large number of youth, especially those at risk, and produce significantly increased rates of condom use and condom-use intention among the target groups (Galbraith & Ricardo, 1996). The PACE Project. PACE (Preventing Agricultural Chemical Exposure Among North Carolina Farm workers), a participatory health project involving migrant and seasonal farm workers—a poor and medically underserved population—addresses health concerns surrounding occupational exposure to agricultural chemicals (Arcury, Austin, Quandt, & Saavedra, 1999). The project engages a variety of segments of the farmworker community through a number of interactions such as establishing full partnership with the North Carolina Farmworkers’ Project (NCFP), a small, grassroots farmworker organization, a project advisory committee, community forums, public presentations, and formative research. PACE’s partnership with NCFP has resulted in the production of more practical and culturally appropriate training packages on pesticide safety and the development of the components of intervention. NCFP has also become, in some instances, the presenters of the interventions to farmworkers. The advisory committee for PACE brings together members of the farm groups (farmers and farmworkers) and the services group (health care workers and Cooperative Extension Educators). Through this forum, farmworkers are able to express their concerns and interact with farmers and provide critical evaluation of the feasibility and cultural appropriateness of the intervention. Similarly, the community farmworker forums, project presentations, and formative data collection represent other mechanisms used to generate opportunities for consultation, exchange of opinions, and sharing of experiences with and beliefs about agricultural chemicals. For the PACE project, one significant outcome of these participatory forums is that it has helped to bring together scientific and community perspectives and concerns. Far from diluting science, the involvement of affected stakeholders in health risk assessment has evidently resulted in even better science. As Arcury et al. (1999) argued, the community-expert partnership leads researchers/experts to valuable information that would otherwise be unavailable for ensuring that the interventions may be fully responsive to community needs and concerns. In this kind of arrangement, interventions are tailored to meet communities on the communities’ own terms. Community Involvement in HIV/AIDS Prevention. Nothing could be more formidable in scope on matters of community participation in health risk management than the issue of HIV/AIDS in Orange County, California. As the fifth most populous

232

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

county in the United States, Orange County is also marked by increasing ethnic diversity and a growing and diversified population affected by HIV/AIDS. Institutionalized community participation and inclusive planning strategies characterized the efforts of Orange County in fusing locally developed knowledge into public policy on HIV/AIDS education and prevention (Valdisseri, Aultman, & Curran, 1995 as cited by Takahashi & Smutny, 1998). These attempts acquired added significance in the light of the complexity of AIDS as a disease and the stigma that the general public attaches to HIV/AIDS. The inclusionary planning process became unique in that it centered not only on affected stakeholders (i.e., persons living with HIV/AIDS), but also on individuals and groups who were unwilling to participate in the prevention efforts for social and emotional reasons. It also addressed issues of trust and diverse cultural perspectives that were far more difficult to resolve than problems related to conventional information dissemination programs and provision of health services. Given this multidimensional dynamic, community planning in Orange County had to ensure that participants could “articulate for and have expertise in understanding and addressing the specific HIV prevention needs of the populations they represent” (Orange County HIV Prevention Planning Committee, 1995 as cited by Takahashi & Smutny, 1998). The outcome of this process was the creation of the HIV Prevention Planning Committee composed of 17 committee members representing the following groups: (1) gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals, (2) persons of color, (3) substance abusers, (4) youth, and (5) women. In addition, there were representatives from the County’s Health Care Agency, Department of Education, various community-based organizations providing HIV/AIDS services, and the University of California—Irvine. Expectedly there were problems attendant to any experimentation with collectivity. Some members found it difficult at first to break from their intrinsic ties to the populations they represented, hence, slowing down the process of establishing a collective identity. Cynicism continued to be expressed about the power and influence of members representing the municipal agencies, and that there was no equal power in decision making. Overall, however, the fusion of experts with community representatives in the county committee enabled Orange County to formulate a plan particularly in regard to resource allocation. It broke down bureaucratized procedures and engendered information exchange and networking. Advocacy on the part of community-based organizations gave way to a consensual technical process of following a set of criteria to select target populations for the program (Takahashi & Smutny, 1998). Community Involvement in Health Risk Management: Balancing Science, Institutional Trust, and Public Choice

The three cases mentioned in the preceding section illustrate the value of public or community involvement in health risk management. The need to put a premium on public involvement in the risk management process acquires added urgency in the context of the many health-related decisions and choices that modern societies have to make. Indeed, many of the new health risks faced today reflect the consequences of new human interventions in natural processes such as those involving food production and processing, transplants using animal organs, and biotechnology. Robert May (2001) contended that as a result of medical advances that have lengthened life expectancy, the public has also now regarded a longer and healthier life as a basic right and the paths to better health as a public choice. Ironically, with the vast opportunities that medical science has to offer, society has yet to keep pace by doing a better job of defining what kind of world it wants. Whereas

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

233

science continues to assert its voice in terms of “factual clarification of possibilities and constraints” (May, 2001, p. 891), the answers to some of the other substantial questions concerning values and contexts will have to be debated via forums that can accommodate complexities and varied viewpoints. Whereas it is a valid concern for health experts that popular beliefs, biases, and opinions may sway policymakers into enacting a questionable regulation, similar concerns can be raised about the biases that are brought by health practitioners into health risk assessment. Ong (1998) noted that screening mammograms can detect breast cancer in some women but also place a large group of women at risk of harm from radiation exposure. He adds that “women who have false positive results are subjected to unnecessary tests and interventions, and may have substantial anxiety and psychological morbidity” (p. 1229). He suggested that public participation, in this context, is pivotal in ascertaining the cost-effectiveness and utility of medical diagnosis and treatment. Involving communities in the early stages of health risk assessment, management, and communication also works toward maintaining a balance between diverse perspectives on health. This concept becomes more meaningful as health is viewed as “a state of well-being and the capability to function in the face of changing circumstances” rather than just the absence of disease (Public Health Reports, 1997, p. 183). Based on a study by the Insitute of Medicine’s Division of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, community-based coalitions can become vital players in promoting collaboration in order to achieve more broadly defined health improvement goals for the community. Specifically, such coalitions can help “provide broad assessments, set priorities, and create a more relevant community profile of local demographic and socio-economic characteristics, health status, and health risks.” Moreover, they can also conduct their own health monitoring and formulate the health indicators that are appropriate to the locality (Public Health Reports, 1997, p. 183). The concept of community participation in health risk management recognizes the interdependence of individuals and communities in solving health problems in a more holistic approach. Providing opportunities for community members to work together in community-based groups or in partnerships empowers them to make appropriate decisions on such questions as the safety of drinking water, how to choose treatment regimens for prostate and breast cancer, and enabling action to prevent disease and cancer (Ratzan, 1999). The concept of community participation in health risk decision making and management is not free from the tension that accompanies democratic governance. The tug-of-war between the beliefs and principles of the technical experts and those of the public is to be expected. However, such tension, if seen from a participatory framework, is more productive in terms of the quality and sustainability of the decisions and actions that result from consultation and negotiation. This is mainly because community participation affirms the basic democratic and political ethic and vision as espoused by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s vision places premium on local jurisdictions with active citizen involvement in all aspects of governance, such that “any citizen can attend, when called on, and act in person” (Mason, 1956, p. 372; Koontz, 1999, p. 442). Furthermore, citizen involvement increases government accountability. Evidently, there is no one-size-fits-all community involvement technique that can satisfy all affected stakeholders and perhaps it is best that there is no single modality of community participation. As a process that is essentially interactive, it does not adhere to a specific formula in order to arrive at the end result. As Plein, Green, and Williams (1998) observed, such a process will have “different starting points and different paths for different participating elements” (p. 516). Indeed, the “nuts-and-bolts of co-partnerships”

234

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

(Pritikin, 1998, p. 51) pose difficult questions. As the Orange County community planning experience on HIV/AIDS indicates, community participation can be problematical and may continue to raise questions, if not cynicism (Takahashi & Smutny, 1998). On one hand, while community participation has engendered a collaborative atmosphere among affected individuals and community groups in Orange County, there are issues about participation as serving to legitimize existing institutional structures and practices (Takahashi & Smutny, 1998). Issues such as these call for examining further the various participation tools and processes and how they function in terms of providing a sphere for equitable discourse about health risks and the management of risks. Community involvement takes many forms and the range of techniques to enhance community participation in health services increases as innovations continue to grow. Even as there have been attempts to characterize forms of involvement or participation, there is still no rigorously or generally accepted classification scheme to efficiently categorize the numerous participative approaches and techniques that are currently practiced (Chess, 2000). Community involvement as a process of arriving at communal decisions on risk management is a social and organic process running through a continuum that can be characterized as passive to active, contractual to collegiate, token participation to empowerment (Arcury et al., 1999; Tong & Lu, 1999). As Tong and Lu (1999) further qualify, the process would depend on such factors as how the agency uses the form of participation, the organizational and administrative context, the issues and individuals involved, levels of knowledge, local perceptions and beliefs, as well as issues involving leadership, costs of interventions, degree of collaboration, and so on. What is important is not to lose sight of the end goal, which is to provide an arena for participants to gain insights, reflect on the issues, and provide better informed recommendations or decisions. This notion of a more flexible arena for community involvement or participation is what the proponents of Healthy Communities have qualified as a “safe civic space” for productive and meaningful deliberation rather than engaging stakeholders in issue-specific debates. This space for deliberation allows stakeholders to view community challenges holistically, focus on root causes, create norms of shared health values and culture, encourage beneficial approaches, and form policies that reflect shared values and norms (O’Connor & Gates, 2000). Thus, community involvement in health risk management will do well to utilize a combination of interactive techniques to suitably engage different types of stakeholders. At the core of these activities is the conscious attempt to break down barriers between the so-called experts/scientists and those members of the community who need to decide what policies are best suited to manage health risks locally. In the long term, these multiinteractions provide involved and affected parties a better appreciation of the complexities of a health problem and the entangled social dynamics accompanying problem resolution. Community involvement does not guarantee reduced tensions between community-based stakeholders and agency-based technical experts. Neither should community participation be construed as a means to overthrow or downgrade the contributions of science as a way of knowing about risk. Some of the strongest arguments for community participation come from Greenwood and Levin (1998) who noted that involvement, control, and capacity building are accomplished through a self-informing generation of systematic and organized knowledge. In doing so, they noted that the method aims to increase the ability of the involved community to more effectively control their own destinies and to continue improving their capacity to do so (Greenwood & Levin, 1998). The approach this builds on suggests that those who will be most affected by change should be intimately involved in determining the course

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

235

and substance of change. Maestro-Scherer and Rich (2001) noted that another outcome that must not be trivialized is the impact on group members of “discovering” new ways of understanding. This self-discovery of information may be one of the more powerful motivating influences on behavior, but has been largely neglected by researchers, especially in the health and risk fields. Community participation should be seen as a means of veering away from the polarizing dichotomies of knowing about risk (i.e., “objective risks” and “subjective” risks), in order to move toward a more inclusive and integral consideration of risk viewpoints. Carefully planned community involvement activities may help all stakeholders reduce conflicting perspectives and facilitate the formation of a common resolution for a health problem. Employing community involvement mechanisms in risk assessment and risk management enables the affected stakeholders to take responsibility for the quality of their participation, the ideas they share, and the decisions they eventually make for their own health and for the community. Whereas practical considerations prevent all who will be impacted from participating, it seems reasonable to assume that a full range of perspectives of those affected must be represented (Rich & Maestro-Scherer, 2001a). In addition to issues of inclusion, there is a wide range of other unstudied challenges to participation strategies. Well-designed and -implemented participation strategies are expensive, time consuming, and complex. As a result, most participation activities become “one-time” events, and questions of sustainability are ignored. Other strategies result in questions of exploitation of participants or are used to avoid conflict. In other cases, participation is seen as threatening on behalf of one or more parties and is regarded as a means of power shifting (Rich & Maestro-Scherer, 2001a). All of these issues are significant to the future of participation and largely remain unexplored by researchers. Going beyond these affirmations of the potential benefits of community participation in health risk management and communication, it is important to remember that, at the end of the day, evidence is needed to show what works for and what mitigates against attaining the goal of inclusion and improved health behaviors. REFERENCES Arcury, T., Austin, C., Quandt, S., & Saavedra, R. (1999). Enhancing community participation in intervention research: Farm workers and agricultural chemicals in North Carolina. Health Education and Behavior, 26, 563–578. Aspinwall, L. (1999). Persuasion for the purpose of cancer risk reduction: Understanding responses to risk communication. Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs, 15, 88–93. Ball, L., Evans, G., & Bostrom, A. (1998). Risky business: Challenges in vaccine risk communication. Pediatrics, 101, 453–458. Basen-Engquist, K., & Parcel, G. (1992). Attitudes, norms and self-efficacy: A model of adolescents’ HIV-related sexual risk behavior. Health Education Quarterly, 19, 263–277. Bennett, P. (1999). Understanding responses to risk: Some basic findings. In P. Bennett and K. Calman (Eds.), Risk communication and public health (pp. 4–19). New York: Oxford University Press. Borzekowski, D., Flora, J., Feighery, E., & Schooler, C. (1999). The perceived influence of cigarette advertisements and smoking susceptibility among seventh graders. Journal of Health Communication, 4, 105–118. Bovasso, G. (1996). A network analysis of social contagion processes in an organizational intervention. Human Relations, 49, 1419–1435.

236

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

Brown, W. (1991). An AIDS prevention campaign. American Behavioral Scientist, 34, 666– 678. Brunner, R. D., & Ascher, W. (1992). Science and social responsibility. Policy Sciences, 25, 295–331. Chess, C. (2000). Improving public participation in solving environmental health problems. Journal of Environmental Health, 63, 24–27. Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. (1982). Risk and culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Earle, T., & Cvetkovich, G. (1997). Culture, cosmopolitanism, and risk management. Risk Analysis, 17, 55–65. Eden, S. (1996). Public participation in environmental policy: Considering scientific, counterscientific, and non-scientific contributions. Public Understanding of Science, 5, 183–204. Einsiedel, E., & Thorne, B. (1999). Public responses to uncertainty. In S. Friedman, S. Dunwoody, & C. Rogers (Eds.), Communicating uncertainty (pp. 43–57). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fessenden-Raden, J., Fitchen, J. M., & Heath, J. S. (1987). Providing risk information in communities: Factors influencing what is heard and accepted. Science, Technology and Human Values, 12, 94–101. Fischhoff, B. (1995). Risk perception and communication unplugged: Twenty years of process. Risk Analysis, 15, 137–145. Friedman, S., Dunwoody, S., & Rogers, C. (Eds.). (1986). Scientists and journalists. New York: The Free Press. Galbraith, J., & Ricardo, I. (1996). Challenges and rewards of involving community in research: An overview of the “Focus in Kids” HIV risk reduction program. Health Education Quarterly, 23, 383–394. Greenberg, M., & Williams, B. (1999). Geographical dimensions and correlates of trust. Risk Analysis, 19, 159–169. Greenwood, D. J., & Levin, M. (1998). Introduction to action research: Social research for social change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hiskes, R. (1998). Hazardous liaisons: Risk, power, and politics in the liberal state. Policy Studies Journal, 26, 257–273. Jardine, C., & Hrudey, S. (1997). Mixed messages in risk communication. Risk Analysis, 17, 489–497. Jasanoff, S. (1993). Bridging the two cultures of risk analysis. Risk Analysis, 13, 123–128. Johnson, B., & Slovic, P. (1995). Presenting uncertainty in health risk assessment: Initial studies of its effects on risk perception and trust. Risk Analysis, 15, 485–494. Juanillo, N. K. (1994). Recasting risk and scientific discourse: Dialectical message designs on food safety issues. (Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1994). Archives Thesis, 1994 J917. Kasperson, R. E. (1986). Six propositions on public participation and their relevance for risk communication. Risk Analysis, 6, 275–281. Kasperson, R., Renn, O., Slovic, P., Brown, H., Emel, J., Goble, R., Kasperson, J., & Ratick, S. (1988). The social amplification of risk: A conceptual framework. Risk Analysis, 8, 177–187. Kelly, R., Zyzanski, S., & Alemagno, S. (1991). Prediction of motivation and behavior change following health promotion: Role of health beliefs, social support, and self-efficacy. Social Science Medicine, 32, 311–320. Koontz, T. (1999). Citizen participation: Conflicting interests in state and national agency policy making. The Social Science Journal, 36, 441–458.

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

237

Krimsky, S., & Golding, D. (1992). Social theories of risk. Westport, CT: Praeger. Lee, C. (1998). Alternatives to cognition: A new look at explaining human social behavior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Leventhal, H., Kelly, K., & Leventhal, E. (1999). Population risk, actual risk, perceived risk, and cancer control: A discussion. Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs, 25, 81–84. Lewin, K. (1948). Resolving social conflicts: Selected papers on group dynamics. New York: Harper. Maestro-Scherer, J., & Rich, R. (2001). Zelf-informerende organisatieverandering. De evolutie van een methode ter bevordering van de participatie in data-collectie, analyse enactieplanning. Tijdschrift voor Arbeid en Participatie, 23, 48–62. Marris, C., Langford, I., & O’Riordan, T. (1998). A quantitative test of the cultural theory of risk perceptions: Comparison with the psychometric paradigm. Risk Analysis, 18, 635– 647. Marris, C., Langford, I., Saunderson, T., & O’Riordan, T. (1997). Exploring the “psychometric paradigm”: Comparisons between aggregate and individual analyses. Risk Analysis, 17, 303–312. Mason, A. T. (1956). Free government in the making (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. May, R. (2001). Risk and uncertainty. Nature, 411, 891. Nakajima, H., & Mayor, F. (1996). Culture and health. World Health, 49, 3. National Research Council (NRC). (1989). Improving risk communication. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Nelkin, D. (1987). Selling science. New York: W. H. Freeman. O’Connor, D., & Gates, C. (2000). Toward a healthy democracy. Public Health Reports, March–June. Ohanian, E., Moore, J., Fowle, J., Omenn, G., Lewis, S., Gray, G., & North, D. (1997). Risk characterization: A bridge to informed decision making. Fundamental and Applied Toxicology, 39, 81–87. Ong, G. J. (1998, Oct. 31). The public has a role in translating evidence into practice (Commentary). British Medical Journal, 1229. Orlandi, M. (1996). The challenge of changing health-related behavior. Preventive Medicine, 25, 51–53. Otway, H. (1987). Experts, risk communication and democracy. Risk Analysis, 7, 125–129. Otway, H., & Thomas, K. (1982). Reflections on risk perception and policy. Risk Analysis, 2, 69–82. Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. Toronto: Collier-Macmillan Canada. Peters, R., Covello, V., & McCallum, D. (1997). The determinants of trust and credibility in environmental risk communication: An empirical study. Risk Analysis, 17, 43–54. Pierce, J., Steger, M., Steel, B., & Lovrich, N. (1992). Citizens, political communication, and interest groups. Westport, CT: Praeger. Plein, L. C., Green, K., & Williams, D. (1998). Organic planning: A new approach to public participation in local governance. The Social Science Journal, 35, 509–523. Plough, A., & Krimsky, S. (1987). The emergence of risk communication studies: Social and political context. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 12, 4–10. Pritikin, T. (1998). Citizen’s view: The nuts and bolts of co-partnerships. Human Ecology Review, 5, 51–53. Public Health Reports. (1997, May–June). Community health requires improved partnerships. Public Health Reports, 183.

238

SCHERER AND JUANILLO

Ratzan, S. (1999). Cancer risk communications: What we know and what we need to learn. Vital Speeches, 65, 267. Renn, O. (1998). The role of risk communication and public dialogue for improving risk management. Risk Decision and Policy, 3, 5–30. Renn, O., & Levine, D. (1991). Credibility and trust in risk communication. In R. E. Kasperson & P. M. Stallen (Eds.), Communicating risks to the public: International perspectives, (pp. 175–218). Amsterdam: Kluwer. Rich, R., & Maestro-Scherer, J. (2001a). Self-informing organizational change: A participatory method of data collection, analysis and action planning. Revue internationale de Psychosociologie, 7, 207–222. Rich, R., & Maestro-Scherer, J. (2001b, March). High tech for high touch: A participatory approach to collaborative data collection, processing and analysis. Proceedings of International Conference on Actuality of Action Research (32) (pp. 81–87). Le Centre International de Recherch´e, Formation et Intervention Psychosociologique (CIRFIP). Rich, R., Scherer, C., Maestro-Scherer, J., and Michell-Nunn, S. (2002). Technology in organizational learning: Using high tech for high touch. Educational Technology and Society, 5, 2. Rogers, G. (1997). The dynamics of risk perception: How does perceived risk respond to risk events. Risk Analysis, 17, 745–757. Rothman, A., & Kiviniemi, M. (1999). Treating people with information: An analysis and review of approaches to communicating health risk information. Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs, 25, 44–51. Rowan, F. (1996). The high stakes of risk communication. Preventive Medicine, 25, 26–29. Scherer, C. (2000). Community network linkages during a health controversy. Journal of Public Health Management Practice, 6, 21–29. Schwab, M., & Syme, L. (1997). On paradigms, community participation, and the future of public health. American Journal of Public Health, 87, 20–49. Slovic, P. (1987). Perception of risk. Science, 236, 280–285. Slovic, P. (1992). Perception of risk: Reflections on the psychometric paradigm. In S. Krimsky & D. Golding (Eds.), Social theories of risk (pp. 117–152). Westport, CT: Praeger. Slovic, P. (1996). Trust, emotion, sex, politics, and science: Surveying the risk assessment battlefield. In M. Bazerman, D. Messick, A. Tenbrunsel, & K. Wade-Benzoni (Eds.), Psychological perspectives to environment and ethics in management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., & Lichtenstein, S. (1980). Facts versus fears: Understanding perceived risk. In R. Schwing & W. A. Albers Jr. (Eds.), Societal risk assessment: How safe is safe enough? New York: Plenum. Stern, P. C., & Fineberg, H. V. (Eds.). (1996). Understanding risk: Informing decisions in a democratic society. Washington, DC: National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy Press. Strobino, D., Keane, V., Holt, E., Hughart, N., & Bernard, G. (1996). Parental attitudes do not explain underimmunization. Pediatrics, 98, 1076–1083. Takahashi, L., & Smutny, G. (1998). Community planning for HIV/AIDS prevention in Orange County, California. Journal of the American Planning Association, 64, 441–457. Thomas, J. C. (1995). Public participation in public decisions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Tinker, T. L. (1996). Recommendations to improve health risk communication: Lessons learned from the U.S. Public Health Service. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 197–217. Tong, S., & Lu, Y. (1999). Major issues in the environmental health decision-making process. Journal of Environmental Health, 62, 33–35.

11. COMMUNITY HEALTH RISK MANAGEMENT

239

Valdisseri, R., Aultman, T., & Curran, J. (1995). Community planning: A national strategy to improve HIV prevention programs. Journal of Community Health, 20, 87–100. Welsh, I. (1995). Reflexivity and the globalization of environmental politics. Bristol: Centre for Social and Economic Research, University of the West of England. Wildavsky, A. (1987). Choosing preferences by constructing institutions: A cultural theory of preference formation. American Political Science Review, 81, 3–21. Williams, B., & Matheny, A. (1995). Democracy, dialogue, and environmental disputes. New Haven: Yale University Press.

12 Working along the Margins: Developing Community-Based Strategies for Communicating about Health with Marginalized Groups Leigh Arden Ford Western Michigan University

Gust A. Yep San Francisco State University The complexities of health-related communication research and practice in community and with community are the foci of this chapter. As scholars and members of multiple communities, some marginalized and some not, we are committed to the ideology and principles of community-based health communication scholarship that we will describe in these pages. Because of these commitments, we begin with a narrative describing a community-based health communication strategy that fell short of these commitments. Our purpose in this narrative of failure is not to discourage community-based collaborative scholarship. Rather, we hope it illustrates how readily and unconsciously privilege may be enacted and marginalization experienced in such efforts. While we each have stories to tell, one of Leigh’s experiences with hantavirus prevention education in the U.S.-Mexico border region (USMBR) follows. In the summer 1993, several sudden deaths from severe lung infections among otherwise healthy adults were reported in the southwestern United States. Led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), teams of research scientists soon identified the infection as hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), caused by one of the several hantaviruses in the world.1 With the identification of the virus (now named Sin nombre), the CDC undertook a focused effort to further scientific research on the transmission 1 This particular hantavirus is spread to humans by infected rodents, specifically deer mice and cotton rats in the southwestern United States. When fresh or dried rodent urine or feces sheds the virus it becomes airborne. The aerosolized virus then can be inhaled by the human host and a lung infection ensues (CDC, 1994). While HPS is a serious public health threat because it is difficult to diagnose, has no known cure, and is fatal in approximately half the cases, it is also preventable through the enactment of simple, relatively inexpensive measures.

241

242

FORD AND YEP

and treatment of the disease and also supported an extraordinary effort to communicate information about this infectious disease and its prevention to the public. The hantavirus research team working in the USMBR had two goals: first, to conduct seroprevalence screening, i.e., testing blood for prior hantaviral exposure, and second, to develop communication strategies for the dissemination of information about emerging infectious diseases to Spanish-speaking rural, border, and migrant communities. In these efforts, we worked collaboratively with public health personnel, community leaders, and local community health workers. We participated in community health fairs, visited local schools, attended meetings of local agencies and community groups working to solve social, economic, and health problems on the border, and listened to and learned from the community. Reaching migrant farmworkers proved a challenge but we were able to develop at least one outreach strategy we hoped would be effective. One early morning the team traveled with the New Mexico Department of Health mobile medical unit to the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso border. On the Texas side of one border crossing migrant day laborers waited in the predawn hours for contractors who transported them to the fields of southern New Mexico. At 3 A.M. we met a volunteer farm labor organizer, a local female who participated as our liaison to this community on this and other occasions. We set up a table outside the medical van and brought out our Spanish-language HPS information materials, a coffeepot, and, as an afterthought, a basket filled with condoms. This last-minute gesture not only proved to be culturally insensitive but also may have inadvertently undermined the community education goal of the trip. Few men approached the table that morning, despite the persuasive efforts of the labor organizer and one Spanish-speaking male on the team. As a few farmworkers drank the proffered cups of coffee, the Spanish-speaking team members attempted to enlist their participation in the blood draw while simultaneously giving instruction about HPS prevention and offering the free condoms. Most men declined participation, refusing the condoms as well. As dawn approached and most of the vans had departed, our team discussed our disappointment. In these reflective moments, two things became clear. First, the blood draw, the condoms, and the talk about viruses likely conflated hantavirus and HIV for the farmworkers and may have resulted in misinformation and further misunderstanding of both viruses. Second, the migrant workers there were all Hispanic males with minimal education while our team was mostly female, mostly Anglo, middle class, and highly educated. Despite our efforts to collaborate with the community, it became clear to us that we had confronted our own privilege as a boundary to this educational effort in only limited ways prior to the experiences of that morning. (See Crabtree & Ford, 1998, for a description of the project and the dilemmas encountered.) Border crossings (Giroux, 1992), literally and figuratively, define community-based health communication work. Community health promotion researchers and practitioners embrace culture as the central organizing theme in shaping identity, values, and histories and engage differences such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation as boundaries to be crossed within social interaction (Airhihenbuwa, 1995). As a consequence, the tensions between power and powerlessness, privilege and marginalization, participation and resistance characterize this scholarship and challenge its enactment. Despite (and perhaps because of) these challenges, we celebrate the boundary-spanning nature of community-based health communication scholarship in this chapter. Our first goal is to present theory, research, and practice in this area to date. We begin with a discussion of the complexities of the social (cultural), economic, and political context for marginalized populations and then explicate notions of community, culture, and

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

243

communication in community-based health promotion. We then review representative research on community-based strategies for communicating with marginalized populations about health, using an analytical structure focused on the forms of community participation and empowerment. Our second goal is to provide a rationale for centralizing marginalized communities in our research, theory, and practice in the new century. We conclude with a reflection on contradictions emergent and inherent in community-based scholarship and their implications for research and practice. THE SOCIO-CULTURAL ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF MARGINALIZED POPULATIONS

Although there are different perspectives on marginalization (e.g., Amaro & Raj, 2000; Crewe, 1997; Ferguson, 1990; Frye, 2001; Marshall & McKeon, 1996; Mokros & Deetz, 1996; Ray, 1996; Tucker, 1990; Yep, 1998), it is clear that there are numerous disenfranchised individuals, social groups, and communities in U.S. American society. Marginalization, according to Tucker (1990), is that complex and disputatious process by means of which certain people and ideas are privileged over others at any given time . . . [and] the process by which, through shifts in position, any given group can be ignored, trivialized, rendered invisible and unheard, perceived as inconsequential, de-authorized, “other,” or threatening, while others are valorized. (p. 7)

In short, this process of marginalization produces individuals, social groups, and communities that are denied full privileges, rights, access, and power within the existing political system and social structure (Ray, 1996). Marginalization exists in an ongoing dialectical tension with an invisible center (Ferguson, 1990). The center or “mythical norm” is “defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” (Lorde, 1990, p. 282). In other words, social and cultural (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, physical appearance, age, ability, etc.) and economic factors (e.g., financial security, socioeconomic status, etc.) are used as markers to disenfranchise individuals and groups. Although these factors marginalize people in different ways, to different degrees, with different material and psychological consequences, Ray (1996) reminds us that we live in a world in which everyone can be affected in some way, “It may happen to us or to someone we care about. With a roll of the die, with great abruptness, anyone can become ‘them’” (pp. xv–xvi). In this section, we examine the contexts associated with marginalization and disenfranchisement of individuals and social groups. For purposes of discussion, we examine social, cultural, economic, and political contexts under two separate headings. However, we recognize that such contexts operate interdependently in complex and intersecting ways. For example, a poor European American, middle-aged, female, drug-using commercial sex worker operates in a society that marginalizes and attempts to silence her in multiple ways—socially, materially, politically, discursively. Through these intersecting systems of marginalization and oppression, her experience represents a nonsummative and simultaneous combination of all social, cultural, economic, and political factors. The Social, Cultural, and Economic Context

The unequal distribution of wealth, health, and life opportunities is heavily influenced by the interaction of social, cultural and economic as well as political factors (Minkler,

244

FORD AND YEP

Wallace, & MacDonald, 1994/1995). Individuals and groups that do not conform to the mythical norm, or “the standards of normality” in society, are marginalized and devalued, and their health concerns are treated differently than those in the dominant culture. Marginalization can be based on gender (Amaro & Raj, 2000; Bauer, Rodriguez, Quiroga, & Flores-Ortiz, 2000; Cline & McKenzie, 1996; Gutierrez & Lewis, 1997; Zambrana, 1996), race and ethnicity (Airhihenbuwa, 1995; Gutierrez & Lewis, 1997; Huerta & Macario, 1999; Zambrana, 1996), social class (Marshall & Mc Keon, 1996; Zambrana, 1996), disability (Braithwaite, 1996; Johnson & Albrecht, 1996), and sexuality (Corey, 1996; Elwood, 1999; Wohlfeiler, 1997; Yep & Pietri, 1999), among others. These marginalization markers can operate alone (e.g., disenfranchisement based on social class) or, more frequently, in combination with other markers (e.g., disenfranchisement based on social class, gender, and ethnicity). In summary, what is treated or untreated, defined or undefined, as a health or social issue is delineated by the dynamics of gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality (Minkler, 1997; Zambrana, 1996). The social, cultural, and economic context affects the individual’s daily experiences and his or her relationship to the larger social system including health care. For example, research on abused Latina and Asian women identifies a number of interpersonal, sociocultural, and systemic factors influencing their health and well-being including feelings of shame, fear of retaliation by the abuser, feelings of family loyalty, language barriers, prohibitive health care costs, medical providers’ cultural insensitivity, and inaccessible health care services like long waiting periods, among others (Bauer & Rodriguez, 1995; Bauer et al., 2000; Rodriguez, Quiroga, & Bauer, 1996). Bauer and associates (2000) found that traditional gender roles in the family influenced the women’s perceptions of abuse and their willingness to seek professional help. Both Latina and Asian participants in their study indicated their need to maintain loyalty to their families and to keep their family units intact while the Asian women reported a tremendous sense of shame and fear of ostracism. Some of the Latinas experienced discrimination and cultural insensitivity from their medical providers. Similarly, research on women living in poverty indicates that they are in poorer health than more affluent individuals (Marshall & McKeon, 1996; Zambrana, 1996). Access and availability of health care and underutilization of existing health care services are critical factors contributing to the poor health status of women living in poverty. Marshall and McKeon (1996) identified several factors leading to underutilization of health services. First, poor women, living with limited financial resources, are forced to focus on more immediate needs like food and shelter rather than on health care. Second, accessibility and availability of health services, including location and availability of appointments, transportation, and child care services, and other obstacles erected by the health care establishment, become additional barriers to seeking health care. Marshall and McKeon also reported that women living in poverty are generally less knowledgeable about health and illness, disease symptoms and warning signs, and preventive health practices. In summary, the social, cultural, and economic context of marginalized individuals and social groups creates unfriendly conditions for maintaining good health. In many ways, the health care system continues to reproduce and reflect other systems of inequality in U.S. American society today (Minkler, 1997). The Political Context

Politics is “the complex constellation of social relations among individuals” and “not solely an examination of the policy process” (Elwood, 1999, p. 5). Undoubtedly, relationships

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

245

among individuals, groups, communities, and institutions such as health care are political. Lack of political voice, representation, and legal protection is common among marginalized individuals and communities (Bauer et al., 2000; Diaz, 1998; Diaz-Cotto, 1991; hooks, 1990; Yep & Pietri, 1999). For example, Diaz-Cotto (1991) observed that definitions of criminality and selective enforcement of offenses by the criminal justice system place working-class white and minority women in the lowest strata of society. Yep and Pietri (1999) found that, in addition to lacking political voice and representation, transgenders are disregarded and pathologized by the health care establishment in terms of biomedical and psychological research and provision and delivery of health care services. Bauer and associates (2000) identified fear of deportation and lack of legal protection as critical barriers for reporting spousal abuse and seeking health services among Latina and Asian undocumented immigrant women. In short, the political context also provides an inhospitable environment for marginalized populations. Such an environment hinders maintenance of optimal health and healthseeking behaviors by these individuals and communities. Taken together, the social, cultural, economic, and political contexts shift the focus from individually oriented health behavior change models to the larger social domain where these behaviors are enacted and rendered meaningful. This move to focus on contexts (Airhihenbuwa, 1995; Airhihenbuwa, Makinwa, & Obregon, 2000; Airhihenbuwa & Obregon, 2000) and social ecology (Choi, Yep, & Kumekawa, 1998; McLeroy, Bibeau, Steckler, & Glanz, 1988) offers major advantages over individualistic models. Choi and associates (1998) identified three potential advantages: First, it de-emphasizes the importance of the individual on behavior change and the potential concomitant of blaming the victim for lack of effort or failure to change. Second, it considers both individual and environmental influences as possible explanations for unhealthy behaviors. Third, it allows the use of environmental [and contextual] approaches in prevention programs. (p. 27)

Hence, this move provides a framework to address multilevel health risk factors affecting marginalized communities. Further, an understanding of the marginalization that arises from these larger social systems provides insight into the complexities of communitybased health communication efforts. COMMUNITY, COMMUNICATION, AND CULTURE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY-BASED HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

Scholars focused on community-based strategies for improving individual and community health come from diverse disciplines but share common roots: (1) the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities project, advocating community-based health intervention approaches (Hancock, 1993); (2) growing dissatisfaction with the research and outcome failures of individual lifestyle based models of health promotion (Becker, 1986); and (3) the rise of alternative discourses for pedagogy, research, and theorizing within the social sciences (see Mumby, 1997, for a discussion of these discourses). In the latter case, the critical pedagogy advocated by Brazilian Paolo Freire (1998/1970) in particular, informs the community-based health intervention movement. Observing that traditional methods of literacy education were largely ineffective with poor disenfranchised Brazilians, Freire advocated an alternative approach, empowerment education defined as “a participatory education process in which people are not objects

246

FORD AND YEP

or recipients of educational and political projects but actors in history, able to name their problems and their solutions to transform themselves in the process of changing oppressive circumstances” (Wallerstein & Bernstein, 1994, p. 142). In summary, the community-based health promotion agenda has come to represent an alternative domain of knowledge, discourse, and methods to more traditional approaches to health promotion interventions (Robertson & Minkler, 1994; Wallerstein & Bernstein, 1994). Further, in the view of these scholars, health promotion scholarship marginalizes community, culture, and communication when the significance of these notions to health intervention efforts with disenfranchised communities is viewed as just one of a host of factors affecting health. In the following sections, we examine community, communication, and culture in community-based health interventions with marginalized groups. First, we briefly define community (the chapter by Dearing in this volume provides further discussion on issues related to defining community) and then we briefly review the two dominant frameworks for understanding health communication (Lupton, 1994; Mokros & Deetz, 1996). Next we present a view of culture that resists its essentializing form in traditional health promotion scholarship. Finally, we highlight the dialectical tension between the two communication frameworks and present the communicative activity of dialogue as central to community-based health intervention scholarship. Community in Health Intervention Programs

In general, when community is considered in health promotion activities and research, the geographic sense of locality predominates. While proponents of using community-based health promotion strategies with marginalized populations consider the effects of physical locality, they begin with a view of community as a socially constructed phenomenon. That is, community is constituted (created) and reconstituted (sustained) in the every-day communication practices of a group of people that result in a sense of shared social space, i.e., the informal social environment where community is encountered and constituted, of connectedness, and of shared language and meanings shaped by experience in a shared social, cultural, and political context (Adelman & Frey, 1997; McMillan & Chavis, 1986; Weider & Hartsell, 1996).2 Finally, significant to the goal of social change advocated by Freire (1998/1970), a community identifies shared needs and capacities. That is, the group acknowledges common concerns and through its identification of collective strengths, abilities, and resources commits to addressing those concerns in interdependent ways (McKnight, 1987; McMillan & Chavis, 1986). This sense of community profoundly alters the definition of health itself to include the social, political, and economic determinants of health. Further, the emphasis on community results in health intervention activities that are inherently political and that serve the superordinate goal of social justice (Lupton, 1994; Robertson & Minkler, 1994). Communication in Health Intervention Program

The two frameworks for understanding communication in health intervention research and practice, the instrumentality and constituitive views (Mokros & Deetz, 1996), represent

2 For example, Gerard Power and Teresa Byrd (1998) edited a recent volume focusing on health issues in the USMBR where a sense of geographic place is interwoven with culturally based community identifiers and shared sense making in health promotion activities.

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

247

different discourses and contrasting assumptions about social actors, their social worlds, and their communicative practices. As such each discourse also reflects an ideological position (Geist & Dreyer, 1993; Mumby, 1997; Lupton, 1994). In traditional health promotion scholarship, the discourse of representation utilizing the metaphor of communication as an instrument predominates (Mumby, 1997). In this discourse, the objective nature of reality and human existence and the discoverability of truth frame research and practice. Within the discourse of representation, language becomes a “value neutral” mode of expression believed to represent and to refer to some objective reality and communication then is characterized as the exchange of information by social actors who function as processors of that information (Mokoros & Deetz, 1996). Further, communication itself is an object open to investigation and analysis by researchers and practitioners whose goal is to discover and explicate strategies to achieve maximum communicative effectiveness (Mokros & Deetz, 1996; Mumby, 1997). Hence, health promotion scholarship within this discourse emphasizes issues such as message design, communication channels, and measurable effects in a health information campaign designed and planned by experts (Lupton, 1994). The ideological position of representational discourse presumes a value neutrality while it functions primarily to maintain or enhance the existing power relationships (Mumby, 1997). Indeed, Lupton (1994) argued that the interests of health promotion researchers align with the powerful, established health care interests such that “communication is largely regarded as a ‘top-down’ and somewhat paternalistic exercise” (p. 56). Further, reliance on the biomedical model and individualistic models of health knowledge and behavior in these health interventions reifies the hegemony of the prevailing ideologies thereby deflecting health responsibility from the dominant social structures and marginalizing the role of culture in everyday communication practices (Geist & Dreyer, 1993; Lupton, 1994). The alternative discourses of communication articulated by Mumby (1997) begin with a constitutive view of communication. In this social constructionist’s perspective, our experience of reality is viewed as the product of communicative actions rather than reality as an objective phenomenon; persons and things are constituted through interaction, and interaction consists of ongoing contests of meaning. As applied to health communication, then, Mokros and Deetz (1996) stated, “To approach communication as constitutive is to throw into question persons, diseases, and health as natural categories and to instead view these categories as discursive ways of understanding experience, understandings that are socially constructed” (p. 32). Thus, individuals, communities, and health/disease are linguistic constructions based on shared assumptions about what’s true, what’s real, and what’s valued (Mumby, 1997). The discussion thus far describes a contextualized but apolitical constitutive view of communication, a critique leveled against research within the discourse of understanding (Mumby, 1997). Within a discourse of suspicion the political and ideological effects on communication practices are foregrounded (see Mumby, 1997, and Mokros & Deetz, 1996, for extended discussions). Briefly stated, in this discourse communication constitutes persons and situations but those constitutions arise from and within a political/ideological discourse that privileges certain forms and meanings over others (Mumby, 1997). This marginalization of some realities and the privileging of others reflects the economic, cultural, and ideological dimensions of power. Thus, the goal of health promotion scholarship becomes to expose and challenge those systems of domination and to centralize the voices of the disenfranchised (Lupton, 1994; Mokros & Deetz, 1996).

248

FORD AND YEP

Culture in Health Intervention Programs

Culture consists of a complex social, economic, and political structure characterized by a system of values that influences attitudes, perceptions, and communication behaviors and practices in a given society, within a historical context (Airhihenbuwa, 1995). Culture is constantly produced and reproduced through communication. Although some individuals and social groups are more readily marked as “having culture” (e.g., Native Americans) than others (e.g., European Americans), every individual and social group operates within particular cultural systems. Such systems are not static as Giroux (1992) reminded us, “[culture] is not an object of unquestioning reverence but a mobile field of ideological and material relations that are unfinished, multilayered, and always open to interrogation” (p. 99). In short, everyone functions within a fluid cultural system. Communicating about health inevitably occurs within a particular cultural context. Cultural sensitivity, according to Airhihenbuwa (1995), “refers to the need to develop programs in ways that are consistent with a people’s and community’s cultural framework” (pp. 6–7). If we develop, implement, and evaluate health intervention programs that are culturally sensitive, there are no “cultural barriers.” These barriers often result when dominant and hegemonic cultural standards are applied to less privileged groups (e.g., application and imposition of middle-class, male, European American beliefs and values about health and illness on poor, female, non-European American individuals) (Airhihenbuwa & Obregon, 2000). In his study on Latino gay men and HIV infection, Diaz (1998) described the sociocultural context of sexual activity among Latino gay men in the United States in an attempt to identify—instead of devalue and pathologize—the Latino cultural scripts associated with sexual expression. Because such scripts consist of factors like machismo, homophobia, family loyalty, sexual silence, poverty, and racism that are decisively different from European American gay male scripts, Diaz suggested that health messages must be tailored to the social and cultural realities of Latino gay men rather than simply adapting and imposing middle-class, European American cultural standards (see also Huerta & Macario, 1999; Yep, in press). More simply stated, to maximize the effectiveness of health messages we must construct them with cultural sensitivity. But where do members of privileged communities such as those represented by our academic and research credentials acquire that sensitivity? Dialogic encounter appears to offer one means to that increased cultural understanding. Centralizing Dialogue in Health Intervention Programs. Health promotion researchers and practitioners interested in using community-based communication strategies with marginalized populations begin their efforts from a position that supports an appreciation for a dialectical tension between the instrumentality and constitutive views of communication. While valuing the knowledge developed from traditional health promotion scholarship in communities, these researchers and practitioners reject the “power over” ideological position and embrace one of “power with” (Zoeller, 2000). Working within the worldview of community members, using their cultural knowledge and beliefs, and building on their strengths and understandings of their own needs, the role of the health communicator becomes that of catalyst, coach, facilitator, and teacher/learner. In practice, dialogue is the communicative activity through which this dialectical tension is experienced. While multiple conceptions of dialogue exist, some common themes, values, and practices emerge (see Anderson, Cissna, & Arnett, 1994). First, dialogue exists in relationship or “the between”—the region of human existence that connects one person to another (Buber, 1965). Relationship features a concern for openness and in its

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

249

enactment connectedness, trust, respect, and hope emerge. With openness, the participants in dialogue face risk, but the risk is presumed worthy as “dialogic relations involve risking one’s position in order to arrive at new understandings, and a commitment to keep the conversation going” (Zoeller, 2000, p. 193). Further, dialogue is defined by difference. “Otherness” is key as we are called to listen to the voices of those whose language, systems of meaning, and sense of community are different from our own (Zoeller, 2000). Finally, the possibility for change emerges in dialogue. Participants may find that dialogue challenges the unexamined certainties held as truth by the individual or the group. This possibility for change is the central purpose of dialogue in community-based health interventions. Relying on Freire’s notion of dialogue in empowerment education, the dialogic practices advocated reflect the themes heretofore described, but in addition a political consciousness infuses dialogue as it develops over time; the intent of dialogue is distinctly liberatory. As a democratization of both method and content, the goal of dialogue is to create conscientizacao, or consciousness raising. The dialogic content begins with the existential reality of people’s lives focusing on the here and now of people’s daily existence and local realities. As the dialogue unfolds, community members draw on their own experiences and practical knowledge to try to make sense of their situations and are free to challenge alternative interpretations. Through the sharing of interpretations a collective knowledge develops and a critical consciousness emerges, an awareness of societal power contradictions and a consciousness of the personal experience of oppression and one’s place as a member of an oppressed community (Freire, 1998/1970). Motivated by consciousness of oppression, individuals and groups can mobilize their skills and resources to actively change their situations. Through the dialectical process of collective action (or praxis) and reflection individuals, groups, and communities empower themselves to act effectively for individual and social change. In summary, dialogue is a collaborative activity existing in dialectical tension with collective action. When dialogue occurs, the result is the hopeful possibility that individuals and communities empower themselves, enhancing community, building social capital, and leading participants to act in ways that create justice and human understanding. The ideal of dialogue, however, is challenged by multiple barriers to its enactment, barriers as mundane as time and as complex as our multilayered identities in interaction. In most research on community-based health interventions, the pragmatic sense of dialogue prevails. That is, researchers, practitioners, and community members engage each other in many ways, some truly dialogic and others more or less participatory. REPRESENTATIVE RESEARCH ON COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES FOR COMMUNICATING WITH MARGINALIZED POPULATIONS ABOUT HEALTH

Empowerment is the central organizing theme of all community-based health promotion strategies with marginalized populations; however, Freire’s (1998/1970) explication of empowerment action in communities reveals a complex set of intersections and ongoing dialectical tensions. Specifically, the forms of participation and the levels of empowerment and transformation are interrelated, are not mutually exclusive, and reciprocally influence one another. Thus, in its enactment in community-based health intervention research and praxis, empowerment is both a process and an outcome and occurs at both the individual and the community level (Bandura, 1997; Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995). Following Freirean ideals, community-based health promotion activities center on the notions of participation and empowerment. The former democratizes health intervention

250

FORD AND YEP

efforts as individuals and communities identify their own health concerns, determine the best strategies for addressing those needs within their communities, and then enact those strategies. The latter suggests a transformation. Individuals and communities once disenfranchised gain power, not simply in reference to the specific health issue addressed but also in the development of added community capacity and increased social justice. As succinctly stated by Wallerstein and Bernstein (1994), empowerment is “an interactive process of change, where institutions and communities get transformed as people who participate in changing them become transformed” (p. 142). In summary, community-based health interventions challenge hierarchical, patriarchal, coercive conceptualizations of power with a conceptualization of power that features participation, caring, and responsibility to others (Fawcett, Paine-Andrews, Francisco, Shultz, & Ricter, 1995). Further, community health interventions have an emancipatory goal. Through these community-developed and community-enacted interventions, the marginalized community challenges the larger structural systems of domination, i.e., the social, political, cultural, and economic forces that function to preserve the power of the oppressors and continue the subjugation of the oppressed. In the following section, we examine representative emancipatory projects using community-based strategies for communicating with marginalized populations about health.3 The level of community participation in problem identification, solution development, and strategy enactment is the key organizing scheme for this examination. We recognize that because of the long term, “bottom-up” nature of these emancipatory projects, multiple types of community participation and multiple specific empowering outcomes may constitute a single project. Grassroots Organizing: Participation of Citizen Volunteers and Community Activists

Many advocates of community-based health promotion efforts view grass roots organizing as the beginning of social change. In general, such efforts feature the committed collective action of a small group of people, usually citizen volunteers or community activists who come together at their own initiative to improve conditions in their communities (Bettencourt, 1996). These projects often begin with the broad goal of improving community health, but the definition of health, the identification of specific health needs, and the strategies for addressing those needs arise from the citizen group. The Casa en Casa project of La Clinica de la Raza (LCDLR) in East Oakland, California, a Latino community of primarily Mexican immigrants, provides an exemplar. Founded in 1971, at the height of the Chicano movement by university students who were influenced by Freirean theory, the LCDLR began as small medical clinic offering free, culturally and linguistically appropriate care to low-income residents. Over the years, community involvement in the clinic and staff involvement in the community led to increasing commitment to community health education (CHE) activities until a separate unit of the clinic, Casa CHE, was established for this purpose. The educational staff was 3 Community-based health promotion scholarship owes much to participatory action researchers who have been using these ideas in developing countries for some time. This review, however, focuses on marginalized populations in the United States and in Canada, which as a matter of national policy has undertaken this approach. Further, the studies presented in this review come from a variety of disciplines, emphasizing the interdisciplinarity that has been encouraged by mutual scholarly interests and by the advocacy position taken by WHO in its Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities initiative.

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

251

committed to empowerment education and began community organizing through the Casa en Casa project, where neighbors met weekly in participants’ homes to learn about health, to discuss personal concerns, and to develop community actions. Some community empowerment resulted as a few Casa en Casa groups engaged in political activity, such as resistance to cutbacks in human services, but the individual level of empowerment was more commonly experienced by members who received support and information as a result of their participation in the group (Merideth, 1994). Although it is true that “grassroots activity can be started by anyone with an issue to address and an ability to communicate a message” (Bracht, Kingsbury, & Rissel, 1999, p. 97), it is also true that a community’s marginalized status may contribute to an inability to initiate action as members are caught by their own domination and the struggle for survival consumes daily attention and time. Thus, in many community-based health intervention “grassroots” projects, health professionals actually initiate problem identification efforts and community involvement by identifying community leaders or by calling for citizen volunteers (Kar & Alcalay, 2001). The starting point for this sort of grassroots health development project then is the establishment of the relationship necessary to dialogue. Specifically, health promotion scholars must exhibit the attitude of listener and learner to earn the trust of and openness with community members (Dervin, 1989). As a variation on the formative research more familiar in traditional health promotion scholarship, researchers and practitioners encourage the voices of community participants in an effort to understand their worldview. Thus, many projects begin with participant observation, in-depth interviewing with key informants, door-to-door surveys, or focus groups (Byrd, 1998; Myrick, 1998; Travers, 1997). For example, in the HPS prevention project described early in this chapter, we noted the many forms of participation in which we engaged to develop a committed presence in the community and collaborative relationships with community members (Crabtree & Ford, 1998). We also conducted individual and focus group interviews with promotoras (community health workers) to learn about the borderland community and its health concerns and to uncover mutual benefits of further collaboration (Ford, Barnes, Crabtree, & Fairbanks, 1998). These formative activities represent a transitional phase in the relationship from researcher-subject to participant-collaborator. Hence, while the project may have been initiated by the health communication professional, the meaning of the issue and strategies for addressing that issue are community driven. Traver’s (1997) emancipatory project with low-income women in an urban area in Canada illustrates these transitions. The central concern of this empowerment education project was reducing nutritional inequities. Travers began the project as a participant-observer at a community drop-in parent center. After a few weeks, she began to hold group interviews/discussions with women who attended an informal weekly women’s coffee group at the center. These discussions focused on the women’s experienced difficulties in feeding their families. Over time these women acquired increased awareness of the sources of their oppression and began to develop plans of action to address their oppression. Early in their discussions one woman observed that groceries cost more in urban neighborhoods than in the suburbs. After some discussion of other concerns, the group focused their energies on this issue. Members conducted a comparison shop and verified the significant price differential. After discussing several options over several weeks, the group, supported by Travers’ advocacy, wrote letters to both community supermarkets, noting their findings and recommendations for action, and both stores reduced price inequities. Further, a subgroup of women, with the aid of the researcher, secured grant funding for the establishment of a grassroots cooperative grocery now run by women from the community. Through their participation

252

FORD AND YEP

in empowering activities, these women empowered not only themselves but also their communities. In summary, grassroots organizing typically yields a small group of individuals who through their participation are empowered. At times they are able to effect social change and mobilize the community; more often these empowered individuals engage members of their social networks in informal interaction. We now examine the significance of those social networks to emancipatory projects. Social Networks: Community Health Workers as Boundary Spanners

One of the most frequently utilized forms of empowerment and participation in communitybased health communication interventions is collaboration with community health workers (CHWs) or lay health advisors (CDC, 1994). CHWs are trusted and respected community members who provide informal, community-based health-related services and communication interventions. Many CHWs are women who work as volunteers for the betterment of their communities, although increasingly their efforts are being supported by private and/or public health agencies and institutions (Walker, 1994). Some community empowerment projects focus on creating lay health advisors (Bird, Otero-Sabogal, Ha, & McPhee, 1996; Booker, Robinson, Kay, Najera, & Stewart, 1997; Byrd, 1998; Lugo, 1996; McFarlane & Fehir, 1994; Merideth, 1994) whereas other projects utilize existing CHW networks (Ford et al., 1998; Myrick, 1998). As indigenous residents of marginalized communities, CHWs are uniquely knowledgeable about community needs and as respected members of the community and the culture, they bring to their work the language, the cultural understanding, and a worldview shared with community members (CDC, 1994). In areas where CHWs are serving, they are able to communicate to professionals the needs of community members and to provide quality health promotion and disease prevention information to the community in the voice of the community. The degree of participation by CHWs in problem identification and strategy development varies. For example, in the second phase of the HPS prevention project the research team brought the health issue to the attention of the CHWs who, unknown to the team, had also identified this as a community concern following the HPS-caused death of a local agricultural worker (Barnes, Ford, & Crabtree, 2000). In contrast, Byrd (1998) described a child immunization project totally initiated by a group of health promotoras involved in Project Verdad in the USMBR. Furthermore, these CHWs also developed the outreach strategies for this project. In most cases CHWs participate in some formal training about health issues, but often the CHWs look for and create opportunities for communicating that information in locally acceptable ways. To illustrate, in the HPS project we trained CHWs, focusing on hantavirus transmission and HPS prevention. We then provided a variety of materials for them to use in the community, including videos (and portable TV/VCRs) and pamphlets in English and in Spanish, prevention demonstration materials, and magnetized cards using graphics depicting prevention strategies. In evaluation focus groups with the CHWs, we discovered that they engaged in a wide range of educational approaches and use of the materials as they disseminated this prevention information across southern New Mexico (Barnes, Ford, & Crabtree, 2000). Ford et al. (1998) articulated the constellation of public health and communication roles that CHWs can enact in their communities. In public health practice, a CHW may act as a lay health educator, lay health care referral source, health practice role model, and/or social support provider. The Camp Health Aide Program (CHAP) serving migrant

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

253

farmworkers in the Midwest (Booker et al., 1997) and the previously noted Project Verdad (Byrd, 1998) are excellent examples of these enactments. From a communication perspective, CHWs are described as participants in formal and informal networks of communication, collaborating simultaneously as group members and intergroup linkers. In other words, they have significant amounts of communication with other members within a group and also serve to bind two or more groups together, moving messages from group to group, and hence enacting the network roles of opinion leader, gatekeeper, bridge, and liaison (Ford et al., 1998). The Resource Sisters/Companeras (Lugo, 1996) and De Madres a Madres (McFarlane & Fehir, 1994) programs demonstrate clearly the linking and boundary spanning actions of CHWs (Ford et al., 1998). In short, CHWs become catalysts for change. Through their public health and communication network role enactments, they promote community organizing efforts and enable individual empowerment. Significantly, community health workers empower themselves as they become a means to empowerment for individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities (Ford et al., 1998; McFarlane & Fehir, 1994). Macro Networks: Community Coalitions

Coalition formation has become an important form of community member participation in community-based health promotion activities. Conceptualized as a communication network of communication networks, a community coalition brings together in a single group or organization individuals who represent diverse organizations or constituencies in an alliance to achieve a common goal (see Butterfoss, Goodman, & Wandersman, 1993, for a review). By developing communication linkages among existing organizations and groups, a coalition results in community participation that exhibits a depth and breadth of membership with a far-reaching effect in the community. Further, this increased participation, albeit indirect and representative, potentially may enhance ownership of coalition-generated approaches to health needs and hence can facilitate the mobilization of community members and increase the available resources in the enactment of coalition-developed strategies (Bracht, Kingsbury, & Rissel, 1999). In most empowerment education models of community-based health interventions, coalition formation occurs later in the experience of empowerment. For example, the De Madres a Madres project was designed originally to link volunteer mothers with pregnant community members. In the project’s third year, the volunteer mothers defined coalition formation as a goal for more effective community action for mothers and infants, but it was not until the fourth year of the program that substantial coalition formation took place, linking the project with the Women’s Center, local schools, and a health clinic (McFarlane & Fehir, 1994). By the fifth year of the project, the volunteer mothers, some of whom were now paid staff members, completely directed the activities of the program, focusing not simply on maternal health issues but health issues of the family unit. In addition to the more typical later emergence of coalitions, some community-based health intervention programs begin with the notion of coalition formation, as evidenced by projects uniting African American churches together with a variety of health care and health education organizations (Jackson & Reddick, 1999; Kong, 1997). The links between community coalition formation and community empowerment can be seen in the activities of the CHWs in the USMBR (Ford et al., 1998). Following an outbreak of cholera in an underdeveloped community (a colonia), CHWs created linkages with state and local environmental safety and public health officials in order to teach principles of sanitation, proper sewage disposal, and maintenance of appropriate potable

254

FORD AND YEP

water levels to community members. As a result of this outreach, the community developed an interest in further training and in writing a proposal in collaboration with these various agencies that would fund sewer infrastructure improvement, road paving, and street light installation. The success of the implementation stimulated a long-term potential among community members to further advocate for community change. In summary, opportunities for successful community mobilization toward political action increase with the diversity of represented organizations in community coalitions. Simultaneously, participants in these coalitions may experience a sense of individual and community empowerment. However, such coalitions can be fragile and difficult to coordinate and hold together for any kind of social action. CENTRALIZING MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES IN HEALTH COMMUNICATION RESEARCH IN THE 21ST CENTURY: IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORY, RESEARCH, AND PRAXIS

It has now been a little more than 20 years since the launching of the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities project. While some progress in health improvement and community empowerment has been achieved, much remains to be accomplished in the new century. Bernstein and colleagues (Bernstein et al., 1994) described the scope of the challenge in their rationale for the transformation of a hospital emergency department to a communitybased approach: Daily, we are faced with the casualties of oppression and violence, battering, rape, elder abuse, suicide, environmental disasters, alcohol and drug-related health problems, homelessness, deterioration of medical conditions due to poverty, inadequate nutrition, poor dentition, and general lack of access to health care and prevention. Racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, classism, and ethnocentrism are not just politically correct words; they are realities—the faces of people, their lives, personal and community biographies. (p. 292)

Further, this day-to-day experience of oppression takes place within the ubiquitous context of globalization that dominates markets, states, and our understanding of civil society. Hendriks (2001) argued that the seemingly natural and unalterable progress of globalization limits discourse on the reality of its consequences: environmental degradation, escalating worldwide poverty, the dehumanizing effect of public policies, the monopoly of wealth and power in the hands of the few. Such societal actions serve to increase fragmentation at the local level, heightening “difference” and normalizing oppressive relations. Freeing human capacity to live fully and authentically and experience its political expression in democratic action as supported in the community-based health promotion approach has important implications for communication scholars. Zoeller (2000) describes the Healthy Cities movement as “a concrete example of a significant attempt at invigorating public dialogue and developing democratic alternatives to bureaucratic organizing” (p. 192). As critical communication scholars, we work to understand, reveal, and then challenge the institutional and ideological contexts that impede dialogue. In community, we work to foster dialogue to identify health concerns as political and social problems, soluble by individual and community effort. Through community-based health communication scholarship, we support the development of participatory models of communication where “participation is a normative standard against which all acts of communication can be judged” (Deetz, 1999, p.147; see Deetz for full discussion of participatory democracy as a normative foundation for communication studies).

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

255

The relevance of community-based health communication scholarship with marginalized communities in the 21st century to the health and well-being of individuals and society at large then is clear. Through engagement in and with marginalized communities boundaries are crossed, difference is celebrated, and cultural empowerment becomes the source and also the result of citizen participation (Airhihenbuwa, 1995).4 Through the efforts of community members local, democratic actions potentially can build healthy public policy, create supportive environments, strengthen community action, develop individual skills, and reorient health services (Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 1986). REFLECTIONS ON THE COMPLEXITIES OF COMMUNITY-BASED SCHOLARSHIP FOR HEALTH COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND PRAXIS

In this chapter we have presented an overview of research and practice in communitybased health intervention scholarship based on liberatory dialogue. We described the complexities of the socio-cultural, economic, and political context for marginalized populations, and advanced an argument for the centralization of marginalized communities and participatory communication in health promotion in our future research, theory, and practice. Whereas we have argued for increased attention to this scholarly approach to health communication research and practice, we acknowledge that contradiction, paradox, and dialectical tension characterize this pursuit. Further, these tensions are fundamentally unresolvable. Community-based health intervention scholarship begins with the primary tension between the microlevel (individual) and macrolevel (sociopolitical) as the focus for transformation. This dialectic is influenced by and interrelated with multiple other dialectics. For example, participants have both a collective and an individual identity and can experience marginalization as individuals and as members of a particular community or culture. The tension between process and outcome in empowerment also has been described here and this tension suggests the contradiction of the need for order and organization in the effort to invoke emancipation and choice. Other dialectics have been identified in the enactment of emancipatory projects (see Zoeller, 2000). Of these dialectics perhaps the most troubling is the dialectic between empowerment and disempowerment. This dialectic emerges via the co-optation of terminology where a distinctly social justice–oriented approach is used to achieve conservative political ends to deny and further marginalize individuals and groups through the elimination of important social and economic system supports. For the community-based health communication scholar, the position of researcher also is experienced dialectically. One is both teacher and learner, participant and facilitator, and ultimately researcher and practitioner. These dialectics then have implications that apply to both research and practice. First, the researcher-practitioner must develop his or her own critical consciousness. As Airhihenbuwa and Ludwig (1997) pointed out “many subscribe to Freire’s notion of critical consciousness as long as it is the consciousness of the ‘targeted 4 Airhihenbuwa (1995) proposes a cultural empowerment model, known as PEN-3, a conceptual framework for health intervention programs centered around a dialogic process that allows individuals in communities to address issues of cultural sensitivity and cultural appropriateness in program development, implementation, and evaluation. The model demands that health communication interventions be constructed to resonate and reflect the cultural realities of the community rather than imposing or adapting the dominant cultural perspective on this group. (See Airhihenbuwa (1995) for the complete explication of the model.)

256

FORD AND YEP

community’ that is being examined rather than that of the interventionists” (p. 318). An empathy for the marginalized without commitment to engage in meaningful empowerment education reifies their marginalization. As researchers-practitioners, we must continue to live and act reflexively, to ask critical questions of ourselves and of others so that dignity and freedom for all become a reality. Second, as researchers and practitioners, we must create a space for alternative voices to be heard. In the academic community, we must work to legitimate alternative research strategies such as ethnographic methodologies in pursuit of health understandings. Alternative voices in the community reflect multidimensional identities and the forms of expression and understanding of those identities are culture specific, e.g., the significance of oral storytelling in African American culture suggests alternative strategies for both gathering and disseminating information within this marginalized group. As a corollary to the notion of alternative voices, the recruitment and retention of academicians from marginalized communities is an absolute priority and an ongoing need and concern for community-based scholarship. Additionally, we must encourage the legitimacy of alternative outcomes as measures of success for health communication interventions. For example, these emancipatory projects often do not conform to conventional time lines and frequently are met by surprises and setbacks. Further, hypothesis generation and testing as linked to communication effectiveness cannot be a goal. Success may be measured instead by the accomplishments, small and large, of individuals and communities and the type and quality of participation in the community dialogue. Third, in pursuit of these goals the researcher-practitioner must acquire a nontraditional set of skills. These skills include strategies for grassroots organizing and community building and techniques in community and group facilitation, in addition to acquiring expertise in ethnographic research methods. The researcher-practitioner must also be conscious of the need to function as an advocate in alliance with the marginalized community (Lupton, 1994), occasionally becoming the voice that speaks truth to power. In closing, we are painfully aware of how little the voices of the community have been heard in this chapter, despite its emphasis on empowering and empowerment. Once again, hegemonic forces win. Thus, we end with a reminder from one participant in an emancipatory project, as quoted in Poole and Van Hook (1997). Don’t start with the notion that you have to “empower” us. Recognize that we are in power. This is our community and when your program is gone, we’ll still be here. (p. 3)

In truth, not only will the researcher-practitioner be gone, he or she should be gone. The meaning of real emancipation is that individuals gain control over their lives, persons in communities experience democratic participation, and communities develop a critical understanding of the social and political environment and an ability to act on those understandings (Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995). In the end, it is their community; we are merely sojourners, crossing borders. REFERENCES Adelman, M. B., & Frey, L. R. (1997). The fragile community. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Airhihenbuwa, C. O. (1995). Health and culture: Beyond the western paradigm. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

257

Airhihenbuwa, C. O., & Ludwig, M. J. (1997). Remembering Paolo Freire’s legacy of hope and possibility as it relates to health education/promotion. Journal of Health Education, 28, 317–319. Airhihenbuwa, C. O., Makinwa, B., & Obregon, R. (2000). Towards a new communication framework for HIV/AIDS. Journal of Health Communication, 5(Suppl), 101–111. Airhihenbuwa, C. O., & Obregon, R. (2000). A critical assessment of theories/models used in health communication for HIV/AIDS. Journal of Health Communication, 5(Suppl), 5–15. Amaro, H., & Raj, A. (2000). On the margin: Power and women’s HIV risk reduction strategies. Sex Roles, 42, 723–749. Anderson, R., Cissna, K. N., & Arnett, R. C. (1994). The reach of dialogue: Confirmation, voice, and community. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman. Barnes, M. D., Ford, L. A., & Crabtree, R. D. (2000). Promoting disease prevention communication and education through promotoras: The hantavirus training partnership. Health Education & Behavior, 27, 679–683. Bauer, H. M., & Rodriguez, M. A. (1995). Letting compassion open the door: Battered women’s disclosure to medical providers. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 4, 459–465. Bauer, H. M., Rodriguez, M. A., Quiroga, S. S., & Flores-Ortiz, Y. G. (2000). Barriers to health care for abused Latina and Asian immigrant women. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and the Underserved, 11(1), 33–44. Becker, M. (1986). The tyranny of health promotion. Public Health Review, 14, 15–23. Bernstein, E., Wallerstein, N., Braithwaite, R., Gutierrez, L., Labonte, R., & Zimmerman, M. (1994). Empowerment forum: A dialogue between guest editorial board members. Health Education Quarterly, 21, 281–294. Bettencourt, B. A. (1996). Grass roots organizations: Recurrent themes and research approaches. Journal of Social Issues, 52, 207–220. Bird, J. A., Otero-Sabogal, R., Ha, N., & McPhee, S. J. (1996). Tailoring lay health worker interventions for diverse cultures: Lessons learned from Vietnamese and Latina communities. Health Education Quarterly, 23(Suppl), S105–S122. Booker, V. K., Robinson, J. G., Kay, B. J., Najera, L. G., & Stewart, G. (1997). Changes in empowerment: Effects of participation in a lay health promotion program. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 452–464. Bracht, N., Kingsbury, L., & Rissel, C. (1999). A five stage community organization model for health promotion. In N. Bracht (Ed.), Health promotion at the community level 2: New advances (pp. 83–104). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Braithwaite, D. O. (1996). “Persons first”: Expanding communicative choices by persons with disabilities. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. 449–464). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Buber, M. (1965). Between man and man. (R. G. Smith, Trans.). New York: Macmillan. Butterfoss, E. D., Goodman, R. M., & Wandersman, A. (1993). Community coalitions for prevention and health promotion. Health Education Research: Theory and Practice, 8, 315–330. Byrd, T. (1998). Notes on community health on the border from theory and practice. In J. G. Power & T. Byrd (Eds.), U.S.-Mexico border health: Issues for regional and migrant populations (pp. 195–207). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (1994). Community health advisors: Programs in the United States; health promotion and disease prevention. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

258

FORD AND YEP

Choi, K.-H., Yep, G. A., & Kumekawa, E. (1998). HIV prevention among Asian and Pacific Islander men who have sex with men: A critical review of theoretical models and directions for future research. AIDS Education and Prevention, 10(Suppl A), 19–30. Cline, R. J. W., & McKenzie, N. J. (1996). HIV/AIDS, women, and threads of discrimination: A tapestry of disenfranchisement. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. 365–386). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Corey, F. C. (1996). Gay men and their physicians: Discourse and disenfranchisement. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. 331–345). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Crabtree, R., & Ford, L. A. (1998). Communicating about infectious diseases in the borderlands: Hantavirus education for rural, border, and migrant populations. In J. G. Power & T. Byrd (Eds.), U.S.-Mexico border health: Issues for regional and migrant populations (pp. 52–70). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Crewe, M. (1997). How marginal is a “marginalized group”? Social Science and Medicine, 45, 967–970. Deetz, S. (1999). Participatory democracy as a normative foundation for communication studies. In T. Jacobson & J. Servas (Eds.), Theoretical approaches to participatory communication (pp. 131–167). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Dervin, B. (1989). Audience as listener and learner, teacher and confidante: The sensemaking approach. In R. Rice & B. Paisley (Eds.), Public communication campaigns. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Diaz, R. M. (1998). Latino gay men and HIV: Culture, sexuality, and risk behavior. New York: Routledge. Diaz-Cotto, J. (1991). Women and crime in the United States. In C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, & L. Torres (Eds.), Third world women and the politics of feminism (pp. 197–211). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Elwood, W. N. (1999). Burden of sin: Transmitting messages and viruses in a stigmatized plague. In W. N. Elwood (Ed.), Power in the blood: A handbook on AIDS, politics, and communication (pp. 3–8). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fawcett, S. B., Paine-Andrews, A., Francisco, V. T., Schultz, J. A., & Ricter, K. P. (1995). Using empowerment theory in collaborative partnerships for community health development. American Journal of Community Psychology, 23, 677–697. Ferguson, R. (1990). Introduction: Invisible center. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha, & C. West (Eds.), Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures (pp. 9–14). New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art/The MIT Press. Ford, L. A., Barnes, M., Crabtree, R., & Fairbanks, J. (1998). Boundary spanners: Las promotoras in the Borderlands. In J. G. Power & T. Byrd (Eds.), U.S.-Mexico border health: Issues for regional and migrant populations (pp.141–164). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freire, P. (1998/1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum. Frye, M. (2001). Oppression. In M. L. Andersen & P. H. Collins (Eds.), Race, class, and gender: An anthology (4th ed., pp. 48–52). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Geist, P., & Dreyer, J. (1993). The demise of dialogue: A critique of medical encounter ideology. Western Journal of Communication, 57, 233–246. Giroux, H. A. (1992). Border crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. New York: Routledge.

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

259

Gutierrez, L. M., & Lewis, E. A. (1997). Education, participation, and capacity building in community organizing with women of color. In M. Minkler (Ed.), Community organizing and community building for health (pp. 216–229). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hancock, T. (1993). The evolution, impact, and significance of the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities Movement. Journal of Public Health Policy, 14, 5–17. Hendriks, S. (2001). [Online]. Available: Reviews of Paulo Freire’s books. http://fcis.oise. utoronto.ca/∼daniel schugurensky/freire/sh2.html. Accessed 8-25-01. hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Huerta, E. E., & Macario, E. (1999). Communicating health risk to ethnic groups: Reaching Hispanics as a case study. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 25, 23–26. Jackson, R. S., & Reddick, B. (1999). The African American church and university partnerships: Establishing lasting collaborations. Health Education and Behavior, 26, 663–674. Johnson, G. M., & Albrecht, T. L. (1996). Supportive structures for persons with disability: Smoothing or smothering the way? In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. 433–447). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kar, S. B., & Alcalay, R. (2001). Communicating with multicultural populations: A theoretical framework. In S. B. Kar & R. Alcalay (Eds.), Health communication: A multicultural perspective (pp. 109–137). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kong, B. W. (1997). Community-based hypertension control programs that work. Journal of Health Care for the Poor & Underserved, 8(4), 409–415. Lorde, A. (1990). Age, race, class, and sex: Women redefining difference. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha, & C. West (Eds.), Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures (pp. 281–287). New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art/The MIT Press. Lugo, N. R. (1996). Empowerment education: A case study of the Resource Sisters/Companeras program. Health Education Quarterly, 23, 281–289. Lupton, D. (1994). Toward the development of critical health communication praxis. Health Communication, 6, 55–67. Marshall, A. A., & McKeon, J. K. (1996). Reaching the “unreachables”: Educating and motivating women living in poverty. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. 137–155). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McFarlane, J., & Fehir, J. (1994). De Madres a Madres: A community, primary health care program based on empowerment. Health Education Quarterly, 21, 381–394. McLeroy, K. R., Bibeau, D., Steckler, A., & Glanz, K. (1988). An ecological perspective on health promotion programs. Health Education Quarterly, 15, 351–377. McKnight, J. (1987). Regenerating community. Social Policy, 17(Winter), 54–58. McMillan, D. W., & Chavis, D. M. (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology, 14, 6–23. Merideth, E. (1994). Critical pedagogy and its application to health education: A critical appraisal of the Casa en Casa model. Health Education Quarterly, 21, 355–367. Minkler, M. (1997). Introduction and overview. In M. Minkler (Ed.), Community organizing and community building for health (pp. 3–19). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Minkler, M., Wallace, S. P., & MacDonald, M. (1994/1995). The political economy of health: A useful theoretical tool for health education practice. International Quarterly of Community Health Education, 15, 111–125.

260

FORD AND YEP

Mokros, H. B., & Deetz, S. (1996). What counts as real?: A constitutive view of communication and the disenfranchised in the context of health. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. 29–44). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mumby, D. (1997). Modernism, postmodernism, and communication studies. Communication Theory, 7, 1–28. Myrick, R. (1998). In search of cultural sensitiviy and inclusiveness: Communication strategies used in rural HIV prevention campaigns designed for African Americans. Health Communication, 10, 65–88. The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (17–21 November 1986). In Health promotion anthology (Scientific Publication No. 557). Washington, DC: World Health Organization, Pan American Health Organization. Perkins, D., & Zimmerman, M. A. (1995). Empowerment theory, research and application. American Journal of Community Psychology, 23, 569–579. Poole, D. L., & Van Hook, M. (1997). Retooling for community health partnerships in primary care and prevention. Health and Social work, 22(1), 2–3. Ray, E. B. (1996). Introduction. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. xv–xxi). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Robertson, A., & Minkler, M. (1994). New health promotion movement: A critical examination. Health Education Quarterly, 21, 295–312. Rodriguez, M., Quiroga, S., & Bauer, H. (1996). Breaking the silence: Battered women’s perspectives on medical care. Archives of Family Medicine, 5, 153–158. Travers, K. D. (1997). Reducing inequities through participatory research and community empowerment. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 344–356. Tucker, M. (1990). Director’s foreword. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha, & C. West (Eds.), Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures (pp. 7–8). New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art/The MIT Press. Walker, M. H. (1994). Building bridges: Community health outreach worker programs. New York: United Hospital Fund of New York. Wallerstein, N., & Bernstein, E. (1994). Introduction to community empowerment, participatory education, and health. Health Education Quarterly, 21, 141–148. Weider, D. L., & Hartsell, H. (1996). Community as a folk concept in public health planning. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Chicago. Wohlfeiler, D. (1997). Community organizing and community building among gay and bisexual men: The STOP AIDS Project. In M. Minkler (Ed.), Community organizing and community building for health (pp. 230–243). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Yep, G. A. (1998). My three cultures: Navigating the multicultural identity landscape. In J. N. Martin, T. K. Nakayama, & L. A. Flores (Eds.), Readings in cultural contexts (pp. 79–85). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. Yep, G. A. (in press). “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”: Educating Asian Americans about HIV/AIDS through culture-specific health communication campaigns. In L. K. Fuller (Ed.), Media-mediated AIDS. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Yep, G. A., & Pietri, M. (1999). In their own words: Communication and the politics of HIV education for transgenders and transsexuals in Los Angeles. In W. N. Elwood (Ed.), Power in the blood: A handbook on AIDS, politics, and communication (pp. 199–213). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

12. DEVELOPING COMMUNITY-BASED STRATEGIES

261

Zambrana, R. E. (1996). A research agenda on issues affecting poor and minority women: A model for understanding their health needs. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement: Social health issues and implications (pp. 117–135). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Zoeller, H. M. (2000). “A place you haven’t visited before”: Creating the conditions for community dialogue. Southern Communication Journal, 65(2&3), 191–207.

13 Social Support, Social Networks, and Health Terrance L. Albrecht College of Medicine H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute University of South Florida

Daena J. Goldsmith University of Illinois

Social support provides general social therapy for all types of incongruities one may encounter, soothing and relieving the symptoms of the person encountering the incongruity. The absence of social support seems to be an incongruity of considerable significance for most people. . . . Social support provides each person with a communication network that is a safe base. Here he [sic] can be accepted whether he succeeds or fails in other networks. Here he can retreat to take stock of himself and prepare to meet ‘life.’ Here he is accepted as a ‘whole person,’ and all his various qualities, roles, desires, and the like are of interest. He is not simply a role player whose private life is of no concern to others. —Moss (1973, pp. 236–237)

Nearly three decades ago, in Illness, Immunity, and Social Interaction, Moss (1973) described the function of social support as “social therapy”; that is, a process occurring in communication networks, operating for the purpose of helping people to cope with “incongruities.” Though the specific terminology has changed over the years, researchers across the social sciences, epidemiology, public health, and medicine have long recognized the importance of supportive communication as a necessary condition for the quality of life and for healthful living (e.g., Berkman & Syme, 1979; Cassel, 1976; Cobb, 1976; Moss, 1973). Social support is a communication behavior, as fundamental to interaction as the communication behaviors of informing, persuading, or teaching. Social support is a process embedded in structures of ordinary relationships in social life (Goldsmith, McDermott, & Alexander, 2000). It also is the foundation for extraordinary deeds in situations of extreme distress (i.e., the rescue of the Jews during the Holocaust and other genocides; Albrecht, 1994a; Gourevitch, 1998). Empirical studies of supportive interactions and influence gathered momentum during the 1980s (e.g., Albrecht, Irey, & Mundy, 1982; House,

263

264

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

1981; Thoits, 1984; Wortman, 1984; Wortman & Lehman, 1985). Evidence for the causal link between social support and health/health status mounted, with studies repeatedly showing that formal and informal social support between and among intimates, friends, family members, acquaintances, task associates, strangers, and others had profound consequences for mental and physical well-being. Not surprisingly, the issue captivated social and behavioral researchers who began to document the process in early longitudinal, epidemiological studies (Berkman & Syme, 1979). The notion that network structures of social support and the processes of supportive communication behavior would impact health outcomes and mortality was conceptually groundbreaking and responsive to the criticism regarding the dearth of explanatory models for the relationship between social behavior and biomedical problems (Moss (1973) referred to this relationship as the concept of “biosocial resonation”). Investigation has continued to proliferate across the social and health sciences, describable now as a vast, multidisciplinary body of theory and empirical findings (e.g., Albrecht, Blanchard, Ruckdeschel, Coovert, & Strongbow, 1999; Klein & Milardo, 2000; Goldsmith et al., 2000; Goodwin & Plaza, 2000). The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the prominent research areas regarding the impact of supportive communication on health. Several important literature reviews already exist (e.g., Burleson, Albrecht, & Sarason, 1994; Heaney & Israel, 1995; Uchino, Cacioppo, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996; Sarason, Pierce, & Sarason, 1990). However, most derive from the domains of interpersonal communication, sociology, health education, and social psychology. Our contribution is to provide a review of this terrain from the vantage point of health communication. We include a brief overview of the history of conceptualizing social support as communication, a summary of representative findings on the relationship between supportive interaction and health and illness, a discussion of promising frameworks and directions for research, and a review of the implications for further practice and interventions. HISTORY AND ORIGINS OF SOCIAL SUPPORT AND HEALTH COMMUNICATION

In his 1976 presidential address to the Society for Psychosomatic Medicine, Sidney Cobb, a physician, termed social support as one of three classes of information that “led the subject to believe that he/she 1) is cared for and loved; 2) is esteemed and valued; and 3) belongs to a network of communication and mutual obligation” (Cobb, 1976, p. 300). Cobb’s definition was one of the first well-developed conceptualizations of social support, noteworthy because early on he clearly framed support as a communicative process and structure bearing particular types of influence on the individual. A decade later, Albrecht and Adelman (1987) downplayed the individual-difference aspect of support as related to the individual’s “perceptions” (e.g., Eyres & MacElveen-Hoehn, 1983; Moss, 1973; Tolsdorf, 1976) and emphasized the notion that social support could vary in more or less functional or dysfunctional patterns based on variations in social interaction (see also Caplan, 1976; Kahn & Antonucci, 1980; Schaefer, Coyne, & Lazarus, 1981). As researchers continued to investigate the health effects of supportive relationships, measures of social support began to be refined in the 1980s. The interplay of theory and methodology laid a foundation for further conceptualization. More formal measures were developed (e.g., House & Kahn, 1985) and conceptual debates flourished, which, in turn, further shaped theoretical views of support (for a review, see Cohen & Wills, 1985). Communication is the natural core discipline of theory and research on social support (Albrecht & Adelman, 1984; 1987). Engaging in supportive interactions is an enactment of

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

265

the need for human connection and meaning, so to interpret or render sensible one’s circumstances or life events in relation to health and emotional well-being. A health-enhancing supportive encounter is one where the value of the messages exchanged is based on the extent to which the information obtained is useful for managing health-related uncertainty (or information incongruities, Moss, 1973) and increasing the perception of personal control and the ability to act to achieve positive health goals (see Albrecht, Burleson, & Goldsmith, 1994). Social support is inherently a reciprocal process, occurring in socially constructed networks of close relationships (e.g., intimates, family/kin, significant others, friends) and weak ties (less-developed relationships between people who are less familiar with one another, e.g., acquaintances, strangers, coworkers, distant neighbors). In short, “social support” is an overlay for considering the interactional processes through which relationships and networks of clustered relationships manifest in helpful and sometimes unhelpful (Albrecht & Adelman, 1987) relational patterns. The perspective on social support in this chapter evolves from an earlier definition by Albrecht and Adelman (1987, p. 19): “Social support refers to verbal and nonverbal communication between recipients and providers that helps manage uncertainty about the situation, the self, the other or the relationship and functions to enhance a perception of personal control in one’s life experience” (p. 19). We emphasize the notion that supportive communication functions to help “manage uncertainty,” rather than reduce uncertainty (as originally conceived by Albrecht & Adelman, 1987), given recent research on life-threatening disease where messages conveying ambiguity about otherwise certain outcomes (e.g., death and dying) provide hope and motivation (e.g., Albrecht, et al., 1994; Brashers, Neidig, & Goldsmith, 2000; Ford, Babrow, & Stohl, 1996). Primary types of supportive communication include messages that help others gain perspective shifts on cause-effect contingencies, enhance another’s training or skills, promote behaviors that provide tangible assistance without feelings of undue or excessive reciprocal obligation, offer opportunities for others to engage in protected disclosure or venting of pent-up thoughts and emotions, and offer messages that provide acceptance and reassurance of another’s sense of self-worth, dignity, and face (Albrecht & Adelman, 1987; Goldsmith, 1994; Kalbfleisch & Bonnell, 1996; Keeley, 1996). The conceptual foundations and research debates of the past decades demonstrate that for understanding health communication, “social support” is not a single, unified construct. Greater value exists in viewing social support as an umbrella term for a providing a sense of reassurance, validation, and acceptance, the sharing of needed resources and assistance, and connecting or integrating structurally within a web of ties in a supportive network.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE: IMPACT OF SOCIAL SUPPORT ON HEALTH AND ILLNESS

The outcome of supportive communication on specific health indicators and disease trajectories is complex and varied. Beginning with the basic premise that the principal function of support is to manage health-related uncertainty, helpful supportive resources include 1) expressions of encouragement, hope, reassurance, caring, concern; 2) feedback about one’s health behavior and health risks; 3) general health information and modeling of healthy behavior for health promotion; 4) facilitating coping; 5) provision of lay referrals to professionals in the health system; and 6) assistance, especially with adherence to prescribed health regimens (Albrecht & Adelman, 1987; Brownell & Shumaker, 1985).

266

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

Impact on Mortality and Morbidity

The extent to which social support actually prolongs life is a challenging research focus, given the need for longitudinal data and careful controls, both of which have been difficult to obtain. The extent to which supportive behavior contributes to the reduction of mortality and morbidity and improves the quality of life for patients, families, and communities remains relatively unknown, unexplored, and underfunded (Burish, 2000). The extant evidence is scattered but promising. Following the Alameda study (Berkman & Syme, 1979) showing decreased life expectancy for relatively isolated populations, studies have primarily linked life and death outcomes to support under conditions of chronic disease. Case, Moss, Case, McDermott, and Eberly (1992) found that individuals living alone, as opposed to those living with others, were twice as likely to have a second heart attack—and die from that attack—within six months of suffering the first one. Prominent work has shown a biomedical explanation for this relationship, demonstrating that support positively impacts the immune, endocrine, and cardiovascular systems (see a major review by Uchino et al., 1996). Interestingly, their analyses of findings from 81 studies showed that types of social relationships (particularly family ties) were consistently important in considering physiological functioning. Emotional support, in contrast to informational support, was a better predictor of neuroendocrine function. And, questions remain as to the interaction effect between interactional dynamics and personality predispositions (e.g., hostility, aggression) in affecting relationship quality and health indicators. Psychologists Cacioppo, Berntson, Sheridan, and McClintock (2000) described several ways in which social factors have adverse health outcomes. The implication for health communication from their important review is that positive social support cancels the negative consequences of social isolation by influencing recipients to have more adaptive coping responses to acute and chronic stress, improve patterns of health behavior, improve beliefs and attitudes about life and self-esteem, increase their hope for the future, and deepen their sense of life purpose. In addition to large-scale epidemiologic studies, there is also a growing body of research on the health effects of social support that is disease- or condition-specific. Two areas of research are illustrative examples. First, research on the effects of support on the coping and prognosis of cancer patients illustrates how support may effect treatment of and recovery from life-threatening illness. Second, research on the role of support in facilitating prenatal care and pregnancy outcomes for low-income women shows how support may affect preventive health care. Exemplar 1: Cancer Patients. Cancer patients in particular face a myriad of challenges in order to survive the diagnosis, treatment, and the social and health implications of their disease. The experience of cancer is arguably a time of stress and change. Either the patient turns to available sources of social support or others are prompted to initiate acts of help giving. Regardless, studies have shown patient preferences for different types of support from different sources (Dakof & Taylor, 1990; Neuling & Winefield, 1988; Rose, 1990). Supportive interactions related to cancer are complex and result in varying degrees of success or failure. Cancer survivors have identified specific areas that support attempts need to address: uncertainty about cancer recurrence; self-esteem; body image; somatic distress; a concern for family relationships; increased anxiety experienced by single as opposed to married patients; a desire for effective communication among the survivors, health professionals, and family members, and a need for consideration of the impact of

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

267

employment and insurability issues (Gerlach, Gambosi, & Bowen, 1990; Kaplan & Miner, 2000). Much of the research on social support and cancer survival has been conducted on populations of women with breast cancer. The general conclusion from several studies has been that patients who confide their fears and concerns to loving close ties, such as a spouse or close friend, tend to fare better emotionally (Dunkel-Schetter, Feinstein, Taylor, & Falke, 1992; Lichtman, Taylor, & Wood, 1987). Primomo, Yates, and Woods (1990) found women with chronic illness perceive significantly more support of all types (e.g., emotional reassurance, affirmation, tangible assistance) from their partners/spouses than from others. Lichtman et al. (1987) found that the strength of the precancer marital relationship correlated with postcancer marital satisfaction for both spouses. Postcancer marital adjustment was somewhat associated with the patient’s adjustment to the disease experience. Reciprocity has been empirically shown to be a complex yet important dynamic in close supportive relationships. Vinokur and Vinokur-Kaplan (1990) found that wives (specifically long-term survivors) reported giving more assistance than they received, though husbands of recently diagnosed women reported giving more support than they received (their reports were corroborated by their wives’ reports). Alternatively, Northouse (1988) found that after surgery and beyond, mastectomy patients and their husbands showed a pattern of reciprocity of support in adjustment to the disease course. Support from kin and close friends is most specifically associated with patients’ adjustment to the disease. Although the presence of nonsupportive family and friends is limited, Lichtman et al. (1987) found that nearly half the patients in their study reported surprise at receiving at least one nonsupportive reaction. Gotcher (1992) found both women and men undergoing radiotherapy (women with breast cancer and men with prostate cancer) reported the importance of emotional support, especially valued when provided by family members. However, it was also found that when kin avoided uncomfortable topics, patient-caregiver relationships did not appear to be adversely affected. Zemore and Shepel (1989) found that women with breast cancer received greater emotional support from family and friends than did the control group. Tempelaar, deHaas, de Ruiter, Bakker, van den Heuvel, and van Niuwenhuijzen (1989) found sicker cancer patients reported receiving more help and support than those who were less sick. There is some evidence for positive effects of support group participation for cancer patients (e.g., Fawzy et al., 1993; Spiegel, Kramer, Bloom, & Gottheil, 1989). Such groups may be especially important for those whose own social networks have responded negatively or failed to provide desired forms of support (Bauman, Gervey, & Siegel, 1992; Ward, Leventhal, Easterling, Luchterhand, & Love, 1991). Research on the effects of support groups more generally is addressed later in this chapter in our discussion of support interventions. Exemplar 2: Low-Income Pregnant Women. Recent studies show that supportive communication emerges as a central determinant of the health and well-being of vulnerable populations as well. Data show that kinship support networks are deteriorating in low-income and minority communities due to unemployment, transience, and substance abuse (Roschelle, 1997). This is particularly troubling for the health of low-income pregnant women whose ability to access and utilize the health care system is directly a function of the type of tangible support available to them such as reliable transportation to the clinic (Aved, Irwin, Cummings & Findeisen, 1993; Blankson, Goldernberg, & Keith, 1994; Mikhail, 1999).

268

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

In addition, supportive interactions impact the mother’s level of information, knowledge, experience, feelings, and perceptions about herself and the pregnancy. Informational support from others may help her recognize the symptoms of pregnancy (Maternal and Child Health Services, 1996), understand the reasons to seek care, and overcome perceptions of the exam procedures as relatively painful and difficult to endure (Byrd, Mullen, Selwyn, & Lorimor, 1996). Informational support will also help a low-income woman better navigate the complex and often daunting health care system by providing advice on when and where to obtain timely prenatal care services, referrals to physicians who accept Medicaid patients (and treat them respectfully), and information on whether care can be initiated while awaiting Medicaid eligibility approval (Omar & Schiffman, 1995; Meachen & Kelley, 1991; Zaid, Fullerton, & Moore, 1996). Access is affected by the pregnant woman’s supportive residential and relational environment. Those who are transient (Higgins & Woods, 1999) and/or living in distressed urban neighborhoods (Conrad, Hollenbach, Fullerton, & Feigelson, 1998; Perloff & Jaffee, 1999) have limited access. Unmarried women, those women lacking a relationship with the baby’s father, and those women who are victims of partner physical violence are less likely than women without these circumstances to connect with care services (D’Ascoli, Alexander, Petersen & Kogan, 1997; Wiemann, Berenson, Pino, & McCombs, 1997). As in access, the mother’s relational and residential environment is important for maintaining utilization of prenatal care services. Women who report social support from their partner are more likely to utilize care (Gazmararian, Arrington, Bailey, Schwarz, & Koplan, 1999; Schaffer & Lia-Hoagberg, 1997). THEORETICAL EXPLANATIONS

Whereas explanations for the processes and effects of social support are many and varied, with respect to health issues, two areas are especially fruitful for theorizing: the structural aspects of supportive relationships (i.e., networks) and the transactional processes occurring in those relationships. Communication processes are involved in developing and maintaining supportive networks and supportive relationships. In addition, communication processes are the medium through which support is provided to individuals as they cope with everyday stresses and health crises. Supportive Networks and Relationships

While supportive communication is most traditionally thought to occur in dyads and group settings, supportive interactions never occur in a vacuum. Rather, they occur within the context of larger support networks (i.e., sets of overlapping relational linkages, Albrecht & Adelman, 1987; Penner, Dovidio, & Albrecht, 2000). In short, researchers have directed attention to determining the patterns of communication that are most likely to create health protective social environments and enhance pathways for access to health resources. Researchers also posit a reciprocal relationship between support networks and health behaviors; networks of supportive ties both impact and are impacted by such risk factors as smoking or substance abuse and preventive practices such as screening for early cancer detection and enhanced physical activity (Heaney & Israel, 1995). To describe these patterns, support networks are characterized by a series of structural indices including size (the number of members of the network, such as the number of support providers an individual perceives in his or her relational horizon) and density (the extent to which network members are connected to one another, usually expressed as a ratio of the number of actual ties to the number of theoretically possible ties).

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

269

Multiplexity/uniplexity refers to the extent to which relational partners are more closely linked through multiple roles, such as whether two people are not only friends but also coworkers and neighbors. Uniplex ties are limited to links where partners have a weak tie or singular role relationship (such as teacher-student) and hence their relationship is more limited in context, scope and character. Finally, homogeneity/heterogeneity demonstrates the extent to which members of the support network are similar or dissimilar in terms of sociodemographic characteristics, communication styles and behaviors, personality predispositions, and character traits. Nurturing, caring, and tangible assistance are likely to be expected and provided more readily in closer, multiplex, dense relationships, which also likely carry a presumption of reciprocity of supportive behavior for the future. Close ties also help reinforce and regulate health behavior. The social feedback model (Hammer, 1983), for example, demonstrates how dense, overlapping linkages can influence the distribution of disease and infection by providing social pressure to behave in ways that prevent the spread of disease and infection (i.e., regulating eating behavior to curb obesity, providing resources to increase physical activity, encouraging healthful behaviors such as hand washing or safer sexual practices). Whereas close ties provide comfort, safety, and assistance with adhering to health regimens, weak ties are more open, with fewer obligatory norms (Albrecht & Adelman, 1987; Penner et al., 2000), while at the same time providing a sense of attachment to a wider community and a sense of place (e.g., Unger & Wandersman, 1985). Support from weak ties likely increases the diversity or heterogeneity of one’s contacts while increasing information, goods, and services. With greater diversity comes the opportunity for increased social comparison that can help motivate and model improved health behavior. Weaker ties also have lower temporal reliability and fewer rules and norms, thus enabling lower risk discussion of higher risk topics related to personal needs and behavioral practices (see Parks, Adelman, & Albrecht, 1987). However, it is important to recognize that both close and weak ties are necessary to offset the limitations of each. Probably most noteworthy is that weak ties may be less reliable in times of health need and offer less security and sense of belongingness, though close ties may be resistant to change and overly protective, even delaying recovery (e.g., McLeroy, DeVellis, DeVellis, Kaplan, & Toole, 1984). Supportive Communication and Coping

A distinct and complementary way in which communication is involved in social support and health focuses on the ways in which messages or conversations about stresses can help or hinder individual efforts at managing everyday stresses and health crises. This message (or conversation) level of analysis of social support focuses on the particular actions that network members or relational partners undertake with the intention of helping one another cope. The focus of research is on 1) understanding the conditions under which enacted support has beneficial outcomes; and 2) on identifying the features of enacted support that might make some attempts at assistance more beneficial than others. As Gottlieb (1983, p. 51) has observed, studies of support networks and studies of support messages each provide useful information about social support and health: The study of helping behaviors gives us an appreciation of the content of support, and the study of network structure tells us how the social environment may be patterned or organized as a flexible system for maintaining health and responding to crisis. One body of research that is relevant to an understanding of how conversations provide social support is the literature that has measured the frequency of enacted support and its effects on health and well-being. Enacted support may be defined simply as the things

270

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

relational partners do and say with the intention of helping one another manage problems and stresses. Several widely used measures of enacted support assess the frequency of various kinds of assistance an individual has received (e.g., how often others have provided tangible, informational, emotional, and appraisal support during the last month). Examples include the Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviors (Barrera, Sandler, & Ramsay, 1981), the Arizona Social Support Interview Schedule (Barrera, 1981), and the Stress Questionnaire (Dunkel-Schetter, Folkman, & Lazarus, 1987). The findings on the effects of enacted support on health and well-being vary widely and seem initially contradictory (for reviews, see Cohen & Wills, 1985; Cooper, 1986; Dunkel-Schetter & Bennett, 1990; Leppin & Schwarzer, 1990). First, some studies find that individuals with more enacted support benefit, although these effects are usually evident only for some types of support and under some types of conditions (e.g., Cooper, 1986; Dean, Kolody, Wood, & Ensel, 1989; Lin, Woefel, & Light, 1985; Pennix, Van Tilburg, Deeg, Kriegsman, Boeke, & Van Eijk, 1997; Sandler & Lakey, 1982; Wethington & Kessler, 1986). Second, some studies report the counterintuitive finding that individuals who receive more enacted support report higher levels of stress (Aneshensel & Frerichs, 1982; Barrera, 1981; Cohen & Hoberman, 1983; Sandler & Barrera, 1984) and higher levels of distress (Barrera, 1981; Cohen & Hoberman, 1983; Coyne, Aldwin, & Lazarus, 1981; Fiore, Becker, & Coppel, 1983; Husaini, Neff, Newbrough, & Seymour, 1982; Kauffman & Beehr, 1986). However, it is possible to interpret these findings in ways that are nonetheless consistent with an intuitive belief that overall, enacted support is beneficial in coping with stress. For example, a positive correlation between amount of enacted support and stress might reflect the mobilization of social support, such that as stress increases, individuals seek out more support from their social networks (Barrera, 1986). Similarly, a positive correlation between amount of support and distress might reflect a triage model (Barrera, 1986) in which those who experience the greatest distress elicit the greatest amounts of help and aid from others. These correlations might even be expected to vary over time: The experience of distress might initially elicit higher levels of support (triage) and then, at some later point, these helpful overtures might result in an alleviation of distress (Schwarzer & Leppin, 1991). Further, a reason for the mixed, null, and negative findings on the effects of enacted support is that measures of the sheer amount or frequency of support received overlook the quality and appropriateness of the support. One may receive information and advice about how to cope with a health problem and yet find that the advice is uninformed and therefore of little use. Worse yet, the advice others give might lead an individual to feel that others are critical of his or her own coping efforts or that others are condescending by providing information the individual already knows. Well-intentioned efforts at support could create more stress in the form of relational conflict or increased uncertainty. Another body of research involves observing messages or conversations in which support is enacted and identifying what features of the interaction are associated with participants’ evaluations of the interaction. These studies elicit from strangers or relational partners a discussion of some stress or problem and then ask respondents to rate the perceived supportiveness or helpfulness of the interaction. Trained coders identify different types of support that are enacted in these conversations so that researchers may test whether different types or features of support are associated with greater or lesser recipient satisfaction with support. In some studies, individuals who do not participate in a conversation either rate a videotape of a conversation or rate hypothetical messages for their helpfulness. This work generally shows that specific features of messages or conversations are linked with participants’ (and/or observers’) perceptions that support is in fact helpful. However,

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

271

these studies have usually focused on university populations and everyday stresses, so it is unclear whether similar behavioral patterns are typical or effective for other populations and for more serious kinds of stresses or illness. Although there is evidence that everyday stresses do contribute to health and well-being (e.g., DeLongis, Coyne, Dakof, Folkman, & Lazarus, 1982), it is nonetheless important to examine how support interactions may be similar and different in the context of coping with life-threatening disease or the ongoing demands associated with care giving or managing one’s own chronic illness. In addition, the outcome measures in these studies are typically participant satisfaction or observer evaluation, so it is unclear whether and how these perceptions may be related to health and well-being. Although these various types of research on support messages and conversations have different foci and different strengths and limitations, several generalizations about the features of effective enacted support have begun to emerge from this body of research. First, there is evidence that problem-solving forms of enacted support (e.g., advice, information, tangible aid) and emotion-focused forms of enacted support (e.g., expressions of concern, belonging, and esteem) may be beneficial under different circumstances (Cutrona & Russell, 1990). As illustrated in some studies, tangible support is beneficial only for those with serious health problems or high levels of disability. Tangible support may have no systematic effect, or even create negative effects, for those whose problems or disability are less severe, perhaps because these individuals do not need support and therefore experience aid as critical or intrusive (e.g., Pennix et al., 1997; Wethington & Kessler, 1986). Furthermore, of these two broad types of support, emotion-focused support may be more likely from a cultural standpoint to be perceived positively in a wider variety of situations (e.g., Cutrona & Suhr, 1992, 1994). In their review of 17 interventions targeting various health behaviors and markers of health status, Cwikel and Israel (1987) concluded that provision of emotional support was associated with stronger treatment effects than informational support. In contrast, the benefits of problem-solving support may be more contingent on the recipient’s needs and resources, the provider’s expertise, and the quality of the information, advice, or aid offered. Although emotional support may be beneficial in a wide variety of circumstances, it is still possible to differentiate more and less effective forms. Burleson and his colleagues have found that person-centered messages, which acknowledge, elaborate, and legitimate the feelings of a distressed other, are rated by respondents as more sensitive and effective than messages that reject, deny, or attempt to draw attention away from feelings (see Burleson, 1994, for a review). Burleson and Goldsmith (1997) suggested this is because messages that encourage elaboration of feelings assist the distressed person in reappraising a stressful situation and his or her coping resources. Informational support also may be delivered in more or less effective ways. Goldsmith and colleagues have studied some of the factors that shape reactions to advice (Goldsmith, 1994, 1999, 2000; Goldsmith & Fitch, 1997; Goldsmith & MacGeorge, 2000). The theories of nondirective or client-centered helping that form the basis for many support interventions and crisis-training programs frequently discourage advice giving as a response to others in distress. However, among laypersons, advice is a common type of social support offered in response to another person’s problem. It may be helpful in providing new solutions and communicating the speaker’s concern and desire to help, but advice can also be perceived as criticism or “butting in” (Goldsmith & Fitch, 1997). Recipients’ reactions to advice may be affected by the degree to which advice employs face work: features of a message or conversation that communicate respect for a recipient’s autonomy and acceptance for the recipient’s identity. Goldsmith has found that the content that accompanies

272

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

a piece of advice (Goldsmith, 1999) and the sequence in which advice is introduced into a conversation (Goldsmith, 2000) are both associated with the degree to which advice is experienced as face honoring or face threatening. In turn, respect for face is associated with the perceived helpfulness of advice. Another generalization that emerges from the research on support messages and conversations is the importance of relational coordination in achieving satisfactory support outcomes. Talking about problems and stresses is a potentially problematic type of conversation, in which participants may experience challenges in determining how to 1) introduce problem topics into conversation and when to transition to other, lighter topics (Jefferson, 1984); 2) respond to others’ painful self-disclosures or to questions that may solicit them (Coupland, Coupland, & Giles, 1991); and/or 3) signal a departure from conversational norms so that one person may engage in extended narratives about a problem he or she faces (Metts, Backhaus, & Kazoleas, 1995). Although many studies have focused on the qualities and effects of the support provided in an interaction, the conversational contributions of the support seeker/recipient may also influence outcomes. For example, there is variability in the ways in which support seekers ask for help (Goldsmith & Parks, 1990). The degree to which help is explicitly or directly requested may also influence whether and how effectively it is provided (Barbee & Cunningham, 1995; Cutrona & Russell, 1990; Dovidio & Gaertner, 1983; Rosen, 1983; Wills, 1983). In addition, the ways in which a support seeker presents his or her coping abilities can affect how others react and their willingness to interact (Coyne, 1976; Silver, Wortman, & Crofton, 1990). Similarly, when relational partners have different ways of coping with a shared stressor, this may reduce their satisfaction with one another’s support attempts (e.g., if one partner wishes to avoid discussion of a problem or emotion while the other wishes to engage in discussion, Barbee & Cunningham, 1995; Gottlieb & Wagner, 1991). Given the range of dynamics above, several researchers have called for a revised conceptualization of social support in close relationships. This new framing of support casts it as a more complex dyadic phenomenon, in which partners must not only cope with a stressor but also cope with the relational strains created by the stressor and with the need to coordinate their individual coping attempts (Cutrona, 1996; Lyons, Sullivan, Ritvo, & Coyne, 1995; O’Brien & DeLongis, 1997). IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND PRACTICE Research

Social support will continue as an important research area for health communication scholars. Several broad directions include longitudinal studies that track the overtime changes in the stability/instability of community support networks in vulnerable populations, such as low-income, minority groups (see Roschelle, 1997), studies evaluating support program interventions such as those described in this chapter (below) under “practice” implications, and increased testing of general biobehavioral models that include supportive relationships and psychoneuroimmunology, necessitating interdisciplinary scientific initiatives (e.g., see Andersen, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1994). However, considering specific health communication constructs, three key areas include further inquiry regarding the process of transacting support, the relative efficacy of the placement or type of channel used (e.g., electronic or computer mediated), and the context of supportive interactions (and cultural codes/expectations). First, analysis of real-time supportive transactions, as related to health issues, is gaining increased attention.

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

273

Coping with medical information, particularly when facing life-threatening illness, can be overwhelming and highly stressful for patients and their families. Even highly educated patients may have difficulty following complex medical terminology, treatment alternatives, and regimens as well as developing a cognitive map to navigate the maze of the health care system (Albrecht et al., 1999). Heightened anxiety may exacerbate the near inevitability of error, miscommunication, and misunderstanding (Mortensen, 1997; Taylor, 1992). Preliminary work shows that supportive messages from providers may actually enable cancer patients to cope with their lack of technical understanding of medical terms and facilitate their ability to move forward with treatment decisions in a positive frame of mind (Albrecht et al., 1999). The opportunity to view the ways in which supportive messages enable people to tolerate their uncertainty and manage the experience of miscommunication regarding informational content (see Mortensen, 1997) is worthy of careful descriptive and experimental study. Second, with the advent of the digital and electronic age, alternative channels for support are more available, more accessible, and can serve a variety of needs. Work by Walther and Boyd (in press) and others in this novel area shows that support groups on the Internet abound; the most well known are those serving cancer survivors, caregivers, and people with chronic diseases. The benefits of instant access, anonymity, and participatory control (as noted above) provide alternatives for people seeking support but also seeking to meet needs regarding, timing, privacy, and quantity of support. As a source of weak tie support (Albrecht & Adelman, 1987; Walther & Boyd, in press), computer-mediated channels provide a wellspring of research opportunities, particularly for investigating how electronic sources of support can transcend the problems with traditional, face-toface contact (Walther & Boyd, in press). From a health standpoint, research is needed to track the ways in which computer-mediated support can reach high-risk populations that perhaps have not been traditional users of the Internet (e.g., homeless persons, low-income pregnant women, the elderly). Electronic support is an opportunity for greater access to the health system, monitoring of conditions and disease, information, and importantly, a relief from isolation and loneliness. The extent to which this is feasible and effective is yet to be determined at a community level. Further investigation of situationally specific needs is also important for capturing the subtle and complex ways in which support may meet (or fail to meet) task, emotional, and relational needs (Goldsmith et al., 2000). Such analysis will also help with understanding the reasons why support attempts may falter in missing the needs of recipients. For example, head and neck cancer patients face mortality concerns as well as altered appearance and functional impairment. While perceptions of the availability of support are associated with lessened depression, received support is associated with more depressive symptoms (De Leeuw, De Graeff, Ros, Hordijk, Blijham, & Winnubst, 2000) suggesting that enacted support falls short of meeting the depth of their psychosocial needs. In another example, praise or other more obvious messages of support may lose impact over time in relationships where larger rewards/costs are at stake (i.e., health professionals in task environments). Instead, supervisors’ messages about innovation or new treatment strategies have correlated highly (e.g., r = .78) with global judgments of support (Albrecht & Halsey, 1992). Finally, the social/relational, physical, and temporal context in which support is sought, provided, and transacted is a key target for further study. Albrecht et al. (1994) noted that the findings on supportive communication are culturally bound to limited settings and contexts. However, health issues in particular are often defined in terms of cultural standards, meanings, and expectations. Tracking the mechanisms by which social support is

274

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

transacted and understood to impact health outcomes across contexts has important theoretical and applied implications. In some Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, for example, the family network regulates health decision making and information exchange for the patient. The relative meaning of “supportive behavior” and “for whom” is a culturally framed practice. Historical contexts readily emerge as important, as well. Network studies concluding that tightly knit communities are uniformly problematic for change and promoting action are ignoring the evidence of the rescue networks among strangers and acquaintances in Denmark that mobilized overnight to save 8,000 Jews from deportation to death camps. Overlapping structural ties together with a strongly shared value system and communication code enabled spontaneous, prosocial, large-scale coordination (see Albrecht, 1994a). Such comparative cultural evidence also expands the “strength of weak ties” notion beyond what has been previously understood. Finally, motives for helping and for help seeking may well be mediated by cultural expectations and norms. In particular, much of what is known about social support regarding events of loss and trauma are based on studies of close relationships in the United States and has not expanded to the level of comparisons across individualistic versus collectivistic systems (e.g., Penner et al., 2000; Penner, 2000; Penner & Finkelstein, 1998; Penner, Rioux, & Tilman, 1997). Practice

The practical implications of social support are the basis for much of the widespread interest in this topic. In his early and influential essay, Cassel (1976) suggested it was likely to be more immediately feasible to attempt to improve and strengthen an individual’s social support rather than reduce the exposure to stress. Consequently, research on social support held great promise for improving preventive health services. As a result, there is a large body of descriptive and evaluation-based studies on various social support interventions. Many different kinds of programs are subsumed under this umbrella, from one-on-one peer support or problem-solving assistance to self-help and support groups, to programs that attempt to increase interaction within a neighborhood or apartment building, to public health campaigns that attempt to change attitudes toward seeking and providing help and aid. This body of work is obviously important in its own right in documenting the ways in which findings on social support may be applied to bring about improvement in individuals’ lives. It also has the potential to provide a testing ground for some of the causal relationships between support and health that are inferred from the kinds of studies that are largely correlational and often cross-sectional (Ell, 1984; Rook & Dooley, 1985). Despite the large number of intervention programs that have been reported in the literature, the evidence for their effectiveness is somewhat problematic. There is considerable evidence that support interventions can be effective (e.g., Cwikel & Israel, 1987; Gottlieb, 1983; Iacovino & Reesor, 1997; Wortman & Conway, 1985). However, many studies simply presume that social support is a good end and provide anecdotal reports of program success stories; even those studies that include an evaluation component often do not provide sufficiently rigorous tests of effects. In their 1987 review, Cwikel and Israel estimated that only 20 to 25% of social-network or social-support intervention studies used experimental designs that permit conclusive findings regarding the effectiveness of the intervention. As Baumgarten and her colleagues (1988) observed, research investigators, mental health planners, and members of the general public have strong beliefs concerning the ability of social support interventions to produce beneficial effects on well-being.

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

275

These beliefs are founded on a modest empirical foundation and may persist because they embody values that many wish to foster. There are a number of reasons why it may be difficult to conduct rigorous evaluation of social-support interventions. One difficulty concerns the kinds of outcomes and evidence that constitute criteria for evaluation. Interventions may have greater impact on quality of life or recipient satisfaction than they do on policy-relevant outcomes such as institutionalization or reduced need for professional services (Gottlieb, 1985; Kiesler, 1985). In fact, to the extent that social-support interventions entail advocacy for the needs of support recipients, they may actually increase the use of services (Chapman & Pancoast, 1985). A related issue concerns how much is expected of support interventions. Those who are most disadvantaged in society may face such extreme environmental challenges that social support may only reduce the rate of health or economic decline or lessen the magnitude of stressful difficulties, rather than alleviating problems entirely. Another difficulty with evaluating intervention programs derives from potentially competing considerations: designing maximally effective programs versus isolating what features of the program contribute to effects. Individuals facing serious life stresses are likely to have multifaceted needs or support deficits that require multifaceted services or interventions. This makes it difficult to determine which components of an intervention are most effective and why. For example, the Lifestyle Heart Trial (Billings, Scherwitz, Sullivan, Sparler, & Ornish, 1996; Ornish, 1990; Ornish et al., 1990) has reported remarkable physiological and psychological effects, including some reversal of cardiovascular disease. However, the program includes multiple components in addition to the provision of support (e.g., smoking cessation, exercise, diet, stress management). The ability to separately test each of the various components of such a program may be limited by the number of volunteers who are willing to participate. There is also the ethical concern of randomly assigning participants to a unidimensional program in light of evidence that a multifaceted program saves lives. Given these complications, and the need for more research that provides evidence of intervention effectiveness, Cwikel and Israel (1987) provided the following suggestions for studies on social-support interventions: 1) perform randomized controlled trials and carefully conducted quasi-experimental designs, which are advantageous; 2) provide information on acceptance rates among volunteers, attendance, and drop-outs; 3) choose measures of effects that correspond to the psychological, physical, or behavioral changes intended; 4) measure change in social network characteristics and perceptions of social support to establish whether the intervention functioned as expected; 5) conduct long-term follow-up; and 6) describe and evaluate the actual intervention processes involved. The development and evaluation of social-support interventions has also been limited by the state of theory development in research. As Lanza and Revenson (1993) noted, research is at a stage where enough is known about support processes to design interventions, yet not enough to know how and why these interventions should work. Unless program designers know what it is about social support that works, and through what processes positive effects occur, it is difficult for them to target interventions and know what processes to facilitate (Heller & Rook, 1997; Kiesler, 1985). Rook and Dooley (1985) concluded this is perhaps the “most pressing issue requiring attention” (p. 23). ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

We find it difficult to separate the study of social support from a consideration of ethical issues. There is often an ethical motivation for choosing to study social-support, in that

276

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

supportive communication, supportive relationships, and supportive networks embody some of what is best and most altruistic in human beings (Albrecht, 1994b). At the same time, study of the human needs that inspire social support should also force us to confront societal inequities and disparities in work conditions, access to health care, distribution of resources, and vulnerability to stress and disease (Pilisuk & Minkler, 1985). Indeed the origins of the social-support concept reflect both a moral agenda to improve life and some potentially questionable sociopolitical pressures to do so in ways that are inexpensive (e.g., by utilizing people’s own networks rather than costly professional or social services) and least likely to disrupt the status quo (e.g., by changing the individuals who suffer from stress rather than changing the environmental conditions that create it). Ethical questions are unavoidable when taking theory into practice and attempting to design interventions (Brownell & Shumaker, 1985). Is enough known about support to be able to design programs that will provide benefits commensurate to the expenditure of scarce resources, commitment of time and energy, and trust of research participants? Is enough known to be confident that selected interventions will do more good than harm and not unleash some of the potentially detrimental facets of support? Are interventions occurring not only at the level of individual agency and personal relationships but also at the larger structural levels that contribute to disparities in access, resources, stress, and vulnerability? Are efforts directed to areas of greatest need rather than to areas of greatest familiarity and convenience? Are interventions that are planned and directed by members of one sociocultural group sufficiently sensitive to the needs, values, and practices of other groups? Internet support groups for various life stresses and illnesses provide an interesting case study in which to raise many of these questions. Among academics, lay participants, and funding agencies there has been an explosion of enthusiasm for and research on social support provided in electronic media and several studies report beneficial effects of participation in these groups (e.g., Alemi et al., 1996; Bass, McClendon, Brennan, & McCarthy, 1998; Dunham et al., 1998; Hawkins et al., 1997; Heller, Roccoforte, Hsieh, Cook, & Pickett, 1997). Computer-mediated support groups may increase access to similar others for individuals who are physically disabled or who cope with rare diseases, reduce the stigma experienced in face-to-face interactions, increase comfort in disclosing difficult topics, and provide an opportunity to produce an uninterrupted narrative. However, just as early research on face-to-face support was characterized by optimism and then tempered by studies that documented negative effects of support, so too, research on Internet support groups is beginning to document negative interactions in Internet support groups, negative effects of excessive participation in Internet groups, and variability in the supportiveness of group dynamics (Krautet et al., 1998; Alexander, Peterson, & Hollingshead, in press). Computer-mediated support groups may suffer from unregulated negative or critical messages, provide inaccurate information, and decrease involvement in more multiplex face-to-face relationships. In addition to the need to collect more information on the relative effectiveness of computer-mediated support groups, as well as on the design features that optimize their benefits, several ethical questions should be addressed. For example, are Internet support resources widely accessible? If not, what are the implications of shifting research and funding priorities to a study of Internet support as compared to other kinds of interventions? Even as access to Internet support increases, is this a source likely to be considered credible and plausible among those populations with greatest need? Access to technology may not be the only barrier to implementing Internet support—sociocultural differences in the uses of and attitudes toward technology may also prevent Internet support groups from reaching

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

277

some segments of society. What part of the enthusiasm for researching Internet support groups is motivated by the convenience of access and the researcher’s own familiarity with and use of the Internet? Does this detract from other interventions that may be more appropriate for other needs and in other populations? CONCLUSION

From a health standpoint, supportive communication plays a complicated direct and mediating role in the course and experience of health and illness. Though an inexact body of scientific findings, the research literature on social support continues to attract scholarly interest. Promising frameworks and directions for research point the way for future work, with rich implications for practice and interventions. REFERENCES Albrecht, T. L. (1994a). Social support and community: An historical account of the rescue networks in Denmark. In B. Burleson, T. Albrecht, & I. Sarason (Eds.), Communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships and community (pp. 267–280). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Albrecht, T. L. (1994b). Social support in oncology medical settings. Presented at the Fourth Kentucky Conference on Health Communication, University of Kentucky, Lexington, April. Albrecht, T. L., & Adelman, M. B. (1984). Social support and life stress: New directions for communication research. Human Communication Research, 11, 3–32. Albrecht, T. L., Adelman, M. B., & (1987). Communicating social support. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Albrecht, T. L., Blanchard, C., Ruckdeschel, J. C., Coovert, M., & Strongbow, R. (1999). Strategic physician communication and oncology clinical trials. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 17, 3324–3332. Albrecht, T. L., Burleson, B. R., & Goldsmith, D. (1994). Supportive communication. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (revised ed.) (pp. 419–449). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Albrecht, T. L., & Halsey, J. (1992). Mutual support in mixed status relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 9, 237–252. Albrecht, T. L., Irey, K. V., & Mundy, A. K. (1982). Integration in a communication network as a mediator of stress. Social Work, 27, 229–234. Alemi, F., Mosavel, M., Stephens, R. C., Ghadiri, A., Krishnaswamy, J., & Thakkar, H. (1996). Electronic self-help and support groups. Medical Care, 34, 32–44. Alexander, S. C., Peterson, J. L., & Hollingshead, A. B. (in press). Help at your keyboard: Support groups on the internet. In L. Frey (Ed.), Group communication in context: Study of bona fide groups. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Andersen, B. L., Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., & Glaser, R. (1994). A biobehavioral model of cancer stress and disease course. American Psychologist, 49, 389–404. Aneshensel, C. S., & Frerichs, R. R. (1982). Stress, support, and depression: A longitudinal causal model. Journal of Community Psychology, 10, 363–376. Aved, B. M., Irwin, M. M., Cummings, L. S., & Findeisen, N. (1993). Barriers to prenatal care for low-income women. Western Journal of Medicine, 158, 493–498. Barbee, A. P., & Cunningham, M. (1995). An experimental approach to social support communications: Interactive coping in close relationships. In B. Burleson (Ed.), Communication yearbook 18 (pp. 381–413). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

278

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

Barrera, M. (1981). Social support in the adjustment of pregnant adolescents: Assessment issues. In B. H. Gottlieb (Ed.), Social networks and social support (pp. 69–96). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Barrera, M. (1986). Distinctions between social support concepts, measures, and models. American Journal of Community Psychology, 14, 413–445. Barrera, M., Sandler, I. N., & Ramsay, T. B. (1981). Preliminary development of a scale of social support: Studies of college students. American Journal of Community Psychology, 9(4), 435–447. Bass, D. M., McClendon, M. J., Brennan, P. F., & McCarthy, C. (1998). The buffering effect of a computer support network on caregiver strain. Journal of Aging and Health, 10, 20–43. Bauman, L. J., Gervey, R., & Siegel, K. (1992). Factors associated with cancer patients’ participation in support groups. Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, 10, 1–19. Baumgarten, M., Thomas, D., Courval, L. P., & Infante-Rivard, C. (1988). Evaluation of a mutual help network for the elderly residents of planned housing. Psychology and Aging, 3, 393–398. Berkman, L. F., & Syme, S. L. (1979). Social networks, host resistance, and mortality: A nineyear follow-up study of Alameda County residents. American Journal of Epidemiology, 109, 186–204. Billings, J. H., Scherwitz, L. W., Sullivan, R., Sparler, S., & Ornish, D. M. (1996). The Lifestyle Heart Trial: Comprehensive treatment and group support therapy. In R. Allan & S. Scheidt (Eds.), Heart and mind: The practice of cardiac psychology (pp. 233–253). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Blankson, M. L., Goldernberg, R. L., & Keith, B. (1994). Noncompliance of high-risk pregnant women in keeping appointments at an obstetric clinic. Southern Medical Journal, 87, 634– 638. Brashers, D. E., Neidig, J. L., & Goldsmith, D. J. (2000 June). The role of social support in the management of uncertainty for persons living with HIV or AIDS. Paper presented at the meeting of the International Communication Association, Acapulco, Mexico. Brownell, A., & Shumaker, S. A. (1985). Where do we go from here? The policy implications of social support. Journal of Social Issues, 41, 111–121. Burish, T. G. (2000). The role of behavioral and psychosocial science in reducing cancer morbidity and mortality. The Oncologist, 5, 263–266. Burleson, B. R. (1994). Comforting messages: Significance, approaches, and effects. In B. R. Burleson, T. L. Albrecht, & I. G. Sarason (Eds.), Communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships, and community (pp. 3–28). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Burleson, B., Albrecht, T., & Sarason, I. (Eds.) (1994). Communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships and community. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Burleson, B. R. & Goldsmith, D. J. (1997). How comforting messages work: Some mechanisms through which messages may alleviate emotional distress. In P. A. Anderson & L. K. Guerrero (Eds.), Handbook of communication and emotion: Research, theory, applications, and contexts (pp. 245–280). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Byrd, T. L., Mullen, P. D., Selwyn, B. J., & Lorimor, R. (1996). Initiation of prenatal care by low-income Hispanic women in Houston. Public Health Reports, 111, 536–540. Cacioppo, J. T., Berntson, G. G., Sheridan, J. F., & McClintock, M. K. (2000). Multilevel integrative analyses of human behavior: Social neuroscience and the complementing nature of social and biological approaches. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 829–843. Caplan, G. (1976). The family as a support system. In G. Kaplan & M. Killilea (Eds.), Support systems and mutual help (pp. 19–36). New York: Grune & Stratton.

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

279

Case, R. B., Moss, A. J., Case, N., McDermott, M., & Eberly, S. (1992). Living alone after myocardial infarction: Impact on prognosis. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267, 515–519. Cassel, J. (1976). The contribution of the environment to host resistance. American Journal of Epidemiology, 104, 107–123. Chapman, N. J., & Pancoast, D. (1985). Working with the informal helping networks of the elderly: The experiences of three programs. Journal of Social Issues, 41, 47–63. Cobb, S. (1976). Social support as a moderator of life stress. Psychosomatic Medicine, 38, 300–314. Cohen, S., & Hoberman, H. M. (1983). Positive events and social supports as buffers of life change stress. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 13, 99–125. Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98, 310–357. Conrad, J. K., Hollenbach, K. A., Fullerton, J. T., & Feigelson, H. S. (1998). Use of prenatal services by Hispanic women in San Diego County: A comparison of urban and rural settings. Journal of Nurse Midwifery, 43, 90–96. Cooper, M. L. (1986). The role of supportive transactions and perceived functional support as stress buffers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. Coupland, N., Coupland, J., & Giles, H. (1991). Language, society, and the elderly: Discourse, identity, and ageing. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Coyne, J. C. (1976). Depression and the response of others. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85, 186–193. Coyne, J. C., Aldwin, C., & Lazarus, R. S. (1981). Depression and coping in stressful episodes. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 90, 439–447. Cutrona, C. (1996). Social support in couples. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cutrona, C. E., & Russell, D. W. (1990). Types of social support and specific stress: Toward a theory of optimal matching. In B. R. Sarason, I. G. Sarason, & G. R. Pierce (Eds.), Social support: An interactional view (pp. 319–366). New York: Wiley. Cutrona, C. E., & Suhr, J. A. (1992). Controllability of stressful events and satisfaction with spouse support behaviors. Communication Research, 19, 154–174. Cutrona, C. E., & Suhr, J. A. (1994). Social support communication in the context of marriage: An analysis of couples’ supportive interactions. In B. R. Burleson, T. L. Albrecht, & I. G. Sarason (Eds.), Communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships, and community (pp. 113–135). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cwikel, J. M., & Israel, B. A. (1987). Examining mechanisms of social support and social networks: A review of health-related intervention studies. Public Health Review, 15, 159– 193. D’Ascoli, P. T., Alexander, G. R., Petersen, D. J., & Kogan, M. D. (1997). Parental factors influencing patterns of prenatal care utilization. Journal of Perinatology, 17, 283–287. Dakof, G. A., & Taylor, S. E. (1990). Victims’ perceptions of social support: What is helpful from whom? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 80–89. Dean, A., Kolody, B., Wood, P., & Ensel, W. M. (1989). The effects of types of social support from adult children on depression in elderly persons. American Journal of Community Psychology, 17, 341–355. De Leeuw, J. R., De Graeff, A., Ros, W. J., Hordijk, G. J., Blijham, G. H., & Winnubst, J. A. (2000). Negative and positive influences of social support on depression in patients with head and neck cancer: A prospective study. Psychooncology, 9, 20–28. DeLongis, A., Coyne, J. C., Dakof, G., Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1982). Relation of daily hassles, uplifts, and major life events to health status. Health Psychology, 1, 119–136.

280

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (1983). Race, normative structure, and help-seeking. In B. M. DePaulo, A. Nadler, & J. D. Fisher (Eds.), New directions in helping: Volume 2 Help-seeking (pp. 285–302). New York: Academic Press. Dunham, P. J., Hurshman, A., Litwin, E., Gusella, J., Ellsworth, C., & Dodd, P. W. D. (1998). Computer-mediated social support: Single young mothers as a model system. American Journal of Community Psychology, 26, 281–306. Dunkel-Schetter, C., & Bennett, T. L. (1990). Differentiating the cognitive and behavioral aspects of social support. In I. G. Sarason, B. R. Sarason, & G. R. Pierce (Eds.), Social support: An interactional view. New York: Wiley. Dunkel-Schetter, C., Feinstein, L. G., Taylor, S. E., & Falke, R. L. (1992). Patterns of coping with cancer. Health Psychology, 11, 79–87. Dunkel-Schetter, C., Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. (1987). Correlates of social support receipt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 71–80. Ell, K. (1984). Social networks, social support, and health status: A review. Social Service Review, 58, 133–149. Eyres, S. J., & MacElveen-Hoehn, P. (1983, April). Theoretical issues in the study of social support. Paper presented at the conference “Social Support: What is It?” University of Washington, Seattle. Fawzy, F. I., Fawzy, N. W., Hyun, C. S., Elashoff, R., Guthrie, D., Fahey, J. L., & Morton, D. L. (1993). Malignant melanoma: Effects of early structured psychiatric intervention, coping, and affective state on recurrence and survival 6 years later. Archives of General Psychiatry, 50, 681–689. Fiore, J., Becker, J., & Coppel, D. B. (1983). Social network interactions: A buffer or a stress? American Journal of Community Psychology, 11, 423–439. Ford, L. A., Babrow, A. S., & Stohl, C. (1996). Social support messages and the management of uncertainty in the experience of breast cancer: An application of problematic integration theory. Communication Monographs, 63, 189–207. Gazmararian, J. A., Arrington, T. L., Bailey, C. M., Schwarz, K. S., & Koplan, J. P. (1999). Prenatal care for low-income women enrolled in a managed-care organization. Obstetrics and Gynecology, 94, 177–184. Gerlach, R. W., Gambosi, J. R., & Bowen, R. H. (1990). Cancer survivors’ needs reported by survivors and their families. Journal of Cancer Education, 5, 63–70. Goldsmith, D. (1994). The role of facework in supportive communication. In B. Burleson T. L., Albrecht, & I. Sarason (Eds.), The communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships, and community (pp. 29–49). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Goldsmith, D. J. (1999). Content-based resources for giving face-sensitive advice in troubles talk episodes. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 32, 303–336. Goldsmith, D. J., (2000). Soliciting advice: The role of sequential placement in mitigating face threat. Communication Monographs, 67, 1–19. Goldsmith, D. J., & Fitch, K. (1997). The normative context of advice as social support. Human Communication Research, 23, 454–476. Goldsmith, D. J., & MacGeorge, E. L. (2000). The impact of politeness and relationship on perceived quality of advice about a problem. Human Communication Research, 26, 234– 263. Goldsmith, D. J., McDermott, V. M., & Alexander, S. C. (2000). Helpful, supportive and sensitive: Measuring the evaluation of enacted social support in personal relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 17, 369–392. Goldsmith, D., & Parks, M. (1990). Communication strategies for managing the risks of seeking social support. In S. Duck (Ed.), Personal relationships and social support (pp. 104–121). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

281

Goodwin, R., & Plaza, S. H. (2000). Perceived and received social support in two cultures: Collectivism and support among British and Spanish students. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 17, 282–291. Gotcher, J. M. (1992). Interpersonal communication and psychosocial adjustment. Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, 10, 21–39. Gottlieb, B. H. (1983). Social support strategies: Guidelines for mental health practice. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Gottlieb, B. H. (1985). Social support and community mental health. In S. Cohen & L. S. Syme (Eds.), Social support and health (pp. 303–326). New York: Academic Press. Gottlieb, B. H., & Wagner, F. (1991). Stress and support processes in close relationships. In J. Eckenrode (Ed.), The social context of coping (pp. 165–188). New York: Plenum. Gourevitch, P. (1998). We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed along with our families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Hammer, M. (1983). “Core” and “extended” social networks in relation to health and illness. Social Science and Medicine, 17, 404–414. Hawkins, R. P., Pingree, S., Gustafson, D. H., Boberg, E. W., Bricker, E., McTavish, F., Wise, M., & Owens, B. (1997). Aiding those facing health crises: The experience of the CHESS project. In R. L. Street, W. R. Gold, & T. Manning (Eds.), Health promotion and interactive technology (pp. 79–102). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Heaney, C. A., & Israel, B. A. (1995). Social networks and social support. In K. Glanz, F. M. Lewis, & B. K. Rimer (Eds.), Health behavior and health education: Theory, research and practice (2nd ed.). (pp. 179–205). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Heller, T., Roccoforte, J. A., Hsieh, K., Cook, J. A., & Pickett, S. A. (1997). Benefits of support groups for families of adults with severe mental illness. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 67, 187–198. Heller, K., & Rook, K. S. (1997). Distinguishing the theoretical functions of social ties: Implications for support interventions. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of personal relationships (2nd ed., pp. 649–670). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Higgins, P. G., & Woods, P. J. (1999). Reasons, health behaviors, and outcomes of no prenatal care: Research that changed practice. Health Care Women International, 20, 127–136. House, J. S. (1981). Work stress and social support. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. House, J. S., & Kahn, R. L. (1985). Measures and concepts of social support. In S. Cohen & S. L. Syme (Eds.), Social support and health (pp. 83–108). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Husaini, B. A., Neff, J. A., Newbrough, J. R., & Seymour, M. (1982). The stress-buffering role of social support and personal competence among the rural married. Journal of Community Psychology, 10, 409–426. Iacovino, V., & Reesor, K. (1997). Literature on interventions to address cancer patients’ psychosocial needs: What does it tell us? Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, 15, 47–71. Jefferson, G. (1984). On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately nextpositioned matters. In M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 191–222). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahn, R. L., & Antonucci, T. C. (1980). Convoys over the life course: Attachment, roles, and social support. In P. B. Baltes & O. G. Brim (Eds.), Life span development and behavior (pp. 253–286). New York: Academic Press. Kalbfleisch, P. J., & Bonnell, K. H. (1996). Menarche, menstruation, and menopause: The communication of information and social support. In R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages (pp. 265–278). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kaplan, C. P., & Miner, M. E. (2000). Relationships: Importance for patients with cerebral tumours. Brain Injury, 14, 251–259.

282

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

Kaufmann, G. M., & Beehr, T. A. (1986). Interactions between job stressors and social support: Some counterintuitive results. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 522–526. Keeley, M. P. (1996). Social support and breast cancer: Why do we talk and to whom do we talk? In R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages (pp. 293–306). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kiesler, C. A. (1985). Policy implications of research on social support and health. In S. Cohen & L. S. Syme (Eds.), Social support and health (pp. 347–364). New York: Academic Press. Klein, R. C., & Milardo, R. M. (2000). The social context of couple conflict: Support and criticism from informal third parties. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 17, 618–637. Kraut, R., Patterson, M., Lundmark, V., Kiesler, S., Mukopadhyay, T., & Scherlis, W. (1998). Internet paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? American Psychologist, 53, 1017–1031. Lanza, A. F., & Revenson, T. A. (1993). Social support interventions for rheumatoid arthritis patients: The cart before the horse? Health Education Quarterly, 20, 97–117. Leppin, R., & Schwarzer, A. (1990). Social support and physical health: An updated metaanalysis. In L. R. Schmidt, P. Schwenkmezger, J. Weinman, & S. Maes (Eds.), Theoretical and applied aspects of health psychology (pp. 185–202). London: Harwood Academic Publishers. Lichtman, R. R., Taylor, S. Ell, & Wood, J. V. (1987). Social support and marital adjustment after breast cancer. Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, 5, 47–74. Lin, N., Woefel, M. W., & Light, S. C. (1985). The buffering effect of social support subsequent to an important life event. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 26, 247–263. Lyons, R. F., Sullivan, M. J. L., Ritvo, P. G., & Coyne, J. C. (1995). Relationships in chronic illness and disability. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Maternal and Child Health Services, Oklahoma State Department of Health. (1996). Initiation of prenatal care among women having a live birth in Oklahoma. Journal of the Oklahoma State Medical Association, 89, 328–332. McLeroy, K. R., DeVellis, R., DeVellis, B., Kaplan, B., & Toole, J. (1984). Social support and physical recovery in a stroke population. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 1, 395–413. Meachen, S. E., & Kelley, S. D. M. (1991). Special issues in prenatal care outreach. Journal of Health and Social Policy, 2, 53–67. Metts, S., Backhaus, S., & Kazoleas, P. (1995, February). Social support as problematic communication. Paper presented at the meeting of the Western Speech Communication Association, Portland, OR. Mikhail, B. L. (1999). Perceived impediments to prenatal care among low-income women. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 21, 334–350. Mortensen, C. D. (1997). Miscomunication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Moss, G. E. (1973). Illness, immunity, and social interaction. New York: Wiley Interscience. Neuling, S. J., & Winefield, H. R. (1988). Social support and recovery after surgery for breast cancer: Frequency and correlates of supportive behaviors by family, friends, and surgeon. Social Science and Medicine, 27, 385–392. Northouse, L. L. (1988). Social support in patients’ and husbands’ adjustment to breast cancer. Nursing Research, 37, 91–95. O’Brien, T. B., & DeLongis, A. (1997). Coping with chronic stress: An interpersonal perspective. In B. H. Gottlieb (Ed.), Coping with chronic stress (pp. 161–190). New York: Plenum. Omar, M. A., & Schiffman, R. F. (1995). Pregnant women’s perceptions of prenatal care. Maternal Child Nursing Journal, 23, 132–142.

13. SOCIAL SUPPORT

283

Ornish, D. (1991). Lessons from the Lifestyle Heart Trial. Choices in Cardiology, 1, 1–4. Ornish, D., Brown, S. E., Scherwitz, L. W., Billings, J. H., Armstrong, W. T., Ports, T. A., McLanahan, S. M., Kirkeeide, R. L., Brand, R. J., & Gould, K. L. (1990, July 21). Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary heart disease? The Lancet, 336, 129–133. Parks, M. R., Adelman, M. B., & Albrecht, T. L. (1987). Beyond close relationships: Support in weak ties. In T. L. Abrecht & M. B. Adelman and Associates. Communicating social support (pp. 126–147). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Penner, L. A. (2000). Promoting prosocial actions: The importance of culture and values. Journal of Social Philosophy, 31, 477–487. Penner, L. A., Dovidio, J. F., & Albrecht, T. L. (2000). Helping victims of loss and trauma: A social psychological perspective. In J. H. Harvey & E. D. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of loss and trauma (pp. 62–85). Philadelphia, PA: Bruner/Mazel. Penner, L. A., & Finkelstein, M. A. (1998). Dispositional and structural determinants of volunteerism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 525–537. Penner, L. A., Rioux, S., & Tilman, P. (1997). Dispositional and structural causes of longterm prosocial actions. Invited address presented at the conference on Strategic Influence in Emerging and Established Democracies, University of Silesia, Krakow, Poland, August. Pennix, B. W. J. H., Van Tilburg, T., Deeg, D. J. H., Kriegsman, D. M. W., Boeke, J. P., & Van Eijk, J. T. M. (1997). Direct and buffer effects of social support and personal coping resources in individuals with arthritis. Social Science and Medicine, 44, 393–402. Perloff, J. D., & Jaffee, K. D. (1999). Late entry into prenatal care: The neighborhood context. Social Work, 44, 116–128. Pilisuk, M., & Minkler, M. (1985). Social support: Economic and political considerations. Social Policy, 15, 6–11. Primomo, J., Yates, B, C., & Woods, N. F. (1990). Social support for women during chronic illness: The relationship among sources and types to adjustment. Research in Nursing & Health, 13, 153–161. Rook, K., & Dooley, D. (1985). Applying social support research: Theoretical problems and future directions. Journal of Social Issues, 41, 5–28. Roschelle, A. R. (1997). No more kin: Exploring race, class, and gender in family networks. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rose, J. H. (1990). Social support and cancer: Adult patients’ desire for support from family, friends, and health professionals. American Journal of Community Psychology, 18, 439– 464. Rosen, S. (1983). Perceived inadequacy and help-seeking. In B. M. DePaulo, A. Nadler, & J. D. Fisher (Eds.), New directions in helping: Volume 2 Help-seeking (pp. 73–107). New York: Academic Press. Sandler, I. N., & Barrera, M. Jr. (1984). Toward a multimethod approach to assessing the effects of social support. American Journal of Community Psychology, 12, 37–52. Sandler, I. N., & Lakey, B. (1982). Locus of control as a stress moderator: The role of control perceptions and social support. American Journal of Community Psychology, 10, 65– 80. Sarason, B. R., Pierce, G. R., & Sarason, I. G. (1990). Social support: The sense of acceptance and the role of relationships. In B. R. Sarason, I. G. Sarason, & G. R. Pierce (Eds.), Social support: An interactional view (pp. 97–128). New York: Wiley. Schaefer, C., Coyne, J. D., & Lazarus, R. S. (1981). The health-related functions of social support. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 4, 381–406. Schaffer, M. A., & Lia-Hoagberg, B. (1997). Effects of social support on prenatal care and health behaviors of low-income women. Journal of Obstetrics, Gynecologic and Neonatal Nursing, 26, 433–440.

284

ALBRECHT AND GOLDSMITH

Schwarzer, R., & Leppin, A. (1991). Social support and health: A theoretical and empirical overview. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 8, 99–127. Silver, R. C., Wortman, C. B., & Crofton, C. (1990). The role of coping in support provision: The self-presentational dilemma of victims of life crisis. In B. R. Sarason, I. G. Sarason, & G. R. Pierce (Eds.), Social support: An interactional view (pp. 397–426). New York: Wiley. Spiegel, D., Kramer, H. C., Bloom, J. R., & Gottheil E. (1989, Oct. 14). Effect of psychosocial treatment on survival of patients with metatstatic breast cancer. Lancet, 888–891. Taylor, T. J. (1992). Mutual misunderstanding: Skepticism and the theorizing of language and interpretation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tempelaar, R., de Haas, J. C. J. M., de Ruiter, J. H., Bakker, D., van den Heuvel, W. J. A., & van Nieuwenhuijzen, M. G. (1989). The social experiences of cancer patients under treatment; A comparative study. Social Science & Medicine, 29, 635–642. Thoits, P. A. (1984). Explaining distributions of psychological vulnerability: Lack of social support in the face of life stress. Social Forces, 63, 453–481. Tolsdorf, C. C. (1976). Social networks, support, and coping: Exploratory study. Family Process, 15, 407–414. Uchino, B. N., Cacioppo, J. T., & Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K. (1996). The relationship between social support and physiological processes: A review with emphasis on underlying mechanisms and implications for health. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 488–531. Unger, D. G., & Wandersman, A. (1985). The importance of neighbors: The social, cognitive, and affective components of neighboring. American Journal of Community Psychology, 13, 139–169. Vinokur, A. D., & Vinokur-Kaplan, D. (1990). “In sickness and in health”: Patterns of social support and undermining in older married couples. Journal of Aging and Health, 2, 215–241. Walther, J. B., & Boyd, S. (in press). Attraction to computer mediated social support. In C. A. Lin & D. Atkin (Eds.), Communication technology and society; Audience adoption and uses of the new media. New York: Hampton Press. Ward, S., Leventhal, H., Easterling, D., Luchterhand, C., & Love, R. (1991). Social support, self-esteem, and communication in patients receiving chemotherapy. Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, 9, 95–116. Wethington, E., & Kessler, R. C. (1986). Perceived support, received support, and adjustment to stressful life events. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 27, 78–89. Wiemann, C. M., Berenson, A. B., Pino, L. G., & McCombs, S. L. (1997). Factors associated with adolescents’ risk for late entry into prenatal care. Family Planning Perspectives, 29, 273–276. Wills, T. A. (1983). Social comparison in coping and help-seeking. In B. M. DePaulo, A. Nadler, & J. D. Fisher (Eds.), New directions in helping: Volume 2 Help-seeking (pp. 109–141). New York: Academic Press. Wortman, C. B. (1984). Social support and the cancer patient: Conceptual and methodological issues. Cancer, 53, 2339–2360. Wortman, C. B., & Conway, T. (1985). The role of social support in adaptation and recovery from physical illness. In S. Cohen & S. L. Syme (Eds.), Social support and health (pp. 281–302). New York: Academic Press. Wortman, C. B., & Lehman, D. R. (1985). Reactions to victims of life crises: Support attempts that fail. In I. G. Sarason & B. R. Sarason (Eds.), Social support: Theory, research and applications. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Zaid, A., Fullerton, J. T., & Moore, T. (1996). Factors affecting access to prenatal care for U.S./Mexico border-dwelling Hispanic women. Journal of Nurse Midwifery, 41, 277–284. Zemore, R., & Shepel, L. F. (1989). Effects of breast cancer and mastectomy on emotional support and adjustment. Social Science and Medicine, 28, 19–27.

14 Everyday Interpersonal Communication and Health Rebecca J. Welch Cline University of Florida

Health communication, as an area of theory, research, and practice, focuses on the relationships between communication and health, health attitudes and beliefs, and health behavior. Health communication research has focused more on formal than informal contexts. When investigating informal contexts, researchers have attended more to mass than to interpersonal communication. The purpose of this chapter is to address the “missing box,” the role of everyday interpersonal interaction as an arena of health communication. The chapter presents a rationale for exploring everyday interpersonal communication and health and offers social influence as a theoretical framework for that exploration. HIV/AIDS is argued a fruitful context for exploring the interrelationships of everyday interpersonal communication and health. Reviewing literature on the various roles of everyday interpersonal interaction and HIV/AIDS helps to clarify the potentially powerful and often neglected influence of everyday interaction on health and provides road signs for future research and practice. RATIONALE FOR EXPLORING EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH

A cursory overview of the status of health communication scholarship identifies patterns of phenomena that researchers have addressed and neglected. Initial explorations yield glimpses of the role of everyday interpersonal communication and health, hinting at the possibilities. Status of Health Communication Scholarship

Communication rapidly is becoming recognized as a significant factor in health care and promotion. Health communication has become a vital part of national public health efforts

285

286

CLINE

as evidenced by the recent development of offices of communication at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the opening of the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute in 1999; and the recognition of health communication as central to the “prevention agenda for the nation,” as identified in the Healthy People 2010 objectives (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2000). A critical look at the field points simultaneously to limitations and directions for future research. Health communication emphasizes some phenomena to the neglect of others. From a systemic perspective, health communication occurs in both formal and informal everyday contexts; however, formal contexts have been studied to the relative neglect of informal contexts. Large bodies of research address formal interpersonal contexts, specifically provider-client interaction (most frequently physician-patient interaction) (see, e.g., Cline & McKenzie, 1998; Thompson & Parrott, 2003). Similarly large bodies of research address formal attempts to change the public’s health behavior via health communication campaigns (with substantially more focus on the role of mass media than interpersonal communication, although researchers agree that interpersonal communication plays a powerful role in changing health behavior and must be addressed by campaigns in order to be successful) (e.g., Maibach & Parrott, 1995; Piotrow, Kincaid, Rimon, & Rinehart, 1997; Rice & Atkin, 2001). When health communication scholars have addressed the roles of everyday informal communication and incidental messages in influencing health, they attended more to mass than interpersonal communication. Research addresses the roles of television (e.g., Signorielli, 1998; Strasberger, 1995) and news (e.g., Dearing & Rogers, 1992; Kinsella, 1989), with less attention to other forms of popular culture (e.g., advertising, movies, billboards, musical lyrics, magazines) (e.g., Krishman, Durrah, & Winkler, 1997; Schooler, Basil, & Altman, 1996). When health communication is construed as occurring in a matrix of formal and informal communication contexts in which planned and incidental everyday messages abound, in both mediated and interpersonal forms, everyday interpersonal communication emerges as “the neglected box.” When addressed, this topic has been explored in fragments. Glimpses of the Role of Everyday Interpersonal Communication in Health

A wide array of illustrations, cutting across numerous health and disease contexts, provides glimpses of the significance of everyday interpersonal interaction in health. Just “plain talk” has health-related functions. Lynch (1985) and associates (Lynch & Rosch, 1990) investigated the influence of talk versus silence on physiological responses; simply talking changes one’s heart function, raising blood pressure and heart rate. Risk-taking behavior (e.g., taking drugs, drinking) may influence interpersonal communication. For example, Monahan and Lannutti (2000) studied alcohol as a “social lubricant” (p. 175) and found that drinking alcohol blocks otherwise existing behavioral inhibitions among women with low social self-esteem, resulting in greater self-disclosure. Everyday interaction plays a significant role in labeling illness. A mass psychogenic illness in a high school, resulting in the need for emergency treatment, initially was attributed to exposure to toxic gas but later found to be associated with social rather than medical or environmental conditions (Jones et al., 2000). In fact, deciding whether one is “ill,” and the timing of that labeling, often are influenced by social interaction (Mechanic, 1966).

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 287

Everyday social networks may serve to disseminate health information or, conversely, to reinforce risk-taking behavior as a social norm. Tardy and Hale (1998) examined the role of informal interpersonal social networks among women in a toddlers’ play group where talk functioned to influence mothers’ health decision making. In contrast, Dorsey, Scherer, and Real (1999) found the frequency with which college students talk about drinking and potential consequences in nonpeer support networks correlates positively with drinking in excess. Such casual interaction may reinforce excessive drinking as a social norm. One commonly investigated phenomenon of everyday interpersonal communication with implications for health is helpful and unhelpful communication. Typically studied under the rubric of “social support” (Albrecht, Adelman, & Associates, 1987; Burleson, Albrecht, Goldsmith, & Sarason, 1994; see the chapter in this volume by Albrecht and Goldsmith), this area focuses on the functions of everyday interaction in helping people manage uncertainties (e.g., coping diagnosis, illness, treatment, recovery). Ironically, communication with those closest to us sometimes endangers well-being. Observers attribute much adolescent risk taking to peer influence (e.g., Alberts, MillerRassulo, & Hecht, 1991). In social contexts, communication can function to recruit others to engage in risky behavior, such as smoking or drug use (e.g., Ferguson et al., 1992; Trost, Langan, & Kellar-Guenther, 1995), to resist recruitment (e.g., Alberts, et al., 1991; Harrington, 1995), and to intervene to halt or reduce risk-taking behavior (Seibold & Thomas, 1994; Thomas & Seibold, 1995). Although explanations of adolescent risk taking tend to focus on peer influence, research indicts family communication as well. Communication with both peers and family members, in the forms of teasing and criticism, may influence body image, which, in turn, relates to eating disorders (e.g., Schwartz, Phares, Tantleff-Dunn, & Thompson, 1999). Understanding that everyday interpersonal communication plays a significant role in health behavior, health educators and public health professionals created interpersonal skills interventions for teens. Much of that advice can be simplified to “just say no.” Lewis (1994) criticized this approach, arguing that identity and relational concerns often supersede health-related intentions. Asking adolescents to simply refuse offers requires them to subvert their self-presentation or relational goals or at least to send a “mixedmessage.” Thus, typical health education fails to address how adolescents can negotiate multiple goals in the context of a social situation without violating social norms. Indeed, the diverse though scant literature on the role of everyday interpersonal communication in health reinforces the primacy of identity and relational goals over instrumental goals. For example, research indicates that sharing cigarettes can function as a way of meeting friends (Eckert, 1989). In refusal situations, although adolescents may be able to “just say no” to strangers (Alberts et al., 1991; Trost et al., 1999), doing so with friends and acquaintances is unlikely. In the latter case, adolescents prefer strategies that avoid rejecting the other person and have the potential to sustain the relationship. In interventions, as well, among both family members and peers, identity and relational goals tend to compete with instrumental goals (e.g., Seibold & Thomas, 1994; Thomas & Seibold, 1995). In summary, everyday interpersonal talk plays a significant role in health. Influences of everyday communication on health: (1) are anchored more in the social reality and social norms of participants than in health knowledge, health information, and traditionally defined health beliefs and behaviors; (2) are embedded in social situations that can be understood only through the realities of the participants; (3) may be positive or negative; and (4) may be planned or incidental. Taken as a whole, this potpourri points to social influence as a framework for organizing and advancing our understanding of everyday interpersonal communication and health.

288

CLINE

EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH AS A MATTER OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE

Neither traditional social psychological nor communication approaches to understanding social influence would have included the study of everyday interpersonal communication as it relates to health-related outcomes. Traditionally, social psychologists emphasized the unilateral function of social influence for control within group contexts (e.g., Moscovici, 1976) and characterized social influence as “a collection of processes” (Edwards, 1990, p. 2) (e.g., social conformity, attitude change and persuasion, power and authority, obedience, modeling, social norms) rather than a coherent unified whole. Traditionally, communication scholars cast social influence in the premises and language of “persuasion.” Persuasion was viewed as a linear process, embedded in a one-to-many framework and preoccupied with actions and issues, thus centered on instrumental goals and outcomes. However, over time, social influence evolved to include the role of “everyday” interpersonal communication. Contemporary Social Influence Theory

Contemporary social influence theory focuses on the social realities of participants with implications for understanding social influence messages and meanings from their viewpoint. Social psychologists contributed a focus on “social reality” and social norms; communication scholars offered the significance of messages, meanings, and a transactional perspective. Everyday social influence is understood to define social realities and social norms and to constrain interaction and behavior accordingly. Social psychologists cast social norms as “the key idea” or unifying construct in social influence (Turner, 1991, p. 2). From a contemporary perspective, social influence consists of “the processes whereby people agree or disagree about appropriate behaviour, form, maintain or change social norms and the social conditions that give rise to, and the effects of, such norms” (Turner, 1991, p. 2). The concept of “social norm” invokes a sense of “oughtness” as people justify actions in terms of moral obligations and rightness woven into a validating social reality. Communication scholars initially cast social influence in the premises and language of “persuasion,” but over time came to endorse three premises about social influence. First, they embraced interpersonal communication as persuasion under the rubric of compliance gaining (e.g., Miller, Boster, Roloff, & Seibold, 1987; Seibold, Cantrill, & Meyers, 1985). Second, communication scholars wrestled with juxtaposing traditional views of persuasion that implied linearity and intention, with premises about interpersonal communication as transactional and spontaneous. In turn, they questioned the necessity of intention and conscious awareness to socially influence (e.g., Miller et al., 1987). Berger and Douglas (1982) cautioned that many interactions can be characterized in terms of “mindlessness” (p. 43). Thus, the concept of “goal” as a conscious objective may be unnecessary in characterizing social influence. Third, communication scholars came to recognize the multifunctionality of communication. Clark and Delia (1979) identified three kinds of objectives explicitly or implicitly embedded in every communicative transaction: (1) instrumental objectives, seeking responses involving a task, (2) interpersonal objectives, involving establishment or maintenance of a relationship, and (3) identity objectives, related both to managing selfpresentation and facilitating the other’s identity management. Historically, instrumental or task-oriented goals have been “studied vigorously” (Newton & Burgoon, 1990, p. 479), while relational and identity objectives received scant attention. Thus, thinking regarding

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 289

the study of social influence evolved to include interpersonal transactions, “mindless” behavior, and multiple functions. Social Reality and Social Norms: The Basis for Everyday Interaction

The concepts of socially constructed reality and social norms are central to understanding social influence. As both products of and templates for everyday interpersonal interaction, socially constructed realities provide blueprints for formulating meaning and guiding behavior. The Social Construction of Reality

Berger and Kellner (1964) and Berger and Luckmann (1966) cast everyday interaction as significant in creating a “shared reality.” “Everyday knowledge,” or what “everyone knows,” flows from continuously validating everyday interaction that creates “intersubjective” realities. Socially constructed realities are so unconsciously and continuously reinforced that they come to be experienced as “objective.” Socially constructed realities become the template for human behavior. Reality hardened by intersubjectivity makes “evident” what is “real” and, in turn, “appropriate” behavioral responses. That sense of “appropriateness” constitutes what we term social norms. Thus, everyday talk and everyday language play powerful roles in constructing realities and social norms for operating within those realities. The Centrality of Language. As Berger and colleagues (Berger, 1995; Berger & Bradac, 1982) argued, the only means for “knowing” anything is through experience and all experience is mediated through language. From a health perspective, social interaction provides the basis for the “reality” and “meanings” of such basic concepts as “health,” “illness,” “disease,” and “risk.” Within social contextual boundaries (whether family, peer group, or culture), social interaction yields social norms regarding the meaning of and reaction to specific health states and diseases. Language surrounding a particular disease not only labels it, but also frames the disease in larger perspectives and builds relationships with other concepts, yielding schema for the disease. Schema may be understood as networks of meaning; thus, the use of a single term, ostensibly to denote a particular pathology, comes to invoke expanded systems of meaning that go well beyond biomedicine to function as a blueprint for human behavior. Although some language use is “thoughtful,” (Berger & Bradac, 1982, p. 113), much of the time individuals pay minimal attention to highly repetitive everyday interaction. Berger and Bradac (1982) use the phrase “metaphors which people live by in the conduct of relationships” (p. 124) as they point to the role of language in providing the basis for behavior. Meanings We Live By: Metaphors as Behavioral Blueprints. “Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 3). In everyday talk, we constantly refer to one thing in terms of another; what we know about the second phenomenon provides some understanding of the first. The power of language rests in its metaphoric nature (e.g., Hawes, 1975); we do not process symbols as discrete phenomena, rather we use symbols in patterns, invoking whole systems of meanings beyond apparent referents. Thus, a single word can come to stand for a fully developed metaphoric blueprint for the situational reality and serve as a model to guide human action.

290

CLINE

The Meanings of Everyday Interaction vis-a-vis ` Health

Traditional approaches to social influence focused on intentional phenomena and instrumental goals to the exclusion of other sometimes competing goals. Clearly the reviewed glimpses of everyday interpersonal health communication indicate that health-influencing messages are not necessarily (nor even likely) to be intended to influence health nor contain explicit health content. Messages and meanings leading to health outcomes often have little to do with health content in actors’ minds. From a public health perspective, instrumental goals are primary (i.e., changing health behaviors). For example, from a public health frame, one teen offering another teen a cigarette is understood as the solicitation or recruitment of risk taking; the outcome is understood in terms of enhanced or diminished risks to health. However, from the participants’ perspective, offering a cigarette may symbolize friendly or confirming interaction. To understand the functions of everyday interpersonal communication in health, researchers need to expand the frames of meaning for investigation to include identity and relational management. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION IN THE HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC

Understanding the potential roles of everyday interpersonal communication in health may help in discovering points of intervention and efficacious strategies for health-promoting and disease-preventing social influence. HIV/AIDS provides a territory for exploring those roles. HIV/AIDS as a Territory for Exploring Everyday Communication and Health

In the past two decades, no disease captured the American public’s attention more than HIV/AIDS. By virtue of its magnitude and the tentacles of its meanings, HIV/AIDS emerged as the number one health problem in the public’s mind and the most stigmatizing disease in contemporary times. The more than 810,000 cases diagnosed and 467,000 deaths attributable to AIDS by the end of 2001 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2001) are only suggestive of impact. The magnitude of impact includes health care costs and social, psychological, relational, and economic effects on partners, family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, schoolmates, and health care providers. Early in the epidemic, the disease was associated with an array of social and health problems and marginalized populations. The tapestry of meanings of HIV/AIDS was woven with the threads of drug use, unwanted and teen pregnancy, other sexually transmitted diseases, and violence. Gay men, prostitutes, drug-users, ethnic minorities, and the poor dominated the HIV population constructed in the public’s mind. In time, HIV/AIDS emerged as an interpersonal epidemic both in etiology and social impact. HIV infection occurs most often in interpersonal if not intimate contexts (in sexual encounters, via needle sharing, in maternal care). Quickly, prevention messages were framed as interpersonal advisories: “know your partner,” “negotiate condom use,” and “don’t share needles.” Interpersonal dilemmas driven by stigma characterize the experiences associated with the disease, as HIV/AIDS became defined as a disease of “us” versus “them.” The social reality and resultant consequences of HIV/AIDS grew directly from the meaning-laden nature of the disease. With reactions driven more forcefully by schema associated with AIDS than by biomedical/clinical information, “AIDS has turned out to be one of the most meaning-laden of diseases” (Sontag, 1990, pp. 179–180). Thus,

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 291

HIV/AIDS, in its inseparable health and social contexts, offers a window into understanding the significance and varied roles of everyday interpersonal communication in health and risk contexts. The Social Construction of HIV/AIDS

The social construction of HIV/AIDS is both a product and process of everyday talk. The social construction emerging from everyday talk provides a framework of meaning that, in turn, drives everyday interaction associated with the disease. The Socially Constructed Identity of AIDS

The course of the development of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, and responses to it by both the public and policymakers, contributed to a socially constructed identity in which the disease has both gender and sexual orientation. Historical accounts of how the epidemic was reported both in epidemiological and social circles clarify how AIDS came to be “a gay man’s disease” in everyday vocabulary (see, for example, Kinsella, 1989; Shilts, 1988). Despite the fact that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) thought they were alerting the public via routine reporting channels (i.e., the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report [MMWR]) about early and as yet unlabeled cases of AIDS, both health and news professionals ignored the emerging epidemic due to its association with gay men. Press response to the first AIDS-related MMWR (CDC, 1981, June), which reported a deadly outbreak of pneumonia among five otherwise healthy gay men in California, was nominal (Kinsella, 1989). By late 1981, MMWR had run several articles on what the CDC was calling the “epidemic of immunosuppression” (Kinsella, 1989, p. 15), with little resulting media attention. As Kinsella argued, had early AIDS cases been in aging white, middle-class men (as was Legionnaire’s disease), clinical and public attention would have been tidal wave in proportion. Instead, AIDS was virtually ignored in the news media, and thus, was largely unknowable by the public. Although news media eventually attended to AIDS, much early coverage proved harmful by reflecting a polarity of realities, ranging from anyone can get AIDS and easily to only gay men are at risk. Neither reality was helpful in constructing health risks for the public. For example, a 1988 Cosmopolitan story on AIDS claimed “There is almost no danger of contracting AIDS through ordinary sexual intercourse” (Kinsella, 1989, p. 8). A few months later, Newsweek (Sex in the age of AIDS, 1988) cited Masters, Johnson and Kolodny’s (1988) claim that AIDS could be spread via casual contact (implying transmission via tears, toilet seats, sweat, etc.). The competing realities contributed either to unnecessary panic and fear or to a glib “not me” reality. At the same time, what could have been helpful information to the public was missing. Notably absent was “any guidance concerning action the public could take to avoid transmission of the virus” (Roth, 1990, p. 7). The process of labeling the disease went hand in hand with news coverage (and its absence) in developing and hardening a reality in which the disease was delimited by gender and social orientation. That social construction permitted denial of vulnerability among every other population. The Language of AIDS: Labeling an Emerging Epidemic, an Epidemic of Labels

Early labels explicitly associated AIDS with gay men. As the disease progressed, dysfunctional language reinforced moral judgments and interfered with rational understanding of risk and efficacious approaches to prevention.

292

CLINE

Among the terms that emerged for AIDS by 1982 were “gay cancer,” “gay pneumonia,” “the gay plague,” and WOGS (wrath of God syndrome) (Treichler, 1988). Doctors unofficially used terms like ACIDS (acquired community immune deficiency syndrome) and CAIDS (community acquired immune deficiency syndrome); the first official label was GRID (gay-related infectious disease). These labels established AIDS as a “gay disease,” and focused attention on “communities” or groups of people. This “group” identity functioned to define AIDS as a disease of “others.” Such labels shifted public attention and everyday discourse away from the causes of the disease and risk-taking behaviors to attention on “who has the disease.” The public came to accept and use language that cast judgment on people with the disease; the infected people rather than the risk behaviors emerged as what were to be avoided. Shilts (1988) identified examples of dysfunctional language surrounding AIDS. The term bodily fluids came to summarize routes of transmission of the disease, largely due to an unwillingness to use explicit language (e.g., “semen” and “vaginal fluids”) in public discourse. The term engendered the notion that AIDS could be contracted through casual household contact (e.g., through tears or sweat). As diagnostic tools emerged, the language surrounding AIDS created a contagion of meanings. The term exposed to the virus, used to explain a positive HIV test, hid the reality that having the antibodies meant having the virus. This simple euphemism mystified the disease and inadvertently fed the myth of HIV as airborne. Unwillingness to use explicit language played a significant role in failing to provide clear prevention guidelines to the public once modes of transmission were identified. Unwillingness to use terms like penis, vagina, condom, and anal intercourse disallowed clear public discourse that influences private behavior. For example, The New York Times failed to print the word “penis” until the 1993 Bobbitt case. Network television refused to air condom advertising. Ongoing debates about using the word “condom,” condom advertising, and teaching condom use as prevention contributed to a social construction in which “condoms” themselves came to have stigmatizing moral overtones in everyday interpersonal contexts. Metaphors of AIDS: An Emerging Epidemic of Meaning

Metaphors provide conceptual maps for thinking about diseases. Each identifies the role of the infected person and implies a prototype of responses both to the disease and the infected. Sontag (1978), in analyzing metaphors of cancer, uncovered patterns of language in which cancer was associated with punishment, energy, warfare, death, and pollution. AIDS provided a yet more stigmatizing disease. With the early identification of Kaposi’s sarcoma as an indicator, AIDS took on many metaphors of cancer and then some. These metaphors functioned to polarize concepts and people, to stereotype both the disease and the infected. Metaphors of AIDS so commonplace as to be invisible to the everyday person include associations with war/military, pollution, plague, crime, and otherness/civic divisiveness (Ross, 1988; Sontag, 1990). Casting AIDS in military terms (e.g., “the war on AIDS”) framed the disease and its sufferers as the “enemy” to be “conquered,” invoked “otherness,” and attributed evil or fault. As Sontag (1990) noted, “the move from the demonization of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one” (p. 99). The virus “lurks” and “triggers” symptoms when it “attacks” the body (Ross, 1988; Sontag, 1990). Those who “‘harbor’ the virus are like spies in our midst” (Ross, 1988, p. 44). Calls for tracking and quarantine are calls to “locate” and confine the enemy (Ross, 1988, p. 45).

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 293

Concepts of “pollution” cast the virus and the people carrying it as pollutants to be “contained.” The plague or punishment metaphor extends the pollution metaphor, casting AIDS as a “collective” calamity (Sontag, 1990), “inflicted” as “punishment for sin” (Ross, 1988, p. 41), “retribution” for the actions of a “community.” Plagues are thought to come from “somewhere else” (emphasizing “otherness”). Viewing a disease as pollution and plague casts the infected as pollutants and sinners. Concepts of AIDS as pollution and punishment overlap with concepts of crime. The virus “lurks” (like a criminal) and “strikes” its “victims,” rendering judgments of “guilty” or “innocent” upon them (e.g., as in “innocent” children and hemophiliacs, implying all others are “guilty”). Researchers “investigate” the “baffling” disease, searching for “clues” to solve the “mystery” in need of “unraveling” (Ross, 1988). Evident throughout already mentioned metaphors is the concept of AIDS as “otherness” or “civic divisiveness” (Ross, 1988). Enemies and criminals are viewed as “them” in an us-them distinction. Unsafe behaviors are cast as “deviant,” further reinforcing division. Terms like the general population and risk groups imply not just difference but deficiency. The otherness metaphor “permits people to accept lesser treatment for those who belong to that other group than they would demand for themselves” (Ross, 1988, p. 46). In summary, the metaphors of AIDS tend to cast people with HIV disease as the enemy, pollutants, sinners, criminals, and the socially and morally distanced “them.” These metaphors abound in the everyday language of the public at large, health care professionals, and public figures, with significant implications for everyday interaction. How the Meanings of HIV/AIDS “Direct” Behavior, Influence, and Are Influenced by Everyday Interaction

A major premise of the present analysis is that human beings act in accordance with meanings associated with message-affiliated behaviors and anticipated interpretations of those actions by others. Thus, understanding the array of meanings associated with HIV risk taking is necessary to predicting and influencing those behaviors. The Tapestry of Meanings of HIV-Risk-Taking Behaviors

Meanings associated with HIV risk behavior are embedded in a larger array of meanings associated with sexuality and drug use. As Friedman and Des Jarlais (1991) pointed out, these interactions are a result of a lifelong series of social relationships. The messages and meanings of behaviors in those relationships hold clues for why risks are taken and prevention avoided. The Meanings of Unsafe Sex. Public health officials tend to see sexuality in terms of its health-risk meanings. The term unsafe sex, as used here to refer to sex without a condom, mirrors that perspective. However, from the participants’ perspective, “unsafe sex” is replete with identity and relational meanings. 1. Identity meanings. Sexual choices, including unsafe sex, function to define the self (Netting, 1992). Among the identity-related meanings associated with unsafe sex are: (1) a dialectic of invincibility (e.g. Sobo, 1993) and fatalism (Sherman & Kirton, 1999); (2) judgments of healthiness (Sherman & Kirton, 1999) or unhealthiness (Sobo, 1993); (3) trustworthiness of character or respectability (e.g., Boulton, McLean, Fitzpatrick, & Hart, 1995); (4) wisdom or knowledgeability (i.e., can judge another’s character accurately, are “careful,” or can “tell by looking”) (e.g., Cline & Freeman, 1988); and (5) judgments of gender appropriateness (e.g., Brown, Lourie, Flanagan,

294

CLINE

& High, 1998; Sherman & Kirton, 1999). Engaging in unsafe sex also is associated with being “out of control” due to “the heat of the moment,” alcohol, drugs, or grief (e.g., Ross, 1992; Williams, Kimble, Covell, & Weiss, 1992). This attribution functions to buffer identity by absolving the actor of responsibility for behavior. 2. Relational meanings. Sexuality invokes relational meanings both in terms of affiliation and control, corresponding with Henley’s (1977) horizontal and vertical dimensions of relationships. Affiliative meanings commonly associated with sexual intercourse in Western culture include connectedness, emotional involvement, commitment, love, caring, romance, intimacy, and trust. Women, more than men, associate these meanings with intercourse, engaging in sex as a larger process of seeking love and commitment (see, e.g., Rosenthal, Gifford, & Moore, 1998; Tavis & Semin, 1997). Having unsafe sex is seen as a greater expression of affection, companionship, romance, love, caring, and intimacy than using a condom and indicates loyalty, honesty, and trust (e.g., Boulton et al., 1995; Rosenthal et al., 1998). People disenfranchised by sexual orientation or poverty may be willing to have unsafe sex as a means of relational contact (e.g., Sherman & Kirton, 1999). Having unsafe sex may signify acceptance devoid of their stigma for people who are HIV infected (e.g., “She loves me so much she is willing to take the risk”) (Sherman & Kirton, 1999, p. 87). “ ‘Having a relationship’ is protection” emerges as a theme in research. For both gay men (Boulton et al., 1995) and heterosexual couples (Sobo, 1993), having unsafe sex “proves” that a relationship is committed, strong, and healthy rather than casual. Engaging in sex also can be understood in terms of relational control, a perspective more characteristic of men than women. Concepts associated with sex as relational control include sex as a hunt, ensnaring, rescue, seduction, competition, power, conquest, and exploitation (see, e.g., Bowen & Michal-Johnson, 1995). In this frame, having sex amounts to exerting one’s will with a partner’s submissiveness. Concepts of giving, yielding, submitting, doing one’s “duty,” or filling marital or legal obligations also characterize relational control meanings. These relational meanings provide the backdrop for understanding risky sexual behavior. Having unsafe sex when a partner would prefer to use a condom signifies control. In the typical scenario among heterosexuals, the woman wants to use a condom and the man resists (Sobo, 1993). The man who insists on or physically forces unsafe sex not only dominates his partner, he also reinforces his identity as masculine and in control. Women’s claims to engage in unsafe sex by mutual consent may shroud the reality of their submission; these accounts, often after a woman planned to use a condom, permit denial of relational powerlessness and dependence (Sobo, 1993).

In summary, identity and relational meanings can largely account for decisions not to use a condom. These meanings also help to explain HIV-risk-taking behavior other contexts. The Meanings of Prostitution. As a matter of public health, prostitution is replete with meanings of risk. However, participants’ meanings are symbolic worlds away. For sex workers, intercourse represents a business transaction (Mays & Cochran, 1988). Sex represents money and unsafe sex may represent more money when preferred by clients (Browne & Minichiello, 1995). For a client, having sex with a prostitute may mean easy access, lack of emotional involvement, and company, fun, or variety (Chetwynd & Plumridge, 1994). Despite the socially constructed association of AIDS with prostitution, in the United States prostitutes are likely to use condoms with their clients (e.g., Cusick, 1998). Unsafe sex with clients is associated with urgency to earn money and loss of relational control (i.e., powerlessness due to drug or alcohol use, or violence from customers) (Cusick, 1998).

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 295

Generally, identity threats associated with condom use are irrelevant in sex for pay as the sex has little personal meaning (Browne & Minichiello, 1995). From the perspective of the sex worker, sex with clients is “a job” (e.g., Perkins, Lovejoy, Dean, & Wade, 1991), “not real sex” (Browne & Minichiello, 1995, p. 619); condoms function as occupational safety. Using condoms reinforces this frame by emphasizing limited self-sharing in the transaction. Accounts of both male and female sex workers portray the meanings of unsafe sex dramatically differently depending on the meaning of the encounter; although condom use is mandated for work, it is not expected in personal relationships (e.g., Browne & Minichiello, 1995) where engaging in unsafe sex signifies familiarity and trust (e.g., Cusick, 1998). In summary, the meanings of behavior in sex work can be explained better in terms of identity and relational meanings than risk. Prostitutes tend to use condoms when engaging in what they construe as “not real sex,” and not to use them for “real sex,” where they see themselves as “protected by relationships.” The Meanings of IV Drug Use and Sharing Works. In terms of public health, sharing needles for IV drug use represents a major risk for HIV infection. But IV drug users are unlikely to associate sharing works with risk because of an overwhelmingly risky lifestyle, including everyday risks of arrest, failure to locate drugs, failure to locate funds to buy drugs, violence, and risks associated with taking drugs (McKaganey, Friedman, & Mesquita, 1998). The “added risk” of sharing works may go unnoticed. Relational meanings tend to dominate drug use. Drug use symbolizes an array of positive interpersonal phenomena including the romantic initiation, social bonding, and shared instrumental goals. Thus, attempts to reduce sharing works likely encounter “strong opposition from partners who feel their strongest friendships are under attack” (Friedman, Des Jarlais, & Sotheran, 1986, p. 385). Initiating someone into IV drug use is called “giving them their wings,” (Des Jarlais, Friedman, & Strug, 1986, p. 114) and is associated with peer acceptance and risk; sharing needles in that initiation reinforces one’s identity as a peer (Des Jarlais et al., 1986). The greatest factor influencing sharing of injecting equipment is availability of sterile equipment (McKaganey et al., 1998). In the absence of access to clean works, sharing takes on social meanings, including giving and reciprocity (McKaganey et al., 1998). Research shows that 70% of injectors shared needles with a spouse or sexual partner, a running partner, or with friends and acquaintances (Neaigus et al., 1994). Those relationships are long-standing and complex, often based on kinship, friendship, marriage, sexual ties, and economic activity. Sharing injecting equipment may occur in a larger context of sharing housing, tasks, money, food, and needs for human contact. In this context, sharing works serves as a symbolic bond (Grund, Stern, Kaplan, Adriaans, & Drucker, 1992). Drug users cooperate to meet instrumental goals. “Running partners” or “shooting buddies” function as teams to “hustle” money to buy drugs (Des Jarlais et al., 1986, p. 115). When partners are both men, they likely have had sexual relationships with the same women; when the partners are a man and woman, they likely have a sexual relationship (Des Jarlais et al., 1986). Common activities and synchrony of emotional experiences (highs, withdrawal) bond the parties. Thus, the running partner can be characterized as “the strongest positive relationship” in the IV drug subculture (Des Jarlais et al., 1986, p. 116). Running partners often share works, symbolizing “a close, caring, ‘family’ relationship” (Des Jarlais et al., 1986, p. 120). Thus, refusing to share works not only jeopardizes the

296

CLINE

interpersonal relationship, but also casts doubt on the partner’s character by implying that he or she might be diseased. Meanings of drug use and sexual behavior tend to differ by gender. Women are more likely to have sexual partners who also are IV drug users (Des Jarlais, Chamberland, Yancovitz, Weinberg, & Friedman, 1984). The “shooting partner” may represent her most significant relationship as he also is likely to be her sexual partner (Des Jarlais, Friedman, Casrield, & Kott, 1987). Many women fail to negotiate “safe drug use” for the same reasons they fail to negotiate condom use: identity and relational risks (Williams, 1991). The most common reason for women sharing works is relational affiliation (Dwyer et al., 1994); sharing also may be governed by relational control (Brimlow & Ross, 1998). Drug-using women are more likely than men to be married, dependent on others, and have dependent children (Griffin, Weiss, Mirin, & Lange, 1989). Relational ties often influence their drug-related behavior. When men and women share needles, the man tends to inject first as a matter of social status, thereby placing the woman at elevated risk for viral infection (e.g., Freeman, Rodriguez, & French, 1994). Further, women who attempt to negotiate safe behavior with drug and sexual partners face both relational and physical jeopardy (e.g., Brimlow & Ross, 1998). Williams (1990) found that many female IV drug users or sexual partners of IV drug users are deeply involved with their children. Part of being “a good mother” is avoiding drugs during pregnancy. In effect, identity and relational meanings drive some of these women to stop using drugs during pregnancy, including long-term heroin addicts (Williams, 1990). Clearly, interpersonal relationships play a significant role in drug-use behaviors. Understanding the social context, social norms, and meanings associated with drug practice can inform HIV prevention efforts (Neaigus et al., 1994). The Tapestry of Meanings of HIV Prevention

Although the federal government was slow to respond to the AIDS epidemic, when it acted, a set of prevention messages was disseminated widely. Five years into the epidemic, the U.S. Surgeon General (1986) released a 35-page report that served as the primary source for AIDS prevention messages. Two primary messages advised the public about interpersonal communication for the purpose of AIDS prevention. Stated in ambiguous terms (“know with absolute certainty, that neither you nor your sexual partner is carrying the virus of AIDS,” or “you must use protective behavior,” p. 16), they were disseminated as: “know your partner” and “negotiate safe sex.” Both messages are problematic in interpretation and practice. “Know Your Partner” as Prevention Advice: The Meanings and Practice of “Safe-Sex Talk”. The message to “know your partner” was translated to mean that sexual partners should talk openly for the purposes of AIDS prevention. Partners should disclose their sexual histories and past risk behaviors as well as discuss certain intimate topics (monogamy and condom use). Substantial evidence supports wide dissemination and practice of the advice (e.g., Cline, Johnson, & Freeman, 1992; Misovich, Fisher, & Fisher, 1996). Typically, women, more often than men, report such talk (e.g., Cline & McKenzie, 1994). Unfortunately, both the logic and interpretation of the advice to talk to a partner as a means of risk reduction can be indicted. The advice to “talk-as-prevention” can be critiqued

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 297

as follows: no amount of talk, unless it leads to condom use, constitutes efficacious HIV risk reduction. Not simply inefficacious, the advice is potentially dangerous. 1. Difficulty of implementation. Talking with a partner for the purpose of AIDS prevention poses several challenges: (1) high level of communication skills required to simultaneously manage health, identity, and relational goals; (2) violating relational norms by discussing taboo topics (Baxter & Wilmot, 1985); (3) managing competing frames of discourse (romantic versus clinical, trust versus distrust); (4) managing identity goals while implicitly questioning a partner’s character; and (5) not knowing a partner well enough to engage in intimate talk (Cline, et al., 1992). 2. The logic of talk as risk assessment. A second criticism involves the efficacy of talk as prevention. The advice to “know your partner” fosters belief in the efficacy of personal judgment as a basis for risk assessment. Few people perceive that they “do not know” their partners; “knowing” may mean identifying by name, being acquainted, or having made judgments based on superficial information. Those who attempt talk for risk assessment will be stymied by two factors: (1) a partner cannot know reliably the risk behaviors of his or her previous partners or the partners of those partners (i.e., the sexual family tree), and (2) the potential for partner deception (e.g., Mays & Cochran, 1993). 3. Competing goals: Managing images and relationships. To the extent that “talk” leads to condom use, talk is a worthwhile prevention effort. However, talking in order to use condoms is relatively unlikely as that advice simultaneously jeopardizes identity and relational goals. The most dominant reasons for “not talking” to a partner about AIDS, even though desiring to do so, reflect struggles with relational and identity management (Cline et al., 1992). Practicing the advice may jeopardize partners’ identity management and/or identity management may jeopardize prevention. Individuals likely see themselves as wise or credit themselves with being “careful” or “selective.” Following this logic, partners may substitute personal perceptions for talk, or if talk occurs, substitute conversation for condom use. A potential sexual partner may reason, “If he talks about intimate topics, he must be honest;” that “honesty” can be extended to additional character judgments, including low disease risk, and obviate the need for condoms. In either case, no efficacious risk reduction occurs. At worst, the advice is dangerous when it becomes a substitute for condom use. Meanings associated with AIDS-prevention talk may jeopardize the relationship or relational meanings may jeopardize talk. A desire to talk suggests lack of trust; in turn, partners may reason, “If I trust you, I don’t have to ask.” Ironically, the perception of having a “trusting relationship” may be construed as evidence of “safety” and preclude engaging in safe-sex talk. 4. “Know your partner” research. Numerous findings argue that attempts to practice the “know your partner” advice are associated with increased reliance on personal judgment and decreased probability of condom use, and, thus, ultimately with greater risk. Evidence of assessing risk intuitively, by appearance and conversation, includes: avoiding condom use because one “just knows” the partner was safe (e.g., Williams et al., 1992); relying on judgments of risk for protection (e.g., Carter, McNair, Corbin, & Williams, 1999); getting to “know” someone and judging risk by observing personal habits, social circles, and attire (e.g., Estrada & Quintero, 1999); liking (e.g., Williams et al., 1992); perceived monogamy (e.g., Prince & Bernard, 1998) and perceptions of being in a relationship (e.g., Hennessy, Manteuffel, Dilorio, & Adame, 1997); invoking trust (e.g.,Williams et al., 1992); being “selective” (e.g., Hawkins, Gray, & Hawkins, 1995); and relying on sexual history taking (e.g., el-Bassel & Schilling, 1991). Evidence indicates that conversation specifically about condoms increases the probability of their use in limited circumstances, particularly via “bullying” strategies (Margillo & Imahori, 1998), in uncommitted relationships (e.g., Edgar, Freimuth, Hammond, McDonald, & Fink, 1992), and for contraceptive purposes (e.g., Koch, Palmer, Vicary, & Wood, 1999).

298

CLINE

In summary, by advocating conversation as prevention, the advice to “know your partner” reinforces the view that being in a relationship is protective. The end result is that the advice likely has done more harm than good. Negotiating Condom Use. The second interpersonal message was to “negotiate safe sex” or “negotiate condom use.” A wealth of evidence suggests limited practice in most populations, with identity and relational meanings as major prohibiting factors. 1. Evidence regarding condom use. Although people are knowledgeable about condoms’ efficacy, most do not use condoms, nor are informational interventions effective in increasing condom use (e.g., Lewis, Malow, & Ireland, 1997). Exceptions include sex workers with their clients, gay men (Boulton et al., 1995), and serodiscordant couples (Kennedy et al., 1993). Condom use is low among adolescents and use declines with age (e.g., Romer, Black, Ricardo, & Feigelman, 1994). Condom use is low among college students; typically about 20% report always using condoms (e.g., Oswalt & Matsen, 1993) despite most having multiple partners (DiClemente, Forrest, & Mickler, 1990). Condom use is low among heterosexual adults regardless of gender and ethnicity; rates of never using condoms typically exceed those of college students (e.g., Maxwell, Bastani, & Warda, 1999). Further, studies of varied populations show that as numbers of partners increase, condom use decreases (e.g., Oswalt & Matsen, 1993). 2. Meanings associated with condoms. Because condom use occurs in dyadic contexts, behavior is fraught with identity and relational meanings. Substantial evidence indicates that condoms are condemned and avoided by both men and women for psycho-physical reasons (issues of pleasure, spontaneity and comfort) (e.g., Ross, 1992). However, identity and relational reasons may be even stronger deterrents. 3. Risks to identity. Meanings commonly associated with condoms pose threats to identity. Jeopardy is attached to procuring, carrying, and using condoms. Both young males and females are embarrassed by buying condoms (e.g., Taylor, 1995). Women report greater embarrassment than men in buying (e.g., Cline & McKenzie, 1994) and carrying condoms (e.g., Lear, 1995), although often men are more embarrassed to use them (Cline & McKenzie, 1994). Suggesting using a condom may jeopardize one’s character. A person may fear being seen as having poor judgment, being unwise, careless, diseased (Sobo, 1993), sexually active (Hillier, Harrison, & Warr, 1998), or promiscuous (e.g., Rosenthal et al., 1998); or having cheated (Hetherington, Harris, Bausell, Kananagh, & Scott, 1996). The suggester may fear being viewed as untrustworthy or unfaithful (e.g., Sobo, 1993) or being labeled homosexual or bisexual, a drug user, or a prostitute (e.g., Worth, 1989). These meanings are enough to motivate condom avoidance. Gender norms pose a double standard in which being sexual is positive for men and negative for women. To buy, carry, or suggest using condoms may challenge a woman’s reputation or denote lack of sexual innocence (Lear, 1995), mark her as planning to have sex (Hillier et al., 1998), result in stigma associated with casual sex, promiscuity, and infidelity (Price, 1997); and jeopardize cultural (Marin & Marin, 1992) as well as gender identity (Brown et al., 1998; Flores-Ortiz, 1994). For women, using condoms may negate the association of sex with procreation and motherhood (e.g., Pivnick, 1993). Similarly, for some men, the potential to procreate is a part of their masculine identity or machismo (e.g., Price, 1997). Yielding to a woman who suggests using a condom may threaten one’s manhood (Abdool Karim, Abdool Karim, Preston-Whyte, & Sankar, 1992) or image of unquestioned authority (Miles, 1997). Proposing condom use may threaten a partner’s character (Brown et al., 1998) by calling into question the partner’s honesty (Sobo, 1993), fidelity, trustworthiness (Hetherington et al., 1996), faithfulness (e.g., Abdool Karim et al., 1992), and respectability (Raffaelli & Suarez-Al-Adam, 1998), or by implying the partner is a high STD risk (e.g., Ross, 1992).

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 299 The power of identity meanings in the context of relating is clear: Many people fear risk of rejection more than they fear STDs (Pliskin, 1997). Because relational meanings are so closely associated with identity meanings, they too often result in condom avoidance. 4. Relational meanings of condoms. Meanings commonly associated with condoms pose significant relational threats. As Adelman (1992) pointed out, condoms evoke images and contexts that defy relational well-being. Condoms represent a kind of relational barometer: Using a condom becomes a “tangible signifier of levels of intimacy, trust, and developmental stage of a relationship” (Estrada & Quintero, 1999, pp. 142–143). Using a condom signifies relational distance, questionable trust, limited commitment, and/or an early stage of relationship. Condoms often are associated with one-night stands, casual sex, and “illicit sexual relationships” (Raffaelli & Suarez-Al-Adam, 1998, p. 17), and with lack of relational involvement (Sheeran, Abraham, & Orbell, 1999) and commitment (e.g., Afifi, 1999). They are relatively more likely to be used as contraception among the young (Romer et al., 1994), in new relationships or early in relationships (Moore, Harrison, Kay, Deren, & Doll, 1995), in short-term relationships (Jadack, Hyde, & Keller, 1995), in fluid rather than in exclusive relationships (St. Lawrence et al., 1998), in steady rather than casual relationships (Magura, Shapiro, & Kang, 1994), with lovers rather than husbands (Pivnick, 1993), among single than married couples (Willig, 1994), for one-night stands (Williams et al., 1992), and for sporadic sexual encounters (Taylor, 1995). Condom use also is associated with the absence of trust and intimacy (e.g., Hammer, Fisher, Fitzgerald, & Fisher, 1996). Because condoms symbolize extrarelational activity, partners may avoid their use in order to sustain positive relational values (Worth, 1989). In short, condoms are equated with lack of relational connectedness. Condoms also are associated with relational control. Beyond losing prized relational values (e.g., commitment, intimacy, and trust), women may fear relational control costs (e.g., anger, hostility, loss of relationship) (e.g., Raffaelli & Suarez-Al-Adam, 1998). Women often cite their partners’ dislike of condoms to justify not using them (e.g., Libbus, 1995). Women who have been beaten or sexually abused simply are not in a position to request condom use; doing so may incur physical violence (e.g., Kalichman, Williams, Cherry, Belcher, & Nachimson, 1998). Given that men tend to be more negative about condoms’ meanings than women (e.g., Cline & McKenzie, 1994) and in greater control, condom use is improbable among unequal partners (Lear, 1995). Many women at highest risk have little or no bargaining power, as they rely on partners for money, drugs, food, and/or housing (Hetherington et al., 1996). Women may be more likely to perceive risk and desire to use condoms, but men are likely to hold greater relational control. In this case, condom use requires the submission of the man to a woman’s request (Sobo, 1993).

In summary, the meanings and practice of the “negotiate safe sex” or “negotiate condom use” advice are daunting. Condoms, associated with safety from a public health perspective, have become equated with risks to identities and relationships in the minds of participants. The Meanings of an HIV Test. From a public health perspective, the meanings of HIV testing are associated with assessing risk and HIV prevention; this perspective assumes that the person being tested wants to know his or her results. Obviously, many people are HIV tested because they believe they may be at risk of infection. Most people in Beevor and Catalan’s (1993) study who tested positive already had symptoms and had been advised to have the test as part of their treatment. Thus, many are tested for risk or overt medical reasons. However, people often are HIV tested for interpersonal rather than health or risk-related reasons.

300

CLINE

Due to relational meanings, pregnant women, especially if at high risk to infection (e.g., IV drugs users or partners of users), may be reluctant to be tested. Although they may believe they should be tested for the sake of their unborn children, equating a positive test with death may deter them (Williams, 1990). Either way, these women face challenges to achieving relational goals regarding their children. Mandatory testing of newborns essentially amounts to mothers being tested without their consent (Fleischman, Post, & Dubler, 1994). They may experience tension between two relational goals: the desire to protect their babies and the desire to retain their roles as mothers. Women who know they may test positive are likely to accurately anticipate disclosure of their status and predict stigmatizing consequences that will jeopardize social support for themselves and for their newborns (Berger, Rosner, & Farnsworth, 1996). After giving birth, many women fail to return for test results for fear of losing custody of their child for being an unfit mother if they tested positive (Berger et al., 1996). (See Cline & McKenzie, 2000a, regarding issues of mandatory testing and related disclosure.) Numerous relational risks are associated with proposing an HIV test to a partner (Hammer et al., 1996). Having the test often is more acceptable than condom use as it can be justified as a “standard medical procedure” (Sobo, 1993, p. 475). But suggesting the test may raise questions about trust and commitment, resulting in avoidance of the issue in order to avoid making a partner suspicious or feel mistrusted. In contrast, some may fear that suggesting having an HIV test signifies “too serious a relationship” (Hammer et al., 1996, p. 390), one more involved than that to which they are committed. In line with this reasoning, some people believe that having an HIV test will make the relationship closer, more secure, comfortable, and intimate. A final relational reason for avoiding the test is fear that a positive test will end the relationship; the potential loss of the relationship may be more frightening than the prospect of unknowingly being involved with an infected partner. Testing may be used to check on a partner (Sobo, 1993) or as a negotiation “chip” in a new relationship. Some people are pressured by others to have the HIV test; still others have the test to bring symbolic closure to a terminated relationship (Lupton, McCarthy, & Chapman, 1995). For some, getting tested is part of “a routinized script” in the early development of a relationship (Estrada & Quintero, 1999), a part of getting acquainted. Others use the test as a relational litmus test, providing evidence of the seriousness of the relationship (Lupton et al., 1995). A negative test result often is used to justify not using condoms (Lupton et al., 1995). Most people driven by these relational meanings assume that they will test negative. As a result, they may not return for test results and tend not to seek follow-up tests despite engaging in recent risky behavior (Lupton et al., 1995). Thus, from the participants’ perspective, an HIV test may have little to do with diagnosis, but rather is “magically viewed as a preventive measure” in itself (Lupton et al., 1995, p. 177) as it provides evidence of relational commitment and character. Little is known about the process of health care providers disclosing a positive HIV test result to clients (Jackson & Selby, 1998). Many receive little or no emotional or educational support at the time of diagnosis (Farber et al., 1996). The diagnosed person’s longer term adjustment is dependent on the immediate attention of the health care professional to facilitate addressing identity and relational as well as health concerns. Managing the Meanings of Having the Disease

Receiving a positive HIV test result forever changes how one manages life. The infected person is assaulted by shock, uncertainty, and the anticipation of loss. Many people equate

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 301

AIDS, and thus a positive HIV test result, with death (e.g., Williams, 1990). The initial reaction to an HIV diagnosis tends to be shock (Metcalfe, Langstaff, Evans, Paterson, & Reid, 1998). The newly diagnosed resonate with fear and an overwhelming sense of uncertainty (Metcalfe et al., 1998) as they face numerous threats of loss enhanced further by the dilemma of disclosure. The Dilemma of Disclosure. HIV disclosure decisions pose a major dilemma (Sowell et al., 1997) and source of recurring stress (Holt et al., 1998). The dilemma emerges immediately upon diagnosis, when people tend to maintain silence. The stressor recurs as the need for social support emerges both in coping with the meanings and emotional turmoil of diagnosis and as the disease progresses and the need for instrumental support grows. The major source of stress lies in uncertainty regarding how others will respond to the disclosure. People with HIV disease face the choice of risking stigma or denying themselves opportunities for social support (e.g., Simoni, Mason, & Marks, 1997), as the prospects for others’ reactions range from wholehearted and unconditional love, acceptance, and support to rejection, condemnation, ostracism, abandonment, or violence. The end result of an HIV diagnosis is enhanced need for social support at the very time that access to that social support is likely jeopardized by disclosing the very reason for its need. (See analyses of the relationship between stigma and social support by Cline, 1989; Cline & McKenzie, 1996a, 1996b, 2000b.) As a result, people with HIV disease face uncertainty about to whom and under what conditions to make disclosures (Brashers et al., 2000). The Threats of Disclosure. Disclosure of this single piece of information can result in threats to physical well-being, identities, and relationships. 1. Threats to lifestyle and well-being. Disclosure of HIV disease endangers physical wellbeing. What many take for granted, such as spousal and family support, and everyday protection by law against discrimination, employment, housing, education, insurance, and access to health care, may be jeopardized (Moneyham et al., 1996). Ironically, the need to engage in disclosure often keeps HIV-infected people away from the services they most need. Although the threat of violence for HIV-infected women appears greater than for HIV-infected men, both may be at enhanced risk upon disclosure. Research from a probability sample indicates that 20.5% of women, 11.5% of men who reported having sex with men, and 7.5% of heterosexual men reported experiencing physical harm since their HIV diagnosis (Zierler et al., 2000); nearly half reported that their HIV status triggered the violence. Women in abusive relationships are at increased risk to violence (Gielen, O’Campo, Faden, & Eke, 1997). The probability of violent responses likely is underestimated given evidence that many women fail to make disclosures to their partners because they fear a violent response (Heyward et al., 1993). Women who are at high risk for HIV infection often are at high risk for violence. As many as two-thirds of HIV-infected women fear violence as they face the prospect of disclosing their disease (Gielen et al., 1997); one-quarter report already having experienced abandonment, verbal abuse, or physical assault as consequences of their disclosure. Beyond loss of physical health and years of productive life, people who test positive are likely to anticipate immediate and longer term identity and relational losses. 2. Threats to identity. Being stigmatized or rejected is prima facie evidence of failure to achieve identity management goals. The implications of AIDS can be summarized in one word: stigma (Goffman, 1963). The impact of stigma associated with AIDS is multiplied by its associations with an array of stigmatizing features including terminal illness, IV drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, and disenfranchised populations (Cline & McKenzie, 1996a).

302

CLINE

HIV represents a massive attack on one’s identity, both internally and externally. As Jackson and Selby (1998) pointed out, the diagnosis can pose immediate damage to the self-concept. Psychological consequences of an HIV positive test include self-rejection and enhanced risks to mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression, and suicide) (Crandall & Coleman, 1992). Among the identity meanings are losses of health and a positive body image as well as facing one’s own mortality. Often a woman diagnosed with HIV becomes angry with herself. The positive test reflects on her character, signifying a lack of wisdom and judgment. People with HIV disease are blamed for their behavior, judged to have character flaws, and represent a most undesirable form of death (Cline & McKenzie, 2000b). HIV, more obvious than other stigmatizing conditions, becomes the “master status” of the infected; a person’s identity becomes equated with his or her infection (Bennett, 1990). The potential identity consequences of an HIV disclosure include shame, disapproval, and becoming identified as a chronically ill person (Katz, 1997). Among women, shame may be relative to the inability to have children or to care for one’s family; among men, shame may emanate from a sense of blame for leaving the family with insufficient resources. An AIDS disclosure may result in personal rejection or condemnation by the very people most might assume would be supportive. Maintaining secrecy often is directed toward protecting others as well as self. When a child has HIV-infection, often secrecy is maintained both within the family (i.e., not disclosing to siblings) and outside the family (e.g., not disclosing to school representatives) (Fanos & Wiener, 1994). These decisions are designed to protect the family’s singular and collective identities. Similarly, Latino men report not disclosing their HIV status to their parents, attempting to avoid both worry and their rejection by others (Mason, Marks, Simoni, Ruiz, & Richardson, 1995). 3. Threats to relationships. Relational implications of an HIV diagnosis surface quickly. As an interpersonal syndrome, people with HIV disease commonly experience relational rejection, betrayal, abandonment, and, at best, uncomfortable interaction. Often women’s initial reactions abound with relational meanings. Some fear having infected a partner; others experience the diagnosis as betrayal or broken trust (Sobo, 1993). For many women, the meanings of the diagnosis center on childbearing and childrearing (Cohen, Hauer, & Wofsy, 1989) as they face choices regarding abortion, postponing childbearing, and planning for their children’s care as they anticipate their own illness and death (Metcalfe et al., 1998). In some cases, the relational losses of HIV disease seem to outweigh the physical losses. Social uncertainties include fear of rejection by family, friends, lovers, and spouses (Lang, 1990), as well as abandonment, hostility, and outright violence (Alonzo & Reynolds, 1995). Relational reasons may drive disclosure decisions. Some HIV disclosures are made in anticipation of gaining social support (Stein et al., 1998); others originate out of caring and concern for a lover’s health (Simoni et al., 1995). Some evidence indicates that people with HIV disease anticipate more negative relational responses to their disclosures than they actually receive (Mansergh, Marks, & Simoni, 1995; Simoni et al., 1997). In fact, most people receive supportive responses (e.g., Holt et al., 1998; Katz, 1997). Despite encouraging evidence regarding supportive responses, the rejection that does occur tends to be devastating and often at the hands of people expected to be supportive. Further, those who fail to disclose may assess their situations accurately; they may be more likely to encounter negative relational consequences than those who took the risk of disclosure (Mansergh et al., 1995). Common responses go beyond anger; 10.4% of Mansergh et al.’s (1995) respondents reported that their lovers left them upon hearing their HIV disclosure. For many gay men, disclosures of sexual orientation and HIV status occur simultaneously (Kadushin, 1996); in effect, they are “outed” by their HIV disclosure (Holt et al., 1998). Families may reject a member’s homosexuality, reject the person, and be fearful of being stigmatized themselves. Even when family members are supportive, the discloser has to worry about trusting others to

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 303 maintain confidentiality (Holt et al., 1998; Moneyham et al., 1996). Several studies show that gay men are less likely to disclose to family members than to gay partners and friends due to fear of rejection (e.g., Mansergh et al., 1995); disclosure to fathers was particularly low. African American women also report painful disclosure experiences with families and partners. These include being shunned by their mothers, being isolated, and being given separate dishes from which to eat (Bedimo, Bennett, Kissinger, & Clark, 1998). One woman’s partner began calling her “the death angel” (Bedimo et al., 1998, p. 52); numerous accounts include partner abandonment or partners turning on them in disbelief, even when the partners were the source of infection. Not coincidentally, the risks associated with disclosing HIV status reflect the same frames of meaning that drive HIV risk and prevention behavior: threats to physical and functional well-being, identities, and relationships.

Summary: Interpersonal Messages and Meanings Frame Behavior

Patterns of interpersonal communication in the HIV/AIDS epidemic support three primary conclusions. First, everyday interpersonal interaction constructs a framework of meaning that functions to direct behavior with regard to AIDS. The language, labels, and metaphors about AIDS create meanings that reflect and predict interpersonal behavior across many contexts. A reality built on themes of stigmatizing identities and divisiveness in relationships yields social norms that guide behavior regarding risk taking, prevention, and responses to people with HIV/AIDS; predictably, these behaviors are designed more to avoid character judgments and relational discord than to promote health and supportiveness. Second, across populations and contexts, across behaviors associated with risk, prevention, and responses to people with HIV disease, the primary frameworks of meaning driving participants’ behaviors are social rather than health related. Actions tend to be framed by meanings associated more with identity and relational management than with health issues. Whatever actions are taken, whether in response to others, in taking risks, in understanding prevention messages, or in managing one’s own illness, occur with consistent sensitivity to maintaining positive impressions among peers and partners and positive relationships with significant others. Logically, intervention efforts must be framed in terms of the participants’ social objectives rather than solely in terms of health objectives or likely they will fail; worse, they may encourage enhanced risk taking. In the case of AIDS, most risky behavior and, thus, most of the desired behavior changes, occur in interpersonal contexts; not only are partners (drug and sexual) likely to influence behavior, but often their cooperation and participation are necessary to enact prevention behavior as well. Risk, prevention, and supportive responses occur in dyadic or group contexts; interpersonal transactions rather than personal behavior become the unit of analysis and the point of intervention. Interventions must account for the transactional nature of the context; unless interventions permit interactants to meet their immediate and longer term interpersonal goals, they are likely to fail. Worse, ignoring the interpersonal context in which risk taking occurs yields ineffective and potentially dangerous prevention messages. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH: DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

The present review of everyday interpersonal communication and health makes several arguments regarding future research and practice. First, more systematic and theoretically driven research is needed. The present review provides glimpses of the varied and significant roles interpersonal communication plays

304

CLINE

every day in health-related outcomes; the case of AIDS illustrates the pervasiveness of those roles across populations and contexts. As a field, we need to attend to the sometimes more difficult-to-capture factors that influence health. We have long known and accepted, in the realm of public health communication campaigns, that interpersonal communication tends to precede behavior change. We have long understood the significance of interpersonal communication in health care transactions for outcomes (e.g., satisfaction, compliance, probability of malpractice suits, and significant medical outcomes). But as a field, we have little attended to the particular dynamics of that interpersonal communication and have little attempted to understand the role of everyday interpersonal communication as it influences health and risk behavior. By focusing on messages and meanings from the perspectives of those engaged in symbolic behavior, social influence offers one theoretical framework around which to conduct research. Second, as researchers in the arena of health, we tend to look at our research topics and questions in a way that overattends to frames of meaning invoked from a public health perspective. That is, we overemphasize the significance of explicit health information and themes of risk in understanding health communication problems. Ironically, as communication scholars, one of the first lessons we likely learned as part of our training was the value of “audience analysis.” That lesson often is set aside in health communication research and practice. Instead of attempting to understand messages and meanings from the perspectives of those participating in health-significant interpersonal transactions, we tend to impose frames of meaning that drive public health policy, interventions, and sources of research funding. That is, we tend to frame not only our research questions from the vantage point of instrumental goals and health as communication content, but also our methods and interpretations of results. In so doing, we enter a different sphere of reality and speak a different language than the individuals we hope to influence. As a result, the messages and meanings likely to be most influential in affecting health-related behavior often are ignored. The present review calls for researchers to understand health and risk behaviors in terms of the frames of meaning used in the interpersonal contexts in which the behavior occurs. More specifically, we can begin this shift in perspective by investigating the identity and relational meanings associated with health and risk behaviors. In turn, we can build interventions on these messages and meanings. Third, in terms of both research and practice, the implications of understanding the social realities, social norms, messages, and meanings from participants’ points of view go beyond effectiveness to issues of ethics. Like health care professionals, health communication specialists ought to adhere to the principles of medical ethics, beginning with “first do no harm.” The principle of nonmaleficence (Beauchamp & Childress, 1989) is not simply the inverse of the principle of beneficence. In the name of “doing good,” that is, acting with moral certitude, many in the fields of medicine, public health, and health communication risk doing harm. When public health officials design and disseminate messages for the public with more consideration of their political and moral acceptability than how those messages will be interpreted and practiced within the social realities in which various targeted publics live, they risk doing more harm than good. In the case of AIDS, the failure to attend to participants’ meanings for the message “know your partner” yielded danger. Messages that framed condoms in positive terms (rather than avoiding the word, and worse, explicitly arguing their inefficacy) and talk, only to the extent that it related to condom use, would have been clearer, more internally consistent, and potentially more effective. Instead, the widely disseminated messages appear to have done substantial harm. In a very real sense, as we begin the third decade of the epidemic, the solution (many widely disseminated prevention messages) has become the problem (Watzlawick &

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 305

Weakland, 1974). Public health efforts to invoke change essentially often have promoted “more of the same” risky behaviors promoters intended to prevent. Finally, implicit in the present review is a plea to pursue an understanding of the significant role that social norms play in behavior; social realities establish the “oughtness” of behavior and interpretations of behavior. As argued here, health communication researchers need to understand the implications of the sources of social norms, their role in interpersonal contexts, and their implications for producing effective behavior change messages. At the same time, planned change messages are only a very small part of the mountain of everyday messages that influence various publics’ social norms. The interrelationships between interpersonal and public influences on social norms need to be better understood. Public health officials, educators, religious leaders, community leaders, practitioners, politicians, news representatives, producers of popular culture, and institutional representatives need to understand that their messages also play a key role in establishing and maintaining social norms. Often their messages work against efficacious prevention. For example, continuing vociferous public debate regarding shown-to-be efficacious prevention behaviors (e.g., education regarding condoms and condom use, needle cleaning and exchange programs) serves to undermine these practices as social norms. When university administrators debated making condoms available on campus, when news editors refused to use the explicit language needed to clearly identify prevention behaviors, when television networks refused condom advertising, when politicians contended, against prevailing evidence that education about condoms and cleaning needles promotes sex and drug use, they all played a role in promoting norms that encourage risk and in denying the very social norms that may be most effective as prevention. One avenue of change for health communication specialists is to address the audiences (e.g., agenda setters, opinion leaders, gatekeepers) who have significant power to influence social norms. REFERENCES Abdool Karim, S. S., Abdool Karim, Q., Preston-Whyte, E., & Sankar, N. (1992). Reasons for lack of condom use among high school students. South African Medical Journal, 82, 107–110. Adelman, M. B. (1992). Healthy passions: Safer sex as play. In E. Edgar & M. A. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), AIDS: A communication perspective (pp. 69–89). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Afifi, W. A. (1999). Harming the ones we love: Relational attachment and perceived consequences as predictors of safe-sex behaviors. The Journal of Sex Research, 36, 198–206. Alberts, J. K., Miller-Rassulo, M. A., & Hecht, M. L. (1991). A typology of drug-resistance strategies. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 19, 129–151. Albrecht, T. L., Adelman, M. B., & Associates. (1987). Communicating social support. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Alonzo, A. A., & Reynolds, N. R. (1995). Stigma, HIV and AIDS: An exploration and elaboration of a stigma trajectory. Social Science and Medicine, 3, 303–315. Baxter, L. K., & Wilmot, W. W. (1985). Taboo topics in close relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2, 253–269. Beauchamp, T., & Childress, J. (1989). Principles of biomedical ethics (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Bedimo, A. L., Bennett, M., Kissinger, P., & Clark, R. A., (1998). Understanding barriers to condom usage among HIV-infected African American women. Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, 9, 45–58.

306

CLINE

Beevor, A. S., & Catalan, J. (1993). Women’s experience of HIV testing: The views of HIV positive and HIV negative women. AIDS Care, 5, 177–186. Bennett, M. J. (1990). Stigmatization: Experiences of persons with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 11, 141–154. Berger, C. R. (1995). Inscrutable goals, uncertain plans, and the production of communicative action. In C. R. Berger & M. Burgoon (Eds.), Communication and social influence processes (pp. 1–28). E. Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Berger, C. R., & Bradac, J. J. (1982). Language and social knowledge: Uncertainty in interpersonal relations. London: Edward Arnold. Berger, C. R., & Douglas, W. (1982). Thought and talk: “Excuse me, but have I been talking to myself?” In F. E. X. Dance (Ed.), Human communication theory: Comparative essays (pp. 42–60). New York: Harper & Row. Berger, J. T., Rosner, F., & Farnsworth, P. (1996). The ethics of mandatory HIV testing in newborns. The Journal of Clinical Ethics, 7, 77–84. Berger P., & Kellner, H. (1964). Marriage and the construction of reality. Diogenes, 46, 1– 24. Reprinted in D. Brissett & C. Edgeley (Eds.). (1975). Life as theatre (pp. 219–233). Chicago: Aldine. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. New York: Anchor Books. Boulton, M., McLean, J., Fitzpatrick, R., & Hart, G. (1995). Gay men’s accounts of unsafe sex. AIDS Care, 7, 619–630. Bowen, S. P., & Michal-Johnson, P. (1995). HIV/AIDS: A crucible for understanding the dark side of sexual interactions. In S. Duck & J. T. Wood (Eds.), Confronting relational challenges (pp. 150–180). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brashers, D. E., Neidig, J. L., Haas, S. M., Dobbs, L. K., Cardillo, L. W., & Russell, J. A. (2000). Communication in the management of uncertainty: The case of persons living with HIV or AIDS. Communication Monographs, 67, 63–84. Brimlow, D. L., & Ross, M. W. (1998). HIV-related communication and power in women injecting drug users. In N. L. Roth & L. K. Fuller (Eds.), Women and AIDS: Negotiating safer practices, care, and representation (pp. 71–80). New York: The Harrington Park Press. Brown, L. K., Lourie, K. J., Flanagan, P., & High, P. (1998). HIV-related attitudes and risk behavior of young adolescent mothers. AIDS Education and Prevention, 10, 565–573. Browne, J., & Minichiello, V. (1995). The social meanings behind male sex work: Implications for sexual interactions. British Journal of Sociology, 46, 598–622. Burleson, B. R., Albrecht, T. L., Goldsmith, D. J., & Sarason, I. G. (Eds.). (1994). Communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships, and community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Carter, J. A., McNair, L. D., Corbin, W. R., & Williams, M. (1999). Gender differences related to heterosexual condom use: The influence of negotiation styles. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 25, 217–225. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (1981, June 5). Pneumocystis pneumonia— Los Angeles. Morbidity and mortality weekly report, 30, 250–252. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2001 December). HIV/AIDS surveillance report, 13(2). Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Chetwynd, J., & Plumridge, E. (1994). Knowledge, attitudes, and activities of male clients of female sex workers: Risk factors for HIV. New Zealand Medical Journal, 107, 351–353. Clark, R. A., & Delia, J. D. (1979). Topoi and rhetorical competence. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 65, 187–206.

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 307 Cline, R. J. W. (1989). Communication and death and dying: Implications for coping with AIDS. AIDS & Public Policy Journal, 4, 40–50. Cline, R. J., & Freeman, K. E. (1988, June). Asking the right questions: A qualitative analysis of AIDS in the minds of heterosexual college students. Presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, New Orleans, LA. Cline, R. J. W., Johnson, S. J., & Freeman, K. E. (1992). Talk among sexual partners about AIDS: Interpersonal communication for risk reduction or risk enhancement? Health Communication, 4, 39–56. Cline, R. J. W., & McKenzie, N. J. (1994). Sex differences in communication and the construction of HIV/AIDS. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 22, 322–337. Cline, R. J. W., & McKenzie, N. J. (1996a). HIV/AIDS, women, and threads of discrimination: A tapestry of disenfranchisement. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Communication and disenfranchisement (pp. 365–386). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cline, R. J. W, & McKenzie, N. J. (1996b). Women and AIDS: The lost population. In R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book (pp. 382–401). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cline, R. J., & McKenzie, N. J. (1998). The many cultures of health care: Difference, dominance, and distance in physician-patient communication. In L. D. Jackson & B. K. Duffy (Eds.), Health communication research: A guide to developments and directions (pp. 57– 74). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Cline, R. J. W., & McKenzie, N. J. (2000a). Dilemmas of disclosure in the age of HIV/AIDS: Balancing privacy and protection in the health care context. In S. Petronio (Ed.), Balancing the needs of private disclosures (pp. 71–82). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cline, R. J., & McKenzie, N. J. (2000b). Interpersonal roulette and disability: HIV/AIDS, stigma, and social support in tension. In D. O. Braithwaite & T. L. Thompson (Eds.), Handbook of communication and people with disabilities: Research and application (pp. 467– 483). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cohen, J. B., Hauer, L. B., & Wofsy, C. B. (1989). Women and IV drugs: Parenteral and heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus. The Journal of Drug Issues, 19, 39–56. Crandall, C. S., & Coleman, R. (1992). AIDS-related stigmatization and the disruption of social relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 9, 163–177. Cusick, L. (1998). Non-use of condoms by prostitute women. AIDS Care, 10, 133–146. Dearing, J. W., & Rogers, E. M. (1992). AIDS and the media agenda. In T. Edgar, M. A. Fitzpatrick, & V. S. Freimuth (Eds.), AIDS: A communication perspective (pp. 173–193). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Des Jarlais, D. C., Chamberland, M. E., Yancovitz, S. R., Weinberg, P., & Friedman, S. R. (1984). Heterosexual partners: A large risk group for AIDS. Lancet, 2, 1346–1347. Des Jarlais, D. C., Friedman, S. R., Casrield, C., & Kott, A. (1987). AIDS and preventing initiation into intravenous drug use. Psychology & Health, 1, 179–194. Des Jarlais, D. C., Friedman, S. R., & Strug, D. (1986). AIDS and needle sharing within the IV-drug use subculture. In D. A. Feldman & T. M. Johnson (Eds.), The social dimensions of AIDS: Method and theory (pp. 111–125). New York: Praeger. DiClemente, R. J., Forrest, K. A, & Mickler, S. (1990). College students’ knowledge about AIDS and changes in HIV-preventive behavior. AIDS Education and Prevention, 2, 201– 212. Dorsey, A. M., Scherer, C. W., & Real, K. (1999). The college tradition of “drink ‘til you drop”: The relation between students’ social networks and engaging in risk behaviors. Health Communication, 11, 313–334.

308

CLINE

Dwyer, R., Richardson, D., Ross, M. W., Wodak, A., Miller, M. E., & Gold, J. (1994). Gender differences in HIV risks among injecting drug users. AIDS Education and Prevention, 6, 379–389. Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in high school. New York: Teachers College Press. Edgar, T., Freimuth, V. S., Hammond, S. L., McDonald, D. A., & Fink, E. L. (1992). Strategic sexual communication: Condom use resistance and response. Health Communication, 4, 83–104. Edwards, J. (1990). Frameworks for applying social psychological processes to social issues. In J. Edwards, R. S. Tindale, L. Heath, & E. J. Posavac (Eds.), Social influence processes and prevention (pp. 1–13). New York: Plenum. el-Bassel, N., & Schilling, R. F. (1991). Drug use and sexual behavior of indigent African American men. Public Health Reports, 106, 586–590. Estrada, A., & Quintero, G. A. (1999). Refining categories of risk and identity: The appropriation of AIDS prevention information and constructions of risk. In W. N. Elwood (Ed.), Power in the blood: A handbook of AIDS, politics, and communication (pp. 133–147). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fanos, J. H., & Wiener, L. (1994). Tomorrow’s survivors: Siblings of human immunodeficiency virus-infected children. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 15, S43–S48. Farber, N. J., Farber, H. T., Weiner, J., Bover, E. G., Davis, E. B., Feldman, D., & Johnson, C. (1996). Telling patients about the diagnosis of HIV infection. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 11, 494–496. Ferguson, K. J., Burke, J. A., Becker, S. L., Reimers, T. M., Daughty, V. S., & Pomrehn, P. R. (1992). The recruitment of new smokers by adolescents. Health Communication, 4, 171–181. Fleischman, A. R., Post. L. F., & Dubler, N. N. (1994). Mandatory newborn screening for human immunodeficiency virus. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 71, 4–17. Flores-Ortiz, Y. G. (1994). The role of cultural and gender values in alcohol use patterns among young Chicana/Latina high school and university students: Implications for AIDS prevention. International Journal of the Addictions, 29, 1149–1171. Freeman, R. C., Rodriguez, G. M., & French, J. F. (1994). A comparison of male and female intravenous drug users’ risk behaviours for HIV infection. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 20, 129–157. Friedman, S. R., & Des Jarlais, D. C. (1991). HIV among drug injectors: The epidemic and the response. AIDS Care, 3, 239–250. Friedman, S. R., Des Jarlais, D. C., & Sotheran, J. L. (1986). AIDS health education for intravenous drug users. Health Education Quarterly, 13, 383–393. Gielen, A. C., O’Campo, P., Faden, R. R., & Eke, A. (1997). Women’s disclosure of HIV status: Experiences of mistreatment and violence in an urban setting. Woman and Health, 25, 19–31. Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Griffin, M. I., Weiss, R. D., Mirin, S. M., & Lange, U. (1989). A comparison of male and female cocaine users. Archives of General Psychiatry, 46, 122–126. Grund, J-P. C., Stern, L. S., Kaplan C. D., Adriaans, N. F., & Drucker, E. (1992). Drug use contexts and HIV-consequences: The effect of drug policy on patterns of everyday drug use in Rotterdam and the Bronx. British Journal of Addiction, 87, 381–392. Hammer, J. C., Fisher, J. D., Fitzgerald, P., & Fisher, W. A. (1996). When two heads aren’t better than one: AIDS risk behavior in college-age couples. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26, 375–397.

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 309 Harrington, N. G. (1995). The effects of college students’ alcohol resistance strategies. Health Communication, 7, 371–391. Hawes, L. C. (1975). Pragmatics of analoguing: Theory and model construction in communication. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Hawkins, W. E., Gray, C., & Hawkins, W. E. (1995). Gender differences of reported safer sex behaviors within a random sample of college students. Psychological Reports, 77 (Pt. 1), 963–968. Henley, N. (1977). Body politics: Power, sex, and nonverbal communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Hennessy, M., Manteuffel, B., Dilorio, C., & Adame, D. (1997). Identifying the social contexts of effective sex refusal. Journal of American College Health, 46, 27–34. Hetherington, S. E., Harris, R. M., Bausell, R. B., Kananagh, K. H., & Scott, D. E. (1996). AIDS prevention in high-risk African American women: Behavioral, psychological, and gender issues. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 22, 9–21. Heyward, W., Batter, V., Malulu, M., Mbuyi, N., Mbu, L., St. Louis, M. E., Kamenga, M., & Ryder, R. W. (1993). Impact of HIV counseling and testing among child-bearing women in Kinshasa, Zaire. AIDS, 7, 1633–1637. Hillier, L., Harrison, L., & Warr, D. (1998). “When you carry condoms all the boys think you want it”: Negotiating competing discourses about safe sex. Journal of Adolescence, 21, 15–29. Holt, R., Court, P., Vedhara, K., Nott, K. H., Holmes, J., & Snow, M. H. (1998). The role of disclosure in coping with HIV infection. AIDS Care, 10, 49–60. Jackson, L. D., & Selby, M. J. (1998). Communicating an HIV-positive diagnosis. In N. L. Roth & L. K. Fuller (Eds.), Negotiating safer practices, care, and representation (pp. 131–153). New York: Harrington Park Press. Jadack, R. A., Hyde, J. S., & Keller, M. L. (1995). Gender and knowledge about HIV, risky sexual behavior, and safer sex practices. Research in Nursing and Health, 18, 313–324. Jones, T. F., Craig, A. S., Hoy, D., Gunter, E. W., Ashley, D. L., Barr, D. B., Brock, W., & Schaffner, W. (2000). Mass psychogenic illness attributed to toxic exposure at a high school. The New England Journal of Medicine, 342, 96–100. Kadushin, G. (1996). Gay men with AIDS and their families of origin: An analysis of social support. Health and Social Work, 21, 141–149. Kalichman, S. C., Williams, E. A., Cherry, C., Belcher, L., & Nachimson, D. (1998). Sexual coercion, domestic violence, and negotiating condom use among low-income African American women, Journal of Women’s Health, 7, 371–378. Katz, A. (1997). “Mom, I have something to tell you”: Disclosing HIV infection. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 25, 139–143. Kennedy, C. A., Skurnick, J., Wan, J. Y., Quattrone, G., Sheffet, A., Quinones, M., Wang, W., & Louria, D. B. (1993). Psychological distress, drug and alcohol use as correlates of condom use in HIV-serodiscordant heterosexual couples. AIDS, 1, 1493–1499. Kinsella, J. (1989). Covering the plague: AIDS and the American media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Koch, P. B., Palmer, R. F., Vicary, J. R., & Wood, J. M. (1999). Mixing sex and alcohol in college: Female-male HIV risk model. Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, 24, 99–108. Krishman, S. P., Durrah, T., & Winkler, K. (1997). Coverage of AIDS in popular African American magazines. Health Communication, 9, 273–288. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lang, N. G. (1990). Sex, politics, and guilt: A study of homophobia and the AIDS phenomenon. In D. A. Feldman (Ed.), Culture and AIDS (pp. 169–182). New York: Praeger.

310

CLINE

Lear, D. (1995). Sexual communication in the age of AIDS: The construction of risk and trust among young adults. Social Science and Medicine, 41, 1311–1323. Lewis, J. E., Malow, R. M., & Ireland, S. J. (1997). HIV/AIDS risk in heterosexual college students: A review of a decade of literature. Journal of American College Health, 45, 147–158. Lewis, L. K. (1994). A challenge for health education: The enactment problem and a communication-related solution. Health Communication, 6, 205–224. Libbus, K. (1995). Women’s beliefs concerning condom acquisition and use. Public Health Nursing, 12, 341–347. Lupton, D., McCarthy, S., & Chapman, P. (1995). “Doing the right thing”: The symbolic meanings and experiences of having an HIV antibody test. Social Science and Medicine, 41, 173–180. Lynch, J. J. (1985). The language of the heart: The human body in dialogue. New York: Basic Books. Lynch, J. J., & Rosch, P. J. F. (1990). The heart of dialogue: Human communication and cardiovascular health. In H. Balner (Ed.), A new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine? (pp. 31–52). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger B.V. Magura, S., Shapiro, J. L., & Kang, S. Y. (1994). Condom use among criminally-involved adolescents. AIDS Care, 6, 595–603. Maibach, E., & Parrott, R. L. (1995). Designing health messages: Approaches from communication theory and public health practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Maloney, B. D. (1988). The legacy of AIDS: Challenge for the next century. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 14, 143–150. Mansergh, G., Marks, G., & Simoni, J. M. (1995). Self-disclosure of HIV infection among men who vary in time since seropositive diagnosis and symptomatic status. AIDS, 9, 639–644. Margillo, G. A., & Imahori, T. T. (1998). Understanding safer sex negotiation in a group of low-income African-American women. In N. L. Roth & L. K. Fuller (Eds.), Women and AIDS: Negotiating safer sex: Practices, care and representation (pp. 43–69). New York: Harrington Park Press. Marin, B. V., & Marin, G. (1992). Predictors of condom accessibility among Hispanics in San Francisco. American Journal of Public Health, 82, 592–595. Mason, H. R. C., Marks, G., Simoni, J. M., Ruiz, M. S., & Richardson, J. L. (1995). Culturally sanctioned secrets? Latino men’s nondisclosure of HIV status to family, friends, and lovers. Health Psychology, 14, 6–12. Masters, W. H., Johnson, V. E., & Kolodny, R. C. (1988). Crisis: Heterosexual behavior in the age of AIDS. New York: Grove Press. Maxwell, A. E., Bastani, R., & Warda, U. S. (1999). Condom use in young blacks and Hispanics in public STD clinics. Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 26, 463–471. Mays, V. M., & Cochran, S. D. (1988). Issues in the perception of AIDS risk and risk reduction activities by black and Hispanic/Latina women. American Psychologist, 43, 949–957. Mays, V. M., & Cochran, S. D. (1993). Ethnic and gender differences in beliefs about sex partner questioning to reduce HIV risk. Journal of Adolescent Research, 8, 77–88. McKaganey, N., Friedman, S. R., & Mesquita, F. (1998). The social context of injectors’ risk behaviors. In G. Stimson, D. C. Des Jarlais, & A. Ball (Eds.), Drug injecting and HIV infection (pp. 22–41). London: UCL Press. Mechanic, D. (1966). Response factors in illness: The study of illness behavior. Social Psychiatry, 1, 11–20. Metcalfe, K. A., Langstaff, J. E., Evans, S. J., Paterson, H. M., & Reid, J. L. (1998). Meeting the needs of women living with HIV. Public Health Nursing, 15, 30–34.

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 311 Miles, L. (1997). Women, AIDS, and power in heterosexual sex: A discourse analysis. In M. M. Gergen & S. N. Davis (Eds.), Toward a new psychology of gender (pp. 479–501). New York: Routledge. Miller, G. R., Boster, F. J., Roloff, M. E., & Seibold, D. R. (1987). MBRS rekindled: Some thoughts on compliance gaining in interpersonal settings. In M. E. Roloff & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Interpersonal processes: New directions in communication research (pp. 89–116). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Misovich, S. J., Fisher, J. D., & Fisher, W. A. (1996). The perceived AIDS-preventive utility of knowing one’s partner well: A public health dictum and individuals’ risky sexual behavior. Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 5, 83–90. Monahan, J. L., & Lannutti, P. J. (2000). Alcohol as a social lubricant: Alcohol myopia theory, social self-esteem, and social interaction. Human Communication Research, 26, 175– 202. Moneyham, L., Seals, B., Demi, A., Sowell, R., Cohen, L., & Guillory, J. (1996). Experiences of disclosure in women infected with HIV. Health Care for Women International, 17, 209– 221. Moore, J., Harrison, J. S., Kay, K. L., Deren, S., & Doll, L. S. (1995). Factors associated with Hispanic women’s HIV-related communication and condom use with male partners. AIDS Care, 7, 415–427. Moscovici, S. (1976). Social influence and social change. London: Academic Press. Neaigus, A., Friedman, S. R., Curtis, R., Des Jarlais, D. C., Furst, R. T., Jose, B., Mota, P., Stepherson, B., Sufian, M., Ward, T., et al. (1994). The relevance of drug injectors; social and risk networks for understanding and preventing HIV infection. Social Science and Medicine, 38, 67–78. Netting, N. S. (1992). Sexuality in youth culture. Adolescence, 27, 961–976. Newton, D. A., & Burgoon, J. K. (1990). The use and consequences of verbal influence strategies during interpersonal disagreements. Human Communication Research, 16, 477– 518. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (2000, January). Healthy people 2010: Understanding and improving health (conference edition). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Oswalt, R., & Matsen, K. (1993). Sex, AIDS, and the use of condoms: A survey of compliance in college students. Psychological Reports, 72(Pt. 1), 764–766. Perkins, R., Lovejoy, F., Dean, M. J., & Wade, A. (1991). AIDS preventive practices among female prostitutes in NSW and ACT. National AIDS Bulletin, 5(8), 28–32. Piotrow, P. T., Kincaid, D. L., Rimon II, J. G., & Rinehart, W. (1997). Health communication: Lessons from family planning and reproductive health, Westport, CT: Praeger. Pivnick, A. (1993). HIV infection and the meaning of condoms. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 17, 431–453. Pliskin, K. L. (1997). Verbal intercourse and sexual communication: Impediments to STD prevention. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 11, 89–109. Price, A. (1997). Culture and condoms: A review of research literature. Modern Midwife, 7, 28–31. Prince, A., & Bernard, A. L. (1998). Sexual behaviors and safer sex practices of college students on a commuter campus. Journal of American College Health, 47, 11–21. Raffaelli, M., & Suarez-Al-Adam, M. (1998). Reconsidering the HIV/AIDS prevention needs of Latino women in the United States. In N. L. Roth & L. K. Fuller (Eds.), Women and AIDS: Negotiating safer practices, care, and representation (pp. 7–41). New York: Harrington Park Press.

312

CLINE

Rice, E. E., & Atkin, C. K. (Eds.). (2001). Public communication campaigns (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Romer, D., Black, M., Ricardo, I., & Feigelman, S. (1994). Social influences on sexual behavior of youth at risk for HIV exposure. American Journal of Public Health, 84, 977–985. Rosenthal, D., Gifford, S., & Moore, S. (1998). Safe sex or safe love: Competing discourses? AIDS Care, 10, 35–47. Ross, J. W. (1988). Ethics and the language of AIDS. In C. Pierce & D. VanDeVeer (Eds.), AIDS: Ethics and public policy (pp. 39–48). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Ross, M. W. (1992). Attitudes toward condoms and condom use: A review. International Journal of STD & AIDS, 3, 10–16. Roth, N. L. (1990, November). The paradox of silence: Suppressed fantasy themes in Sullivan’s first HIV/AIDS speech. Presented to the annual meeting of the Speech Communication Association, Chicago, IL. St. Lawrence, J. S., Eldridge, G. D., Reitman, D., Little, C. E., Shelby, M. C., & Brasfield, T. L. (1998). Factors influencing condoms use among African American women: Implications for risk reduction interventions. American Journal of Community Psychology, 26, 7–28. Schooler, C., Basil, M. D., & Altman, D. G. (1996). Alcohol and cigarette advertising on billboards: Targeting with social cues. Health Communication, 8, 109–129. Schwartz, D. J., Phares, V., Tantleff-Dunn, S., & Thompson, J. K. (1999). Body image, psychological functioning, and parental feedback regarding physical appearance. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 25, 339–343. Seibold, D. R., Cantrill, J. G., & Meyers, R. A. (1985). Communication and interpersonal influence. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 551–611). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Seibold, D. R., & Thomas, R. W. (1994). Rethinking the role of interpersonal influence processes in alcohol intervention situations. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 22, 177–197. Sex in the age of AIDS. (1988, March 14). [Excerpts from Masters & Johnson reprinted.] Newsweek, 111, pp. 45–50. Sheeran, P., Abraham, C., & Orbell, S. (1999). Psychosocial correlates of heterosexual condom use: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 90–132. Sherman, D. W., & Kirton, C. A. (1999). The experience of relapse to unsafe sexual behavior among HIV-positive, heterosexual, minority men. Applied Nursing Research, 12, 91–100. Shilts, R. (1988). And the band played on. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Signorelli, N. (1998). Health images on television. In L. D. Jackson & B. K. Duffy (Eds.), Health communication research: A guide to developments and directions (pp. 163–179). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Simoni, J. M., Mason, H. R., & Marks, G. (1997). Disclosing HIV status and sexual orientation to employers. AIDS Care, 9, 589–599. Simoni, J. M., Mason, H. R., Marks, G., Ruiz, M. S., Reed, D., & Richardson, J. L. (1995). Women’s self-disclosure of HIV infection: Rates, reasons, and reactions. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 63, 474–478. Sobo, E. J. (1993). Inner-city women and AIDS: The psycho-social benefits of unsafe sex. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 17, 455–485. Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. New York: Vintage Books. Sontag. S. (1990). Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors. New York: Anchor Books. Sowell, R. L., Lowenstein, A., Monetham, L., Demi, A., Mizuno, Y., & Seals, B. F. (1997). Resources, stigma, and patterns of disclosure in rural women with HIV infection. Public Health Nursing, 14, 302–312.

14. EVERYDAY INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND HEALTH 313 Stein, M. D., Freedberg, K. A., Sullivan, L. M., Savetsky, J., Levenson, S. M., Hingson, R., & Samet, J. H. (1998). Sexual ethics: Disclosure of HIV-positive status to partners. Archives of Internal Medicine, 158, 253–257. Strasberger, C. C. (1995). Adolescents and the media: Medical and psychological impact. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tardy, R. W., & Hale, C. L. (1998). Bonding and cracking: The role of informal, interpersonal networks in health care decision making. Health Communication, 10, 151–173. Tavis, T. W., & Semin, G. R. (1997). Gender as a moderator of the effects of the love motive and relational context as sexual experience. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 26, 159–180. Taylor, B. M. (1995). Gender-power relations and safer sex negotiations. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 22, 687–693. Thomas, R. W., & Seibold, D. R. (1995). Interpersonal influence and alcohol-related interventions in the college environment. Health Communication, 7, 93–123. Thompson, T. L., & Parrott, R. (2003). Interpersonal communication and health care. In M. L. Knapp & J. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed.) (pp. 680–725). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Treichler, P. (1988). AIDS, gender, and biomedical discourse: Current contests for meaning. In E. Fox & D. M. Fox (Eds.), AIDS: The burdens of history (pp. 190–266). Berkeley: University of California Press. Trost, M. R., Langan, E. J., & Kellar-Guenther, Y. (1999). Not everyone listens when you “just say no”: Drug resistance in relational context. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 27, 120–138. Turner, J. C. (1991). Social influence. Bristol, PA: Open University Press. U.S. Surgeon General. (1986). Surgeon General’s report of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Watzlawick, P., & Weakland, J. (1974). Change: Principles of problem formation and problem resolution. New York: Norton. Williams, A. B. (1990). Reproductive concerns of women at risk for HIV infection. Journal of Nurse-Midwifery, 35, 292–298. Williams, A. B. (1991). Women at risk: An AIDS educational needs assessment. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 23, 208–213. Williams, S. S., Kimble, D. L., Covell, N. H., & Weiss, L. H. (1992). College students use implicit personality theory instead of safer sex. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 22, 921–933. Willig, C. (1994). Marital discourse and condom use. In P. Aggleton & P. Davies (Eds.), AIDS: Foundations for the future (pp. 110–122). London: Taylor & Francis. Worth, D. (1989). Sexual decision making and AIDS: Why condom promotion among vulnerable women is likely to fail. Studies in Family Planning, 20, 297–307. Zierler, S., Cunningham, W. E., Anderson, R., Shapiro, M. F., Bozzette, S. A., Nakazono, T., Morton, S., Crystal, S., Stein M., Turner, B., & St. Clair, P. (2000). Violence victimization after HIV infection in a US probability sample of adult patients in primary care. American Journal of Public Health, 90, 208–215.

IV Organizational Issues Katherine Miller

Scholars studying organizational communication are often confronted with the question of whether the processes they study are really different from processes of interpersonal communication. Is communication between a supervisor and a subordinate dissimilar from communication between any dyad? Can’t we just “tweak” the theories and findings from interpersonal and relational scholarship for understanding organizational communication? Or does context really matter? Does the fact of communication in an organization and in the process of organizing really make a substantive and theoretical difference in understanding communication? For many scholars, though, the answers to these questions are clear. And as the chapters within this section of the Handbook of Health Communication illustrate, the answer is particularly clear-cut when considering health care communication within organizational contexts. Clearly, context does matter, for the organizational context introduces complexities and contingencies that must be taken into account when examining health communication. To illustrate this, consider several defining features of organizational life, and how these features play out in health care organizations (e.g., hospitals, clinics, health maintenance organizations, nursing homes) and in health communication within other organizational contexts. The notion of goals is often considered a defining feature of organizations. In this view, an organization is a group of individuals who join together to accomplish both individual and collective goals. The concept of goals is certainly critical within health care organizations, for the goals of hospitals, clinics, and the like are marked by both urgency and complexity. In many manufacturing and service organizations, goals involve hitting production targets or meeting client expectations. These goals are certainly important. However, in health care organizations the goals are sometimes “life and death” issues and are almost always issues of great personal importance to clients. Further, the goals in a health care organization are complex, particularly in the age of managed care. The goal of providing quality care and access to a large number of people is complicated by the goal

315

316

PART IV: ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES

of keeping costs down for the organization and health care affordable for the population. Thus, the urgency and complexity of goals in health care organizations make the context clearly worthy of study. A second defining mark of organizations is the notion of structure. Organizational structure can take on a variety of forms. Organizations can be highly bureaucratic or more “organic” in structure. Organizations can be “flat” or “tall,” and marked by simple reporting relationships or complex matrix relationships. In many cases, though, structural contingencies in the organization can have an important effect on communication processes. This is certainly true in health care organizations. The structure in these organizations is often quite complex, as many health care organizations are similar to “total institutions” that include both service components and numerous support components. The structure of health care organizations is often particularly complex, too, because many of these organizations have “dual” or parallel structures. For example, most hospitals have a clear medical hierarchy, with the chief of staff heading up this structure, as well as an administrative structure, headed by a CEO or hospital president. Because the goals of these structures may often be in conflict (e.g., quality of care versus cost), the structure of health care organizations offers a particularly interesting context for the study of communication processes. Organizations are also marked by interdependence and embeddedness. The various “parts” of organizations are joined in interdependent relationships that require cooperation and coordination for the accomplishment of goals. Further, organizations and their parts are embedded within larger systems—groups of organizations and institutions that form the environment for the health care organization. Health care organizations are often characterized by incredibly complex systems of interdependence (consider, for example, the number of departments that must work together during a single patient’s stay in a hospital) and by large and turbulent environments. Even a “simple” health care organization such as a solo practitioner’s office must deal with an environment that includes other physicians for referrals, hospitals and continuing care facilities, pharmaceutical and equipment suppliers, a myriad of third party payors and insurance companies, and government and industry regulations that grow on a daily basis. Communication within health care organizations, then, must provide ways of dealing with this complicated web of relationships. Finally, most scholars see organizations as marked by culture. An organizational culture can be seen as a set of values and assumptions that emerge from and subsequently influence the behaviors of organizational participants. An organization’s culture pervades all aspects of interaction and has an enduring influence on how organizational members are socialized, how decisions are made, and how conflict is resolved. In health care organizations—as in all organizations—culture varies from setting to setting. But because of some of the issues already discussed here—the urgency of goals, the complexity of internal and environmental structure, and the constant change brought on by developments in technology and managed care—the cultures of health care organizations are often marked by both exuberance and stress. Cultural conditions such as these have a profound impact on communication processes within health care organizations. In short, then, context does matter. Communication in health care organizations—and communication about health within other organizational contexts—provides a unique and fertile area of study for communication researchers. It is little surprise, then, that the study of communication in health care organizations has been a vibrant area of study for a number of years. The chapters presented in this section provide an overview of where that scholarship has been in the last few decades and the trajectory of theory and research for the future.

PART IV: ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES

317

In the first chapter in this section, “Organizational Forms and the Provision of Health Care,” John Lammers, Ashley Duggan, and Josh Barbour provide a roadmap for our study of health care organizations. Using institutional theory as a guiding framework, these authors develop a comprehensive typology of health care organizations and consider critical factors such as managed care that influence various types of health care organizations. The next two chapters in this section follow up on this typology by examining critical components of people working within health care organizations. First, in “Stress and Social Support in Health Care Organizations,” Julie Apker and Eileen Berlin Ray look at individuals who work in health care organizations and review an important body of work that has considered these workers. This research on stress, burnout, and social support points to ways in which the unique context of health care organizations influences the mental and physical health of health care workers and illustrates the important role that communication plays in both contributing to and coping with these problems. Then, in “Groups and Teams in Health Care: Communication and Effectiveness,” Marshal Scott Poole and Kevin Real examine the teams that are increasingly doing the work of health care organizations. Poole and Real consider various types of health care teams, the contingencies that have led to their prevalence, and the nature of communication within these groups. The final two chapters in this section take on somewhat less traditional—but no less important—topics in the area of communication and health care organizations. First, in “Organizational Rhetoric and Health Care Policymaking,” Charley Conrad and Holly Gene McIntosh acknowledge the complex environment in which health care organizations exist by considering the ways in which rhetoric in the organizing and political processes occur and how this organizational rhetoric influences the nature of health care organizations and the nature of health care that can be provided in these organizations. Finally, in “Working Well: Addressing Individual and Organizational Wellness Initiatives,” Patricia Geist-Martin, Kim Horsley, and Angele Farrell look not at health care organizations but, instead, at processes of health communication that occur in all organizations. Their consideration of ways in which we can communicate about health and about healthy ways of working has implications for the study of a wide range of organizational communication processes in all sectors of society.

15 Organizational Forms of the Provision of Health Care: An Institutional Perspective John C. Lammers University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Joshua B. Barbour University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ashley P. Duggan University of California at Santa Barbara

Health organizations are among the largest, most complex, technologically rich, and valueinfused of any human arrangement. As such, the field of health and medical care in North America—and indeed the world over—provides a diverse and dynamic arena for communication and organizational research. The organizations we refer to as health organizations today include forms whose structures have changed little in one hundred years, such as hospitals. Health organizations also include forms that proliferate today but barely existed one hundred years ago, such as HMOs, hospice, and prepaid multispecialty medical groups. It is therefore appropriate that we turn our attention to these changing settings. Even a cursory glimpse of changes in health care in North America over the last century will convince the observer that a view of the health organization as the container (Putnam, Phillips, & Chapman, 1996) within which communication occurs is an insufficient approach for the study of health organizations. In the United States, the health care sector has witnessed the rise of new organizational forms, the growth of professional norms (Abbott, 1988; Freidson, 1970, 1986), myriad connections to other sectors of society (Meyer & Scott, 1983), and changes in arrangements for the delivery of medical care (Sharf & Street, 1997). An adequate survey of communication in health organizations, therefore, requires a perspective that will recognize the settings (both organizational and institutional) where individuals recognize and create meaning as well as the processes by which these organizations and institutions take shape and change. We approach our survey of organizational forms in this chapter from an institutional perspective (Meyer & Scott, 1983; Scott, 1995; Scott, Ruef, Mendel, & Caronna, 2000).

319

320

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

Generally, the institutional perspective emphasizes the rules, values, and beliefs that surround organizations and their members as critical components of behavior and communication practices within organizations. This approach to organization studies has its roots in the work of Selznick (1948, 1949, 1957), but has a well-developed history in research on organizations more recently (Meyer & Scott, 1983; Meyer, Scott, & Deal, 1983) as well as on health organizations (Alexander & Fennel, 1986; Alexander, Fennell, & Halpern, 1993; D’Aunno & Zuckerman, 1987; Mick & Associates, 1990; Scott et al., 2000). The institutional perspective recognizes that as organizations develop, they take on lives of their own, and that the symbolic environments external to organizations have determinant effects on the shape, behavior, culture, climate, and even survival of organizations. In the pages that follow we first lay out several tenets of the institutional perspective that will guide our identification of organizational forms in health care and help explain the changes we are witnessing. Second, based on the institutional perspective, we turn to a taxonomy of organizations engaged in the funding and regulating of health and medical services, organizations that represent health professionals and other health organizations, and organizations that deliver health services. With this inventory of forms complete, in the third section we review trends and change forces at work in contemporary health care including demographics, disease chronicity, technology, and managed care. Finally we address future research by considering ways that theory building in organizational communication could make common cause with research in health communication. AN INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH

Four themes characterize institutional analysis (Scott, Meyer, & Associates, 1994, pp. 2–3). First, the observable structures and routines that make up organizations are reflective of rules and structures in wider environments. Institutional analysis argues that the existence of organizations such as hospitals, health maintenance organizations, or health advocacy groups depends at least partially on the institutionalization of such forms, that is, the prior development of beliefs, values, and behavioral expectations. Second, the institutional perspective looks to the external environment for the logic of organizational structures rather than the internal, local functional requirements of production. Third, institutionalized meanings—those portable beliefs we have about how organizations should look and what they typically do—pervade organizations. As Scott, Meyer, and Associates (1994) explained, “environmental patterning is not only narrowly legal and economic, but also broadly social and cultural as well” (p. 3). So, despite our expectations to the contrary, hospitals in the profit-making, nonprofit, and governmental sectors look and operate very similarly, and the meaning of professionalization—autonomy and ethical standards—cuts across occupations from physicians to nurses to radiological technicians. Finally, the institutional perspective on organizations recognizes the drift toward the “rationalization” of organizational forms. Scott, Meyer, and Associates (1994) wrote, “the creation of cultural schemes [define] means-ends relationships and standardizing systems of control over activities and actors” (p. 3). Organizations—including health organizations—emerge as means to accomplish culturally valued ends. In addition to these themes, institutional analysis also employs a number of concepts in explaining trends across organizations as well as behavior and communication processes within organizations. We use three of these concepts in this chapter: a sectoral view of society, rational myths, and isomorphic processes. First, institutional analysis views organized activity in terms of societal sectors where decision-making rights tend to be hierarchically

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

321

distributed. Decision-making rights range from resource-oriented funding decisions at higher levels, through programmatic decisions at middle levels, to instrumental decisions at the lowest levels of any given sector. In addition, institutional and technical influences may be observed to characterize sectors of organized activity. Heavily institutionalized sectors are guided by pervasive beliefs about appropriate conduct that are idiosyncratic to organizations in a particular sector. Technical sectors, on the other hand, are characterized by the exchange of easily defined goods or services. Educational organizations, for example, are highly institutionalized, that is, infused with beliefs and values about their appropriate operation irrespective of the empirical evidence about those processes. Many manufacturing industries, in contrast, are highly technical, not because of complexity in their production processes, but because their core processes are well understood and because their products are rationally exchanged in marketplaces (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). The usefulness of these concepts becomes evident when one considers that the health services sector is highly institutionalized yet shifting toward technical norms of efficiency (Navarro, 1999). A second concept used in institutional analysis that is especially appropriate in understanding the communication in and of health organizations is the rational myth (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). A rational myth is a belief generated in and through organizations about the legitimacy of certain actions leading to desired outcomes of organized processes. For example, Meyer and Rowan (1977) cite the use of affirmative action offices and guidelines as a rational myth (p. 343). Because U.S. federal funding and contracting laws require certain fair hiring and recruiting practices, organizations go to considerable lengths to indicate to their environments that such practices are the local norm, while actual practices and outcomes might suggest very different processes (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Geist and Hardesty (1992) documented the creation of such myths (while not using that term) in their study of hospital staffs’ responses to the imposition of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) in the mid 1980s. Third, isomorphic processes in organizational fields such as health care contribute to the uniformity we can observe across organizations. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) identified three isomorphic forces. Coercive isomorphism refers to the adoption of a particular organizational form or process because of a dependency of one organization on another. For example, Medicare reimbursement rules require hospital accreditation making hospitals dependent on the accrediting organization. Mimetic isomorphism refers to the adoption of practices and structures based on observations of successful practices in other organizations or even in other fields. Ritzer’s (1996) work on the “McDonaldization of society” discusses examples of mimetic isomorphism at work in many sectors including health care. Normative isomorphism comes about through the adoption of practices deemed appropriate by trade, industry, and professional associations. The rapid spread of the health care quality improvement movement (Berwick, Godfrey, & Roessner, 1990) is an example of normative isomorphism at work. In sum, an institutional perspective allows an integrated method of exploring the diverse and complex field of health organizations. It views organizations as products of the rules, values, and beliefs of their environments, and offers concepts useful in understanding the traditional and newer forms of organizations in the health sector. Finally, an institutional perspective provides an opportunity for health communication researchers to tie individual micro-level phenomena in health organizations to wider, macro-level changes. In the section below, we turn to an inventory of the forms of health organizations by sector. These organizational forms are the sites where interpersonal health communication takes place and the contexts of periconsultative communication (Street & Real, 2001).

322

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

AN INVENTORY OF HEALTH ORGANIZATIONS

This inventory of organizational forms follows patterns in the health services sector. We begin with an overview of the sector. We then turn to a description of the organizations that provide or channel funding in the sector, continue with organizations that programmatically stipulate activities in the sector, and end with organizations that deliver services in the sector. Overview of the Health Care Sector

As an institutional sector, health care in the United States is a major domain of activity, accounting for 7.3% of total employment and 13.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (roughly 1.1 trillion dollars) in 1997 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000a). The health sector is characterized by elements of centralization as well as elements of decentralization. The federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMM), formerly the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), is the largest single payer of health care services in the country, accounting for 43.6% of total national health care expenditures (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000a). This represents a substantial central position in the field. In contrast to this centralization, over 777,000 physicians practiced medicine in the United States in 1999 (two thirds of whom were in office-based practices; see Table 15.1), and there were in excess of 19,000 medical groups delivering health services (Havlicek, 1999). Adding to the sheer size of the sector is considerable complexity; therefore, it may be inappropriate to describe health care in the United States as a single system. Williams and Torrens (1998) identify four separate systems of care: a well-financed system of care for insured persons; a public system of care that primarily serves the poor; the Veterans’ Administration Health Care System that since the Civil War has provided care to retired military personnel; and the U.S. Department of Defense system of care. Our inventory of organizational forms understates this complexity. Nevertheless, as sites of health communication events, such an inventory should be helpful. Organizations Concerned with Financing and Regulating Health Services and Products

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMM). The CMM is the U.S. agency that provides health insurance coverage to about seventy-four million persons, and, as mentioned above, accounts for about 43.6% of the national health care budget for personal health expenditures (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000a). The CMM came into existence in 1965, when Medicare and Medicaid legislation was signed. It is fair to say that the CMM are connected in a meaningful way to almost every physician and hospital in the United States. Because of their economic power, both individual and corporate providers have adopted many uniform procedures and standards. For example, in 1983, the introduction of DRGs standardized much hospital record keeping. The rules and regulations imposed by the CMM for reimbursement have likely contributed to the corporatization of health care, “[stimulating] hospitals to hire planners, lawyers, and financial advisors, who then found new functions for themselves in arranging merges and acquisitions” (Starr, 1982, p. 434). Chappelle, Blanchard, Ramirez-Williams, and Fields (2000) described how Medicare rules promulgated by CMM constrain how physicians can teach medical students to enter patients’ information into medical charts. Data entered into a chart by a student cannot then be used as a record justifying reimbursement (Chappelle, et al., 2000, p. 37). The

323

268,040 334,000 467,700 552,700 615,400 720,300 737,800 756,700 777,900 797,600 813,800

5.1a 7.1 8.9 10.3 12.2 13.7 13.6 13.4 13.5 13.1 13.2

Year

1965 1970 1980 1985 1990 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

4,289 6,371b 10,762 15,485c 16,576d 16,787 19,820 n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a.

Medical Groups in the U.S. 6.6 6.3b 8.2 9.1c 11.5d 10.5 9.3 n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a.

Mean Medical Group Size n.a. 6,774 6,606 6,529 6,312 5,992 5,911 5,812 5,606 5,626 5,565

Non-Federal Hospitals (NFH) 129 145 189 184 176 172 167 167 167 167 167

Beds per NFH n.a. 15,700e 23,065f 19,100 n.a. 16,170 16,197 16,052 n.a. 17,083 16,886

Nursing Homes HMOs ≈0 37 236 393 556 562 630 652 651 643 568

Total Medicare Certified Hospices ≈0 ≈0 31g 158 806 1,857 2,154 2,274 2,215 2,274 2,273

≈0 3.0 9.1 18.9 33.3 50.7 59.7 66.8 76.2 81.1 80.4

HMO Enrollees (Millions) n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. 691 802 n.a. 983 n.a. 1,088 1,079

n.a. n.a. n.a. 28.5 38.1 91.0 n.a. n.a. 98.0 n.a. n.a.

PPO Enrollees PPOs (Millions)

Note. The data in columns two, three, six, seven, and eight are from Health, United States, 2002, retrieved December 13, 2002 from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/ tables/2002/02hus113.pdf. The data in columns four and five (1965–1996) are from Medical Group Practices in the U.S.: A Survey of Practice Characteristics, by Havlicek, P. L., Chicago, IL: The American Medical Association. The data in column nine are from Hospice Facts and Statistics, by the National Association of Home Care, retrieved December 13, 2002 from http://www.nahc.org/Consumer/hpcstats.html. The data in column ten and eleven (1965 to 1980) are from Managed care: A Decade in Review, by Kraus, N., Porter, M., Ball, P., 1980, St. Paul, MN: InterStudy; the data in columns ten and eleven (1985 to 2000) are from the The HMO Trend Report, St. Paul, MN: InterStudy. The data in columns twelve and thirteen are from the American Association of Health Plans, Managed Care Facts, 1998 retrieved December 13, 2002 from http://www.acponline.org/pmc/trend data.htm. a for 1960 b for 1969 c for 1984 d for 1991 e for 1973–1974 f for 1977 g for 1984

Physicians Practicing in the U.S.

National Health Expenditures (% of GDP)

TABLE 15.1

US Health Organization Statistics, Various Years: 1965–1998

324

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

uniformity of practices following CMM rules, regulations, and guidelines seems a powerful example of coercive isomorphic pressures in the health care field (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). The same 1965 legislation that created Medicare also created Medicaid, a jointly funded venture between the federal and state governments to provide medical care to the needy in the United States. Each of the 50 states establishes its own eligibility standards; determines the type, amount, duration, and scope of services; sets the rate of payment for services; and administers its own program (CMM, 2001b). While Medicaid provides a safety net for poor persons in the United States, it is criticized by advocates of the poor for being too stingy with benefits, by fiscal conservatives as being too costly, and by providers, particularly hospitals and physicians, as providing insufficient reimbursement. Policy researchers indicate that the divide between insured and uninsured is growing and that the United States is headed for a two-tier health care system (Reinhardt, 1996). Insurance Organizations. Health insurance organizations are important in the United States because they fund about one third of all expenditures for personal medical services (33.1% in 1998 according to the National Center for Health Statistics, 2001). Although these expenditures are smaller than the payments the government makes (43.6%), they are larger than out-of-pocket payments (19.6%). According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2000b), 944 firms provided health and medical insurance in the United States in 1997. These firms took in revenue of $203.1 billion in that year, employing about 328,000 workers at 3,209 establishments including organizations that operate as HMOs or own HMOs. Organizations that Play a Programmatic Role in the Health Sector

Accreditation Organizations. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) is the nonprofit organization that accredits hospitals, health care networks, home care organizations, long-term care facilities, assisted living residencies, behavioral health organizations, ambulatory care providers, and clinical laboratories. Though the organization has operated since 1951, 1965 Medicare legislation provided substantial additional authority by stipulating that government reimbursements would only be paid to hospitals and clinics that were accredited. In general, accreditation indicates that an organization meets certain formal and performance standards. To earn and maintain accreditation, an organization must undergo an on-site survey by a Joint Commission survey team at least every two or three years. Since 1997, the JCAHO has used performance measures in the accreditation process. The Joint Commission’s organizational members include the American College of Physicians, the American Society of Internal Medicine, the American College of Surgeons, the American Dental Association, the American Hospital Association, and the American Medical Association. As mentioned above, JCAHO accreditation is important to health organizations because it is required by many third-party payers, state licensing agencies, managed care organizations, and financial institutions (JCAHO, 2001a). In addition to organizations that accredit hospitals and other care facilities are the organizations that accredit schools of medicine and public health. As Pfeffer (1981) noted, it is the curricula of academic organizations that form the domain of a field. A leading function of academic accrediting organizations is the standardization of curricula in colleges and universities. Among the more important accrediting organizations in the health sector are the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), founded in 1876, and the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH), founded in 1953. The AAMC accredits

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

325

and lobbies for 125 U.S. medical schools and 16 Canadian medical schools. It also represents 400 major teaching hospitals and health systems and 90 academic and professional societies. The ASPH represents 29 schools of public health and 9 educational programs in public health. Like the CMM, the accrediting organizations may be seen as an isomorphic force in the health sector. The rules imposed by JCAHO, for example, reach far into the clinical practice of medicine in ways that are a mystery to some providers (Yost & Serkey, 1999), and its methods of measuring for quality improvement are adapted from industrial efforts begun in the 1970s (Brennan, 1998). The presence of such organizations adds force to the institutional argument that beliefs and values at the field level influence behaviors and structures at the organizational level. Trade and Professional Associations. The Gale Directory of Associations (Gale Research Company, 2001) lists 3,381 national associations serving the health services industry in the United States, and an additional 3,651 operating at the regional, state, and local levels. These associations—of professionals, organizations, and/or patients— make up the warp and woof of occupations, organizations, and clients in the health care industry. In this section, we consider just three associations: the American Medical Association, the American Nursing Association, and the American Hospital Association. These associations have several features in common. They each admit both individual members and organizational members. They each provide services to their members including advocacy, and each is over a hundred years old. As such these three represent the institutional aspect of the field of health organizations. The American Medical Association (AMA) reported that it had just under 300,000 members in 1999 (AMA, 2001), accounting for roughly 38% of American physicians. Compare this to the over 82% represented in 1962. The Association describes itself as “the patient’s advocate and the physician’s voice” (AMA, 2001). Founded in 1847, the AMA’s “agenda remains rooted in [its] historic commitment to standards, ethics, excellence in medical education and practice, and advocacy on behalf of the medical profession and the patients it serves” (AMA, 2001). But with less than one half of U.S. physicians among its members, the Association has recently struggled to define itself as relevant. Several issues put the American Medical Association in difficulty at this historic juncture. First, the organization of medical practice has changed drastically. As an association primarily of individual members, the AMA is not as relevant as it once was because so many physicians are now employed or members of medical groups. Second, physicians are not as unified about policy matters as they once were. For example, the Association’s membership includes physicians in favor of national health insurance and those opposed. In an effort to increase its revenues in the face of dwindling membership, the Association endeavored to offer a series of product endorsements in 1998 that created great controversy (Tye, 1999). However embattled it may be, from an institutional point of view, the AMA serves as a centralizing power and voice for health concerns, particularly for providers in the United States. As of 1996, the American Nurses Association (ANA) represented the interests of 2.5 million U.S. nurses (82.7% actively employed as nurses). In 1897, the directors of training at 10 Eastern and Midwestern hospitals founded the Association. Aside from the traditional status difference between physicians and nurses, their associations and work situations also contrast sharply. The ANA is formally composed of the 53 state associations, 13 affiliated associations, and approximately 70 other organizations that represent aspects of professional nursing in the United States. As an organization, it is more integrated and

326

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

federated than the AMA. Individual members of the ANA are automatically enrolled as members of constituent associations at the state level. The American Hospital Association (AHA) was founded in 1898 (American Hospital Association, 2000a). Its members include nearly five thousand hospitals, health care systems, networks, and other providers of care. The AHA also maintains affiliations with state and metropolitan associations, and an additional 37,000 individual members. The AHA also plays a major role in the standardization of hospital services through its education and publishing functions (AHA, 2000a). The AHA acts as an advocate for hospitals regarding issues of concern to owners, managers, and workers, as well as for patients. AHA advocacy issues currently include concerns about hospital worker shortages, reimbursement for care provided to uninsured patients, and reducing the regulatory maze that hospitals must navigate (AHA, 2000a). Organizations Instrumental in the Delivery of Health Care

Physicians’ Offices. The simplest organizational form for delivery of health services is the office of the solo-practicing physician. This site of medical communication episodes has undergone fairly rapid alteration. The number of physicians practicing in the United States has increased steadily over the last two decades from 153 per 100,000 persons in 1975, to 245 per 100,000 in 1997 (Havlicek, 1999), but the percentage of physicians practicing as solo providers has declined. For example, the percentage of family practitioners in solo practice shrank from 54% in 1980 to 25% in 1997 (American Academy of Family Practice, 2001). Between 1965 and 1996, the percentage of nonfederal physicians accounted for by medical group positions increased from 10.6% to 32.1% (Havlicek, 1999). In spite of these trends, the most common practice type, and the one that remains a cultural icon, is the solo practice. As a setting for health communication episodes, the solo physician’s office will typically employ three or four nonphysicians (Community Health Care, 2001) and has traditionally provided medical services to more than one member of a family over extended periods. A single individual that works closely with the physician generally carries out the nursing function; another staff person performs the appointments and records function; and the billing function may be shared or handled by a single staff person. Today these functions are frequently further removed from the control of the physician, as practice management firms contract with physicians to provide all of the ancillary services involved in the traditional medical practice (Robinson, 1997). Medical Groups. As reported in Scott and Lammers (1985), the medical group as we know it today was nonexistent at the turn of the century. Not only did the vast majority of physicians practice as independent providers, but also medical groups were even seen as a threat to the practice of medicine and the quality of medical care (Starr, 1982, p. 213). The first medical groups (for example, the Mayo brothers clinic in Rochester, Minnesota) provided contract services to industry (in the Mayo case, to railroads). But suspicions about the ethics of group practice lingered until nearly World War II, when economies of scale and burgeoning specialization made practice combinations more feasible and increasingly popular (Starr, 1982, p. 213). As of 1996, there were nearly twenty thousand medical groups in the United States (see Table 15.1), accounting for 206,557 physician positions (Havlicek, 1999). The mean size of medical groups appears to have leveled off or fallen slightly from a high of 11.5 physicians in 1990 to 9.3 physicians in 1996 (see Table 15.1).

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

327

A number of researchers have commented on the transition of physicians from solo to group practices (Freidson, 1970, 1986; Scott & Lammers, 1985; Wolinsky & Marder, 1985). Some argued that the corporatization of medicine (Relman, 1998) led to proletarianization of the occupation (McKinlay & Arches, 1985), whereas others argued that neither a professional stratification approach (Freidson, 1986) nor a Marxist analysis correctly captured the changes underway in medical practice (Annandale, 1989). For example, Gross and Budrys (1991), in a study of physicians’ interaction in a prepaid group, found that the physicians they studied had entered into prepaid practice with the understanding that their professional autonomy would be independent of administration. The same physicians later discovered, however, that their professional autonomy had not been preserved. As administrative controls over their practice increased, their satisfaction with professional aspects of practice declined. Lammers (1992) reported similar findings. The institutional perspective points to an isomorphic process in the changes underway in group practices. Medical practice management firms conform to market principles and share management philosophies. Medical groups grow more similar as more of them are managed by these firms. For example, the Medical Group Management Association reported that median salaries of physician-executives and other administrators of physicianowned medical groups fell by as much as 17% in 2000, while those of executives of nonphysician-owned groups rose by between 5 and 22% (Medical Group Management Association, 2000). Concurrently, as managed care firms put pressures on communities of physicians, physicians are more likely to join in groups to reduce the costs of practice (Robinson, 1998). Hospitals. According to the AHA, in 1998 there were a total of 5,606 nonfederal hospitals in the United States (see Table 15.1). Of the total shown in Table 15.1 for 1998, state and local governments owned 1,218 (21.7%) and investors owned 771 (13.8%). The federal government controlled an additional 275 (4.9%) hospitals, and the remaining 3,342 (59.6%) hospitals were nongovernmental, nonprofit hospitals, organized under state laws as nonprofit organizations and classified by federal laws as tax-exempt charitable entities (AHA, 2000b). There are two major differences between nonprofit hospitals and investorowned hospitals. The first is the exemption from taxes granted to nonprofit hospitals by local governments (property taxes), state governments (income taxes), and the federal government (income taxes and postage rates). Second, investor-owned hospitals are expected to distribute dividends or profits to their owners/investors (Hansmann, 1981) whereas the operating surpluses of nonprofit hospitals must be reinvested in the hospital’s activities. The funding environment of investor-owned and nonprofit hospitals is otherwise similar. Both types rely largely on third-party payments to reimburse the $11,294 median cost of a hospital stay in 1997. The majority of hospitals (that is, nonfederal hospitals, or 71%) are members of a network or system of hospitals (AHA, 2000b). This network means that many hospitals share similar management structures, indicating further isomorphic pressure toward conformity. Investor-owned and nonprofit hospitals (as well as government hospitals) are subject to the accreditation policies of the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Health Organizations. Finally, roughly one third (35%) of all personal medical care expenditures are made by the federal government, contributing to the similarity of hospitals as an organizational form. A distinguishing feature of hospitals, noted by some communication researchers (Geist & Hardesty, 1992), is its dual hierarchy: physicians are organized in one hierarchical staff, and other hospital personnel—including nurses and other departments and staff—are organized in a second chain of command. Geist and Hardesty noted that this arrangement

328

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

leads to the problem of “multiple subordinates” (p. 37). This structure has few counterparts in other Western organizations and may account for why hospitals have changed little during a century of dramatic technological and financing changes. But, as they point out, this structure also contributes to the nature of the hospital as a negotiated order (see also Strauss, 1978; Strauss, Fagerhaugh, Ruczek, & Wiener, 1985). Also notable, most U.S. hospitals offer services much more intensive than room, board, personal, and general nursing care. The hospital is continuously open and staffed to provide care for persons requiring “medical, surgical, psychiatric, testing, diagnosis, and treatment for illness, injury, deformity, infirmity, abnormality, disease, or pregnancy” (JCAHO, 1994, p. 366). Clinical laboratory services, diagnostic X-ray services, and treatment facilities for surgery or obstetrical care have become standard features of hospitals accredited in the United States (JCAHO, 1994). Nursing Homes. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) identified 16,700 residential nursing facilities in the United States in 1995, with an average size of 106 beds (NCHS, 1997) (see Table 15.1). Gubrium (1975) provided an early analysis of life in this organized health setting that sets it apart from hospitals or clinics. Nursing homes are unusual among medical contexts because of the extremely high rates of mortality after institutionalization (Thorson & Davis, 2000). Also, patients and providers in nursing homes, as contrasted with hospitals and other settings, interact almost entirely within the organizational context and in isolation from other social influences (Nussbaum, 1990). Hospice. While today hospice is seen as a common part of the health care landscape in American communities, it is an organizational type that has emerged in the United States in only the last 25 years. According to the Hospice Association of America (HAA) (2001), prior to 1974, there were no hospices in the United States. Today there are 2,273 hospices approved to receive Medicare payments (see Table 15.1). There are also an estimated 200 hospices staffed by volunteers (HAA, 2001). Hospices in the United States are organized in four different ways: as both proprietary and nonprofit home health agencies (providing care in homes rather than in inpatient facilities); as operating units or departments of hospitals; as operating units or departments of a skilled nursing facility or other nursing facility; and as freestanding, independent, mostly nonprofit organizations (HAA, 2001). As a health care organization, the hospice is distinguished by two characteristics. In contrast to most other health organizations, the purpose of hospice is to provide exclusively palliative rather than curative care. Hospices provide “medical, social, emotional, and spiritual services to terminally ill patients and their family members” (HAA, 2001). Second, care provided in the hospice setting is interdisciplinary, involving the coordinated work of physicians, nurses, medical social workers, therapists, counselors, and volunteers (Berteotti & Seibold, 1994). Third, hospice relies heavily on a volunteer workforce. According to industry data, volunteers outnumber paid workers: 46,793 employees to 47,671 volunteers (HAA, 2001). Because of variations in hospice organization and location, staff sizes are difficult to determine, but one report puts the mean number of beds in inpatient hospice facilities at 13 (National Hospice Organization, 1996). Though hospices account for a small portion of expenditures for health care in the United States, they are important sites for the delivery of care. For example, in 1998 hospice services accounted for 0.2% of total Medicaid payments. Yet in that year (1998), hospices provided care to 401,140 Medicare patients throughout the United States (National Association for Home Care, 2000). The rise of hospice in America is a signal of our aging

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

329

population. It represents a shift in our values about palliative and curative services. Hospice as a newer form of health organization has had less exposure to normative pressures and exhibits more variety and flexibility than hospitals. Parish Nurse Programs. Koch (1998) reported that an estimated 2,500 nurses in the United States work in parish nursing programs. The typical program links a hospital and a religious parish with an individual nurse. A nurse working in the context of the church is not a new concept, but the profile of the role has changed considerably over the last two decades. Parish nursing is a health promotion, disease prevention role that incorporates spiritual care but also entails an important boundary-spanning role (Tushman & Scanlan, 1981). The breadth of parish nursing has grown considerably since 1984, from 6 nurses working in the northwest suburban areas of Chicago in partnership with 6 local churches’ to nurses working within all mainline denominations in 48 states, Canada, Australia, and Korea by 1997 (McDermott, Solari-Twadell, & Matheus, 1998). Departments of Public Health. In the United States, there are 3,169 local public health agencies (NACHO, 1991). Local government structures directly influence local public health departments’ activities and services. As Shonick (1981) argued, local governments lack the relative power of the federal and state governments to tax and, therefore, to fund expensive enterprises such as personal medical services, so public health departments tend to be fiscally stressed and less visible than private hospitals and clinics. Nonetheless, county governments are the most common type of local government structure that house local public health agencies (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [USDHHS], 1991). Services provided by local health agencies most commonly include immunizations; health tuberculosis screening; sexually transmitted diseases screening and treatment; chronic diseases screening; care for women, infants, and children; family planning services; prenatal care; HIV/AIDS testing and counseling; and home health care. State health agencies (SHAs) in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 8 territories administer public health services. SHAs usually are organized as either a freestanding, independent agency responsible directly to the governor or the board of health or as a component of a super agency. The SHA is an independent government agency in 31 (62%) states and a component of a state government super agency in 19 (38%) states and the District of Columbia. Of the seven territories for which information is available, SHAs are independent agencies in six territories and a component of a super agency in one territory (USDHHS, 1991). Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Organizations. According to industry data, 1,283 companies comprise the biotechnology industry sector, although the U.S. Census Bureau (2000b) lists 1,767 firms engaged in the manufacture of drugs. The sector employs 153,000 people and in 1998 recorded $18.6 billion in revenues. The sector, like many others in health care, has been characterized by recent waves of mergers and acquisitions. In 1995, prescription drug sales amounted to just over $80 billion in the United States. The major firms that manufacture and develop drugs are headquartered in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, France, Japan, and Switzerland. Despite the size and complexity of the sector, the pharmaceutical industry is not highly centralized (Kanavos, Mrazek, & Mossialos, n.d.). The market tends to be broken into segments by therapeutic classes of drugs. The top 10 pharmaceutical companies account for about 31% of prescription drug sales. The largest companies on a worldwide basis

330

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

include Glaxo Wellcome (U.K.), Merck (U.S.), Hoechst Marion Roussel (Germany and France), Bristol Myers Squibb (U.S.), American Home Products (U.S.), and Novartis (Switzerland) (Patent Fairness Act of 1999, 1999). Compared to the highly institutionalized hospital field, the drug industry in the United States is much more decentralized and operates as a technical sector (Meyer & Scott, 1983). It follows market-driven norms of efficiency, pursuing the manufacture of products and services that generate profits for investors and have measurable effectiveness. Even as the hospital field is being pressured to develop more technical efficiencies, however, the pharmaceutical industry is pressured to adopt prosocial policies with respect to certain classes of drugs such as d4T, an antiretroviral drug desperately needed by people in Africa (Prusoff, 2001). TRENDS AND CHANGE FORCES IN HEALTH ORGANIZATIONS

Having completed our review of organizations in the health services sector, we turn our attention to forces influencing changes in these organizations. While many forces could be identified, this section focuses on four developments in health care: the changing demography of the U.S. population, the rise of chronic diseases, changes in material technologies, and the development of managed care and associated management innovations. Each of these change forces has implications for health organizations. Demographics

Health service organizations and activities—and the communication issues arising from them—reflect the age, gender, and ethnic composition of society. Demographic forces influence the nature of the population served by health organizations, the diseases and ailments treated by health organizations, and the resources available for health organizations. The single most notable feature of demographic changes facing health organizations in the United States is the increasing size of the aged population. At the beginning of the 20th century, the portion of the population 60 years of age and over was 6.4%. In 2000, that figure had risen to 16.4%, and by 2050, it is estimated that 25.0% of the population will be over 65 (Dowd, Monaco, & Janoska 1996). These population trends translate directly into demand for health services, as over one half (52.5%) of older Americans report living with some disability, and one third (33.4%) report living with a severe disability (Administration on Aging, 2000). Additionally, according to the U.S Administration on Aging, chronic conditions are most frequent among the elderly. In 1996, the most frequently occurring conditions were arthritis, hypertension, hearing impairments, heart disease, cataracts, orthopedic impairments, sinusitis, and diabetes (Administration on Aging, 2000). Implied in the population shift figures reported above is the shrinking size of a healthy workforce on whose shoulders the care of elderly will rest. By 2050, the portion of the population that will be between 20 and 60 will be at its lowest since 1900 (48.1%). With more than one half of the population dependent on this group, we may expect concerns about efficiency to be especially severe in health organization management. Disease Chronicity

Chronic diseases are those “that are prolonged, do not resolve spontaneously, and are rarely cured completely” (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1999). Chronic

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

331

diseases are now the leading cause of illness, disability, and death in the United States and attract the majority of health care resources (Institute of Medicine, 2001, p. 27). Care for a chronic disease typically involves a variety of clinicians and health care settings over extended periods. Strauss, Fagerhaugh, Ruczek, and Wiener (1985) first noted the importance of disease chronicity for health services. Their concept of “trajectory” involves health events shaped by social interaction. From this point of view, chronic diseases or health conditions are not only clinically different from acute diseases or health conditions, but also they are socially distinct. The trajectory of a health event is marked by interaction between the patient and a multitude of others, including but not limited to physicians, nurses, social workers, pharmacists, and family members. Presently the U.S. Institute of Medicine is encouraging providers to recognize the importance of improving chronic care services as a part of overall quality improvement in U.S. health care systems. Health care for chronic conditions is different from care for acute episodic illnesses. Care for the chronically ill frequently requires a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach. Effective methods of communication among caregivers and between caregivers and patients are critical to providing high-quality care. Personal health information must accompany patients as they transition from home to clinical office setting to hospital to nursing home and back (Institute of Medicine, 2001, p. 9). But physicians, hospitals, and other health organizations typically work so independently that they frequently provide care without the benefit of complete information about patients’ conditions, medical histories, or treatment received in other settings (Institute of Medicine, 2001, p. 9). Moreover, the collaboration and teamwork called for by the rise of chronic diseases seems to occur more frequently among nonphysicians than among physicians, whose training and socialization prepares them for roles as autonomous and independent practitioners rather than as collaborators. Technology

Recent innovations and improvements in communication technologies have opened many channels for health education and delivery (President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, 2001). Applications of information technologies are found in patient scheduling, clinical and financial records, telemedicine, imaging, Web-based instruction, clinical decision support, quality improvement, biomedical research, robotics, remote visualization, and video-assisted endoscopic surgical procedures, to name only a few. And, the rapid adoption of a wide range of technologies has given rise to new occupational groups including specialized operators (such as radiological technicians—see Barley, 1986) and more general clinical engineers. The complexity of communication technologies has also contributed to the rise of the field of medical informatics (Greenes & Shortliffe, 1990). Clearly, information technologies hold great promise in health organizations, but their potential is as yet unrealized for a number of reasons (President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, 2001). Currently public and private payers of medical services do not reimburse providers for applications that have demonstrated value such as telemedicine or patient-provider interactions over the Internet. In addition, decision-support tools can provide critical links between a current patient’s condition and previous clinical studies, but such systems await investment. Finally, the biomedical community “has tended to rely on information technology innovations that are produced by investments in other industries and other parts of government” (President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, 2001).

332

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

Managed Care

Ten years ago, the words “managed care” had barely entered the parlance of health communication research. Today, managed care arrangements dominate the health care scene in the United States. This section describes what managed care commonly refers to, provides a picture of its growth over the last decade and a half, and lays out opportunities and implications for health communication research (see also Apker & Ray, this volume). Managed care refers to a financial and organizational arrangement for the provision of health care services (almost always but not exclusively medical services). The roots of managed care can be found in early, prepaid group practices such as the Ross Loos Clinic in Los Angeles in the 1920s and the Kaiser plans of the 1940s (Starr, 1982). Both of these prepaid health plans charged industrial workers a few cents a day for medical coverage and both were controversial plans. Ross Loos, through a variety of mergers and acquisitions over the years, is today known as CIGNA. By the year 2000, CIGNA covered 13.4 million lives in its managed care plans (U.S. Security and Exchange Commission, 2000). Kaiser is the acknowledged leader in nonprofit prepaid health plans, covering about 8 million lives. Neither of these plans were originally known as Health Maintenance Organizations. That term came into common use under the federal government’s HMO Act of 1973 (Kongstvedt, 1989; Mayes, 1999). This legislation did much to spur the development of managed care. It required employers with over 25 workers to make an HMO health care plan available and provided $375 million dollars in subsidies to create HMOs. After this legislation the numbers of HMOs and enrollees grew rapidly, as shown in Table 15.1. Although the number of plans rose and fell after the late 1980s, the number of enrollees has climbed steadily since the 1990s, to include 80.4 million Americans and 568 HMOs by 2000 (see Table 15.1). Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs) are a less unified form of managed care that offers patients wider (though still limited) choices of physicians and hospitals at varying levels of costs reflecting the discounts providers are willing to give to attract patients. This form of managed care has also grown rapidly in recent years to overtake HMOs in both the number of organized entities and enrollees (see Table 15.1). One consequence of the HMO Act of 1973 and subsequent legislation was an increase in profit making in health care. Although for-profit hospitals remain a small minority of the hospital population in the United States, for-profit HMOs represent a substantial percentage of all HMOs. The 1997 Census of businesses in the United States identified 262 HMO medical centers subject to federal income tax and 510 HMO medical centers exempt from federal income taxes. Profit making in health care has concerned a number of health service researchers (Gray, 1983, 1991; Schlesinger, Gray, & Bradley, 1996) but has not informed health communication research to date. A number of the features of managed care organizations might be of interest to health communication researchers. First, managed care organizations (for example, HMOs, IPAs, PPOs) can be characterized by their existence in a triad of contractual arrangements (see Fig. 15.1). Consumers (or more specifically, their representatives in the form of employers or governments) purchase memberships in plans from plan administrations. Plan administrations may be operated by organizations that bear close resemblance to the federally chartered HMOs of the 1970s. Alternatively, they may be operated on a for-profit basis, or they may even be operated by private insurance corporations or government agencies. The key characteristic of consumers in managed care is that they are almost always members of a population, either employed persons (typically at large organizations) or beneficiaries of government-sponsored plans such as Medicare or Medicaid. The key characteristic of

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

333

Plan Administration

Patient Populations

Providers

Figure 15.1 The Structure of Managed Care Communication. The diagram is similar to Mackintosh’s (1978, p. 38) which refers only to physicians, third parties in general, and resource flows, not plan administrations, populations, or contractual communication.

plan administrations is that they represent pure administrative structures. They arrange for the access of populations to health services and the access of providers to clients, but the plan administrations provide no direct services. The central characteristic of providers in these plans is that individual physicians, medical groups, hospitals, laboratories, and/or pharmacies have entered into an agreement with the plan administration on the basis of competitive bidding. Without the formal relationship of the provider to the plan, there would be no possibility for the provider to be reimbursed for the service provided to patients. Highly specific and binding contracts tie these three parties together. For the patient population, contracts specify with minute detail the nature of services and manner of their provision that the patient may request of the provider. For the plan, the contracts specify the obligations and duties of the plan toward both provider and patient. For the provider, the contracts specify not only what services may be reimbursed, but also the limits of referrals, hospital admissions, financial incentives, and causing some controversy, what the provider may or may not disclose to the patient about the contract. The contracts represent a set of structures for patient-provider communication that are specified beforehand. This overarching structure now dominates patient-provider communication in the United States. Little health communication research has recognized the pervasiveness and influence of these structures, although health services researchers have devoted increasing

334

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

attention to them (for example, Gross & Budrys, 1991; Robinson, 1997, 1998; Scheffler, 1999). Several features of managed care plans are significant for health communication researchers. The stability of the patient-provider relationship is a staple of organized medicine’s view of good practice as well as communication researchers’ assumptions about the nature of the dyad. But, because the plans structure the patient-provider relationship as a contract, the relationship is predefined by the conditions of the contract, potentially threatening this stability. Patients may be unable to continue to see certain providers because the parties (providers, administrators, patients, or employers) may elect not to renew contracts. This was the case for 934,000 Medicare recipients dropped from managed care plans in 2000 (Cawley, Chernew, & McLaughlin, 2001). As a contract, the relationship can be bought and sold like a commodity. Thus, disruption in the patient-provider relationship can occur when plans fail due to market forces, as in the case of FPA Medical Management, a physicians management group that collapsed in 1998 leaving more than 400,000 patients without an arrangement for medical service (Brewster, Jackson, & Lesser, 2000). But disruption can also occur when the contracts are transferred, as in the case of the purchase of FHP by Aurora Health Plans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the subsequent elimination of 11 physicians’ jobs (Trewyn, 2001). While the reorganization can be explained in business terms it nonetheless has consequences for the patient-provider relationship. The separation of technical (or clinical) control from administrative control in prepaid medical practices (Gross & Budrys, 1991) ultimately subjugates physicians’ control of their practices to administrators. This could decrease the attractiveness of medical careers and perhaps threaten quality of care. From an institutional perspective, managed care represents the rise of norms of efficiency and market values in what until recently was a sector defined by sacred intangible and untestable beliefs about the importance of the patient-provider relationship and public trust, precisely what Meyer and Rowan (1977) referred to as rational myths. Hospitals and physicians, largely in groups, are now brought under the logic of market efficiencies and the commodification of every aspect of the sector, from procedures to relationships (Lammers & Geist, 1997). The development of the field very much follows the pattern of institutionalization outlined by Lawrence, Winn, and Jennings (2001). Thus, we would expect the content, style, and nature of patient-provider communication to change as managed care develops and gradually comes to dominate a community. The September 11th attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., the anthrax attacks, and the ensuing war on terrorism also represent a significant change force for health organizations. For example, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2002, November) recently funded 42 ‘medical reserve corps units’ to respond in the event of a large-scale biological disease outbreak. First responder teams, disaster relief teams, ad hoc disaster management centers, and emergency rooms are some of the health organizations important during an actual outbreak. New government regulations represent institutional changes for the traditional health professions and traditional healthcare sites as physicians, nurses, and hospitals become the new front line in biodefense (Henderson, 1999). Pharmaceutical companies too face pressures to develop, produce, and store large quantities of antibiotics, vaccines, and antitoxins. These organizations gain new importance for scholars of health and organizational communication. For example, urgent risk communication, which until now has received scant attention from communication, scholars, may become much more relevant. And the problems of governmental organizations communicating clearly, rapidly, and effectively with the public as well as with networks of public and private organizations, take on a new urgency. As this handbook goes to press the effects of

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

335

the U.S. war on terrorism are only beginning to emerge, but clearly bio-defense initiatives will be important for health and organizational communication scholars in the future. THEORIZING ORGANIZATIONS IN HEALTH SERVICES

In Kreps and Thornton’s (1992) widely used text, contextual features of health communication are described using a series of concentric circles to show how patient-provider communication is surrounded by organizational and societal factors. Similarly, the Health Belief Model (HBM) (Rosenstock, 1974) and the Behavioral Model of Health Services Use (Andersen, 1995) offer frameworks that suggest socially influenced patterns of health care use. But as Mattson (1999) pointed out, models like the HBM need much additional specification of their communication elements. Each of these models could also benefit from additional specification of the concepts involving the organization of health services (see Table 15.2 for an enumeration of such concepts). Occupational Identification

Writers in health communication have struggled for years with terms that are inclusive enough to acknowledge that physicians are in the minority among those mainstream professionals who see patients, while avoiding the thorny problem of identifying just what TABLE 15.2

Organizational Constructs Useful in Health Communication Construct

Concepts

Occupational identification

professionalism managerialism role identity employment status

Group context

membership boundaries leadership authority membership pools

Organizational context

size complexity formalization climate history

Institutional context

ownership control sector characteristics decision-making rights

Change processes

purposive structurational (destructuration) births, deaths, transformations growth

336

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

distinguishes one caregiver from another. Problems with access to and costs of care have placed more and more registered nurses, physicians’ assistants, and nurse practitioners in front of patients. While many provide preliminary screening, in a number of settings, patients may not see a physician at all over a period of years. For example, nurse practitioners or physicians’ assistants instead of gynecologists often handle routine gynecological exams. Status distinctions among physicians may lead to differential outcomes in the experience of care for the provider that in turn might be expected to contribute to differences in the patients’ experiences. Patients in the United States have access to a wide range of specialists whose training and professional identity may be quite different from that of generalists. Practitioners work in increasingly complex organizations where managerial concerns become a part of the organizational culture (Barr, 1997). The financial pressures placed on providers increasingly put the patient in a room with an employee of an organization. Group Context

As group researchers have exited the laboratory and entered the field in search of more realistic group processes (Frey, 1994b), some new concepts have entered the language of group analysis that should be of particular use to health communication researchers. The key features of the bona fide group perspective include stable but permeable boundaries and interdependence with context (Putnam & Stohl, 1990). For example, Lammers and Krikorian (1997) applied the concept to surgical teams. They suggested that structural relationships among pools of potential members of any given surgical team could predict communication outcomes. Berteotti and Seibold (1994) raised questions about role coordination among hospice team members of differing status. Consider also the role of formal and emergent authority in health care groups. Given the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of health care teams, cross-disciplinary communication, authority, and interdependence could be vital. For example, the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has placed a special emphasis on medical errors in its requests for proposals; measurable medical error may be due to certain, specifiable group communication patterns (Berwick, Godfrey, & Roessner, 1991). Organizational Context

Health communication research routinely fails to control for standard organizational variables of size, complexity, formalization, climate, and history. Yet these are precisely the kinds of distinctions that are of concern to policymakers and stakeholders in other sectors. Barr (1997) argued persuasively that service quality is a function of organization size and complexity, and in turn affects organizational outcomes. Formalization, the extent to which organizational procedures are codified and have lawlike qualities, is today rampant in health organizations. Yet formalization itself is problematic. Hacker and Marmor (1999) contended that the term managed care (and many terms associated with it) “is a confused assemblage of market sloganeering, inspirational rhetoric, and managerial jargon that sadly reflects the more general state of discourse about American medical institutions” (p. 1033). They persuasively argued that the whole alphabet soup of HMO, PPO, MIP, EPO, POS, and the like are misleading, inaccurate, and confusing. They urge analysts to avoid using the industry labels for these managed care entities and to replace the jargon with more empirically descriptive terms. The climate of health organizations has been the subject of health communication investigations (Klingle, Burgoon, Afifi, & Callister,

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

337

1995), but like much climate research, has not been tied to valued outcomes. Given the level of burnout among health care workers (Miller, Birkholt, Scott, & Stage, 1995), organizational attributes like size, complexity, formalization, climate, and history are critical to the success of health services (Aiken, Sochalski, & Lake, 1997). Institutional Context

Whereas organizational variables are often overlooked in health communication research, institutional variables are invisible. Institutions can be thought of best as macromorphic patterns of behavior, beliefs, and structures within which organizations have life and much dyadic communication can be taken for granted. Scott (1995) defined institutions as follows: “Institutions consist of cognitive, normative, and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behavior. Institutions are transported by various carriers—cultures, structures, and routines—and they operate at multiple levels of jurisdiction” (p. 33). Most writers on the subject of institutions in both sociology and economics will agree that regulation and control are defining characteristics of these large structures. As such, ownership rules, control, and decision-making rights that cut across organizations are institutional characteristics. Accreditation patterns in hospitals, unionization of nurses, and the distribution of rights regarding funding, categories of services, and instrumental choices are all shaped by institutional forces in health care. Organizational Change

Health organizations have participated in the waves of change brought on by popular management thinking, such as the Total Quality Management and Re-engineering Movements. Organizational communication scholars have offered perspectives that could improve efforts to accomplish change (Lewis & Seibold, 1998), but health communication scholars have not employed these ideas to understand how providers like physicians and nurses respond to planned changes. Labor studies researchers and nursing scholars, however, have begun to study the effects of planned organizational changes—like job redesign and hospital mergers—on the climate for patient care (Clark, Day, & Shea, 2000). Studies that include purposive organizational change could be employed usefully in health communication research. Scott, Ruef, Mendel, and Caronna (2000) employed structuration as a “master process” (p. 26) to understand how the profession of medicine was transformed in the 20th century from one with widespread autonomy to one where managerial rules govern. In a conceptual move that has relevance for health communication research, Scott Ruef, Mendel, and Caronna refer to changes underway in medical care today as “destructuration and restructuration” (p. 27). Lammers, Duggan, and Barbour (2001) considered the relationship of organizational type and managerial communication to physician satisfaction as part of a structuration process. Researchers may find applications of emerging perspectives in health communication research at the macro level. Although self-organizing systems theory (Contractor & Seibold, 1993) is aimed at explaining systems that are in states of disorder (a debatable claim in the case of U.S. health care systems), certain of its tenets apply. For example, supply and demand for health care seem linked in mutually causal ways that have always baffled economists (Feldstein, 1993). Complex Adaptive Systems theory seems applicable to problems of understanding the trillion-plus dollar health care system and efforts to reform it (Plesk, 2001).

338

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

Finally, health communication research could also benefit from observing that the population of health organizations is changing from an ecological point of view (Aldrich, 1979; Hannan & Freeman, 1977). The population ecology perspective suggests that organizations themselves live in a dynamic environment ruled by ecological principles like births, deaths, and transformations (Aldrich & Fish, 1981). The most amazing example of organizational birth in the health arena is the medical group (not in existence at the beginning of the 20th century) that dominates medical practice today. An institutional perspective directs our attention to these macromorphic structures that influence behavior at the micromorphic level. CONCLUSION

In this chapter, we have identified an institutional approach to communication in health organizations. Throughout we have applied the institutional ideas including sectors, isomorphic forces, and rational myths to sort out the population of organizations we think of as health organizations. This approach can tie traditional patient-provider research to larger issues. The central idea has been context, but issues remain. First, we have not found in the health communication literature much development of ideas organizational communication scholars traditionally work with, such as structuration, communication climate, communication or decision making in groups, leadership, workplace democracy, dialogue, network studies, public goods, technologies and organizations, or organizational identification. Each of these areas could be applied to issues in health organizations. Second, we have accepted the patient-provider relationship as a central problem in health communication research, leaving off the population or mass audience as a legitimate focus for organizational health communication research. A shift in focus would favor more studies like Backer and Rogers’s (1993) work concerning the organizational issues associated with health communication campaigns. This shift could also be tied to an institutional approach and could draw schools of public health and the public health service into the framework. Variation in contexts should be introduced as a variable in health communication studies. Too many studies assume a hospital or physician’s office. The links between professionals and their changing status with the advent of managed care seems a promising area for further research. Changes over time in the context of patient-provider communication may also influence the validity and reliability of health communication studies. Certainly the institutional environment of health organizations has changed drastically in just the last 20 years (since the introduction of DRGs, for example). As of January 1, 2001, 933,687 Medicare enrollees (Ferris, 2000) were dropped from HMOs that claimed that federal reimbursements did not sufficiently cover the costs of care (LaTourette, 2001). Certainly disruptions in the continuity of care would influence the quality and tenor of individual health communication episodes. An institutional approach provides a framework in which we can consider both the microlevel interactions and issues in health care as well as the organizational environment of health services. For example, physician satisfaction is a personal issue that affects individual providers, but in the aggregate, it may be an expression of shifting macromorphic forces and arrangements. If, as we observed in our introduction, organizations are expressions of culturally valued ends, there may be few better places to study changes in our culture than in health organizations.

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

339

REFERENCES Abbott, A. D. (1988). The system of professions: An essay on the division of expert labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Administration on Aging. (2000). Profile of older Americans: 2000. [Online]. Retrieved December 5, 2001, from http://www.aoa.dhhs.gov/aoa/stats/profile/default.htm#health. Aiken L. H., Sochalski, J., & Lake, E. T. (1997). Studying outcomes of organizational change in health services. Medical Care, 35, NS6–NS18. Albrecht, T., & Bach, B. (1997). Communication in complex organizations: A relational approach. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace. Aldrich, H. (1979). Organizations and environments. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Aldrich, H., & Fish, D. (1981, December). Origins of organizational forms: Births, deaths, and transformations. Paper presented at SSRC Conference on Organizational Social Indicators, Washington, DC. Alexander, J. A., & Fennell, M. L. (1986). Patterns of decision making in multihospital systems. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 27, 14–27. Alexander, J. A., Fennell, M. L., & Halpern, M. T. (1993). Leadership instability in hospitals: The influence of Board-CEO relations and organizational growth and decline. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 74–99. American Academy of Family Practice. (2001). Statistics. [Online]. Retrieved December 5, 2001, from http://www.aafp.org/family/. American Hospital Association (AHA). (2000a). American Hospital Association. [Online]. Retrieved January 8, 2001, from http://www.aha.org/index.asp. American Hospital Association (AHA). (2000b). Fast facts on U.S. hospitals from hospital statistics. [Online]. Retrieved January 8, 2001, from http://www.aha.org/resource/newpage. asp. American Medical Association (AMA). (2001). Report of the council on long range planning and development. [Online]. Retrieved December 5, 2001, from http://www.ama-assn.org/ meetings/public/annual00/reports/clrpd/clpd5a00.rtf. Andersen, R. M. (1995). Revisiting the behavioral model and access to medical care: Does it matter? Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 36, 1–10. Annandale, E. (1989). Proletarianization or restratification of the medical profession? The case of obstetrics. International Journal of Health Services, 19, 611–634. Backer, T. E., & Everett, M. R. (1993). Organizational aspects of health communication campaigns. What works? Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Barley, S. R. (1986). Technology as an occasion for structuring: Observations on CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, 78– 108. Barr, D. (1997, June). Structuring managed care delivery systems to increase primary care quality. Paper presented at the meetings of the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy, Chicago, IL. Berteotti, C. R., & Seibold, D. R. (1994). Coordination and role-definition problems in health care teams: A hospice case study. In L. R. Frey (Ed.), Group communication in context: Studies of natural groups (pp. 107–131). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates. Berwick, D. M., Godfrey, A. B., & Roessner, J. (1991). Curing health care: New strategies for quality improvement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Brender, J. A., & Hamer, R. L. (1998). The InterStudy HMO trend report. St. Paul, MN: InterStudy.

340

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

Brennan, T. A. (1998). The role of regulation in quality improvement. Milbank Quarterly, 76, 709–731. Brewster, L., Jackson, L., & Lesser, C. (2000). Insolvency and challenges of regulating providers that bear risk. [Electronic version]. Issue Briefs, 26, 4. Cawley, J., Chernew, M., & McLaughlin, C. (2001, June). HMO participation in Medicare managed care. Paper presented at the Twelfth Annual Health Economics Conference, Durham, NC. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMM). (2001a). National health expenditures. [Online]. Retrieved March 20, 2001, from http://www.hcfa.gov/stats/nhe-oact/tables/t1.htm. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMM). (2001b). Overview of the Medicaid program. [Online]. Retrieved December 5, 2001, from http://www.hcfa.gov/medicaid/mover.htm. Chappelle, K. G., Blanchard, S. H., Ramirez-Williams, M. F., & Fields, S. A. (2000). Off the charts: Teaching students in compliance with HCFA Guidelines. Family Practice Management, 7, 37–42. Clark, P. F., Clark, D. A., Day, D., & Shea, D. (2000). The relationship between health care reform and nurses’ interest in union representation: The role of workplace climate. Journal of Professional Nursing, 16, 92–97. Community Health Care. (2001). Medical group practice legal and administrative guide. [Online]. Retrieved December 7, 2001, from http://www.chci.com/chc/Master5/Master5. htm#HOW MUCH. Contractor, N. S., & Seibold, D. (1993). Theoretical frameworks for the study of structuring processes in group decision support systems: Adaptive structuration and self-organizing systems theory. Human Communication Research, 19, 528–563. D’Aunno, T. A., & Zuckerman, H. S. (1987). A life-cycle model of organizational federations: The case of hospitals. Academy of Management Review, 12, 534–545. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organization fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 147–160. Dowd, T., Monaco R., & Janoska J. (1996). Effects of future demographic changes on the U.S. economy: Evidence from a long-term simulation model. College Park, MD: INFORUM/Department of Economics, University of Maryland. Feldstein, P. J. (1993). Health care economics (4th ed.). Albany, NY: DelMar Publishers Inc. Ferris, M. (2000, September/October). Problems accelerate for Medicare HMOs. Geriatric Times, 1(3). [Online]. Retrieved April 2000 from http://www.medinfosource.com/gt/ g001016.html. Flocke, S. A. (1997). Measuring attributes of primary: Development of a new instrument. Journal of Family Practice, 45, 64–74. Freidson, E. (1970). Profession of medicine: A study of the sociology of applied knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. Freidson, E. (1986). Professional powers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frey, L. R. (1994a). Group communication in context: Studies of natural groups. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Frey, L. R. (1994b). The naturalistic paradigm: Studying small groups in the postmodern era. Small Group Research, 25, 551–577. Gale Research Company. (2001). Encyclopedia of associations: Regional, state, and local organizations. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company. Geist, P., & Hardesty, M. (1992). Negotiating the crisis: DRGs and the transformation of hospitals. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gray, B. (1991). The profit motive and patient care: The changing accountability of doctors and hospitals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

341

Gray, B. H. (1983). The new health care for profit: Doctors and hospitals in a competitive environment. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Greenes, R. A., & Shortliffe, E. H. (1990). Medical informatics: An emerging discipline with academic and institutional perspectives. JAMA, 263, 1114–1120. Gross, H., & Budrys, G. (1991). Control over work in a prepaid group practice. Current Research on Occupations and Professions, 6, 279–296. Gubrium, J. F. (1975). Living and dying at Murray Manor. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hacker, J. S., & Marmor, T. R. (1999). The misleading language of managed care. Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, 24, 1033–1043. Hannan, M. T., & Freeman, J. (1977). The population ecology of organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 82, 929–964. Hansmann, H. (1981). The role of nonprofit enterprise. Yale Law Journal, 89, 835–901. Havlicek, P. L. (1999). Medical group practices in the US: A survey of practice characteristics. New York: American Medical Association. Henderson, D. A. (1999). The looming threat of biological weapons. Science, 283, 1279–1282. Hospice Association of America (HAA). (2001). Consumer information. [Online]. Retrieved December 5, 2001, from http://www.hospice-america.org/consumer.html. Institute of Medicine. (2001). Crossing the quality chasm: A new health system for the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). (1994). Lexicon: Dictionary of health care terms, organizations and acronyms for the era of reform. Oakbrook Terrace, IL: Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). (2001a). Joint commission on accreditation of healthcare organizations. [Online]. Retrieved January 8, 2001, from http://www.jcaho.org/index.html. Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). (2001b). Directory of accredited organizations—Glossary. [Online]. Retrieved January 8, 2001, from http://jcprdw1.jcaho.org/lwapps/shared/glossary.htm. Kanavos, P., Mrazek, M., & Mossialos, E. (n.d.). Pharmaceuticals: A global industry with local interests. [Online]. Retrieved December 7, 2001, from http://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/ health2/Kanavos.doc. Klingle, R. S., Burgoon, M., Afifi, W., & Callister, M. (1995). Rethinking how to measure organizational culture in the hospital setting: The hospital culture scale. Evaluation & The Health Professions, 18, 166–186. Koch, M. W. (1998). Nursing leadership in the faith community. The Tennessee Nurse. [Online]. Retrieved April 25, 2001, from http://wwnurse.com/Nurse-zine/Articles/Nsg Faith Community.shtml. Kongstvedt, P. R. (1989). The managed health care handbook. Rockville, MD: Aspen Publishers, Inc. Kraus, N., Porter, M., & Ball, P. (1990). Managed care: A decade in review 1980–1990. St. Paul, MN: InterStudy. Kreps, G. L., & Thornton, B. C. (1992). Health communication. White Plains, NY: Longman, Inc. Lammers, J. (1992). Work autonomy, organizational autonomy, and physicians’ job satisfaction. Current Research on Occupations and Professions, 6, 155–172. Lammers, J., Duggan, A., & Barbour, J. (2001, November). Managed care as managed health communication: Challenging assumptions about professional and organizational communication in health services. Paper presented at the annual conference of the National Communication Association, Atlanta, GA.

342

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

Lammers, J., & Geist, P. (1997). The transformation of caring in the light and shadow of managed care. Health Communication, 9, 45–60. Lammers, J., & Krikorian, D. (1997). Theoretical extension and operationalization of the bona fide group construct with an application to surgical teams. The Journal of Applied Communication Research, 25, 17–38. LaTourette, S. (2001). Stopping the Medicare HMO revolving door. [Online]. Retreived December 5, 2001, from http://www.house.gov/latourette/HMObill.htm. Lawrence, T., Winn, L., & Jennings, P. D. (2001). The temporal dynamics of institutionalization. Academy of Management Review, 26, 624–644. Lewis, L. K., & Seibold, D. R. (1998). Reconceptualizing organizational change implementation as a communication problem: A review of literature and research agenda. In M. E. Roloff (Ed.), Communication yearbook 21 (pp. 93–144). New York: Guilford Press. Mackintosh, D. (1978). Systems of health care. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Mattson, M. (1999). Toward a reconceptualization of communication cues to action in the Health Belief Model: HIV test counseling. Communication Monographs, 66, 240–265. Mayes, R. (1999, August). From Medicare’s rescue to managed care revolution: How Congress inadvertently transformed American medicine. Paper presented at the conference of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA. McDermott, M. A., Solari-Twadell, P. A., & Matheus, R. (1998). Promoting quality education for the parish nurse and parish nurse coordinator. Nursing and Healthcare Perspectives, 19, 4–6. McKinlay, J. B., & Arches, J. (1985). Towards the proletarianization of physicians. International Journal of Health Services, 15, 161–195. McPhee, R. (1985). Formal Structure and Organizational Communication. In P. Tompkins & R. McPhee (Eds.), Organizational communication: Traditional themes and new directions: Vol. 13. Sage annual review of communication research (pp. 149–178). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). (2000). Managers’ compensation rises— good financial performance could be reason. [Online]. Retrieved December 7, 2001, from http://www.mgma.com/press/mancomp10-15-00.cfm. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 340–363. Meyer, J. W., & Scott, W. R. (1983). Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Meyer, J. W., Scott, W. R., & Deal, T. E. (1983). Institutional and technical sources of organizational structure: Explaining the structure of education organizations. In J. W. Meyer & W. R. Scott (Eds.), Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality (pp. 45–70). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Mick, S. S., & Associates. (1990). Innovations in health care delivery: Insights for organization theory. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Miller, K., Birkholt, M., Scott, C., & Stage, C. (1995). Empathy and Burnout in human service work: An extension of a communication model. Communication Research, 22, 123–147. National Association of County Health Officials (NACHO). (1991). National directory of local health departments. Washington, DC: National Association of County Health Officials. National Association for Home Care. (2000). Basic statistics about hospice. [Online]. Retrieved December 7, 2001, from http://www.nahc.org/Consumer/hpcstats.html. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). (1997). The National Center for Health Statistics: Advance data (No. 280). Hyattsville, MD: U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

343

National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). (2001). Health, United States, 2001. [Online]. Retrieved December 5, 2001, from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hus/ hus.htm. National Hospice Organization. (1996). The 1996 National Hospice Organization inpatient facility survey. Daleview Associates. Navarro, V. (1999). Is there a third way? A response to Gidden’s the Third Way. International Journal of Health Services, 29, 667–677. Nussbaum, J. F. (1990). Communication and the nursing home environment: Survivability as a function of resident-nursing staff affinity. In H. Giles, N. Coupland, & J. M. Wiemann (Eds.), Communication, health and the elderly (pp. 155–171). New York: Manchester University Press. Patent Fairness Act of 1999: Hearings the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, 106th Cong., H.R. 1598 (1999). Testimony of Maura Kealey. Pfeffer, J. (1981). Management as symbolic action: The creation and maintenance of organizational paradigms. In L. L. Cummings & B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior 3 (pp. 1–52). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Plsek, P. (2001). Redesigning health care with insights from the science of complex adaptive systems. Appendix B in crossing the quality chasm: A new health system for the 21st century. Committee on quality of health care in America, Institute of Medicine. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. (2001). Transforming health care through information technology. [Online]. Retrieved December 7, 2001, from http:// www.ccic.gov/pubs/pitac/pitac-hc-9feb01.pdf. Prusoff, W. (2001, March 19). The scientist’s story. The New York Times, p. A19. Putnam, L. L., Phillips, N., & Chapman, P. (1996). Metaphors of communication and organization. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organization studies (pp. 375–408). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Putnam, L. L., & Stohl, C. S. (1990). Bona fide groups: A reconceptualization of groups in context. Communication Studies, 41, 248–265. Ray, E. B., & Miller, K. I. (1990) Communication in health-care organizations. In E. B. Ray & L. Donohew (Eds.), Communication and health: Systems and applications (pp. 92–107). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Reinhardt, U. (1996). Health system change: Skirmish or revolution? Health Affairs, 15, 57–58. Relman, A. S. (1998). The corporatization of the U.S. health-care system. Connecticut Medicine, 62, 97–98. Ritzer, G. (1996). The McDonaldization of society: An investigation into the changing character of contemporary social life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Robinson, J. C. (1997). Physician-hospital integration and the economic theory of the firm. Medical Care Research and Review, 54, 3–24. Robinson, J. C. (1998). Consolidation of medical groups into physician practice management organizations. JAMA, 279, 144–149. Rosenstock, I. M. (1974). Historical origins of the health belief model. Health Education Monographs, 2, 328–335. Scheffler, R. (1999). Physician collective bargaining: A turning point in U.S. medicine. Journal of Health Politics, Policy & Law, 24, 1071–1076. Schlesinger, M., Gray, B., & Bradley, E. (1996). Charity and community: The role of nonprofit ownership in a managed health care system. Journal of Health, Politics, Policy and Law, 21, 697–752.

344

LAMMERS, DUGGAN, BARBOUR

Scott, W. R. (1995). Institutions and organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scott, W. R., & Lammers, J. C. (1985). Trends in occupations and organizations in the medical care and mental health sectors. Medical Care Review, 42, 37–76. Scott, W. R., Meyer, J. W., & Associates. (1994).Institutional environments and organizations: Structural complexity and individualism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scott, W. R., Ruef, M., Mendel, P. J., & Caronna, C. A. (2000). Institutional change and healthcare organizations: From professional dominance to managed care. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Selznick, P. (1948). Foundations of the theory of organization. American Sociological Review, 13, 25–35. Selznick, P. (1949). TVA and the grass roots. Berkeley: University of California Press. Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in administration. New York: Harper & Row. Sharf, B. F., & Street, R. L. (1997). Patient as a central construct: Shifting the emphasis. Health Communication, 9, 1–12. Shonick, W. (1981). The state of the public sector health services in California. Journal of Public Health Policy, 2, 164–176. Singh, D. A., & Schwab, R. C. (1998). Retention of administrators in nursing homes: What can management do? Gerontologist, 38, 362–669. Starr, P. (1982). The social transformation of American medicine. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Stohl, C. S., & Putnam, L. L. (1994). Group communication in context: Implications for the study of bona fide groups. In L. R. Frey (Ed.), Group communication in context: Studies of natural groups (pp. 285–292). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Strauss, A. (1978). Negotiations: Varieties, contexts, processes, and social order. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Strauss, A. L., Fagerhaugh, S., Ruczek, B., & Wiener, C. (1985). Social organization of medical work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Street, R. L., & Real, K. (2001). The influence of managed care on provider-patient interaction: Precursor to a conceptual framework. Unpublished manuscript. Thorson, J. A., & Davis, R. E. (2000). Relocation of the institutionalized aged. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 56, 131–138. Trewyn, P. (2001, January 4). Aurora to close FHP clinics, eliminate jobs. The Business Journal of Milwaukee. [Online]. Retrieved December 5, 2001, from http://milwaukee. bcentral.com/milwaukee/stories/2001/01/01/daily22.html. Tushman, M. L., & Scanlan, T. J. (1981). Boundary-spanning individuals, their role in information transfer and their antecedents. Academy of Management Journal, 24, 289–305. Tye, L. (1999, January 19). New leader’s firing of editor thrusts AMA back into turmoil. The Boston Globe, p. A1. U.S. Census Bureau. (2000a). The statistical abstract of the U.S. [Online]. Retreieved March 20, 2001, from http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html. U.S. Census Bureau. (2000b). Summary statistics for US Firms. [Online]. Retrieved February 28, 2001, from http://factfinder.census.gov. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (1999). About chronic disease. [Online]. Retrieved May 19, 2001, from http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/about.htm. U.S. Centers for Disease Control. (2000). National nursing home survey. Centers for Disease Control. [Online]. Retrieved February 17, 2001, from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/ statab/pubd/ad280tb3.htm. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS). (1991). Profile of state and territorial public health system, 1991. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

15. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

345

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS). (2002). HSS announces creation of medical reserve corps units: Grants to 42 community groups will support new volunteer medical response teams. Retrieved November 1, 2002, from http://www.hhs.gov/ news/press/2002pres/20021101b.html. U.S. Security and Exchange Commission. (2000). Form 10-k for CIGNA Corporation. (Commission file number 1-8323). Washington, DC: U.S. Security and Exchange Commission. Williams, S., & Torrens, P. R. (1998). Introduction to health services (5th ed.). New York: Wiley Medical Publishing. Wolinsky, F., & Marder, W. (1985). The organization of medical practice and the practice of medicine. Ann Arbor, MI: Health Administration Press. Yost, A. J., & Serkey, J. M. (1999). Rule-makers who establish infection control standards. Nursing Clinics of North America, 34, 527–533. AUTHOR NOTE

We would like to thank Kathy Miller for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

16 Stress and Social Support in Health Care Organizations Julie Apker Western Michigan University

Eileen Berlin Ray Cleveland State University

Caregivers find themselves managing a host of demands that are often at odds with each other. They are expected to be quick but thorough, strong but emotionally accessible, always available but never tired, and honest but infallible. Understanding these demands may help people understand why caregivers communicate as they do. (du Pr´e, 2000, p. 93)

Stress and social support are topics that have interested organizational scholars and practitioners for decades. Researchers have investigated a variety of issues related to these subjects, ranging from identifying the communicative antecedents of burnout to determining the “bottom-line” outcomes of stress in areas such as reduced worker commitment and increased turnover to studying the messages and structures that may help employees cope with workplace stress and burnout. These various lines of scholarship reveal that stress, burnout, and social support are communicative processes that are central to our understanding of organizations and their members. Although research in stress and social support has a rich history, the vibrancy of ongoing scholarly activity in these areas highlights the importance of this topic for current and future research. In a 1987 review of the supportive communication and job stress literature, Ray observed several trends. First, the communication of social support had been conceptualized as a person’s accessibility to support or the available sources of support. Second, social support was conceptualized as a means for reducing uncertainty and increasing the recipient’s perception of personal control over the stressors. Third, social support was typically assessed from the recipient’s point of view. Regardless of the supporter’s intent, his or her behavior was only support if the recipient perceived it as such. Fourth, there was no consideration of negative, or dysfunctional, supportive communication. Finally, at the time

347

348

APKER AND RAY

of Ray’s (1987) review, research had focused on human service occupations with little acknowledgement or appreciation of the cultural or social context within which these jobs are embedded. The current chapter updates research on social support in healthcare organizations subsequent to the 1987 review and examines changes in the Ray identified trends. Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed massive changes in healthcare in the United States. It is critical to note these changes because it is impossible to discuss job stress without acknowledging their impact. Previous research on stress in healthcare organizations has often drawn an arbitrary boundary around the organization, giving only a passing nod to exigencies in the external environment. Past studies have also used samples primarily of nurses, nursing assistants, and doctors; other medical and nonmedical support staff have been virtually ignored. In this age of managed care, it is critical that every component of the healthcare organization system is recognized and examined if an suitably complex understanding of the relationship between job stress and supportive communication is to emerge. We have seen in other chapters of this handbook (e.g., Lammers et al., and Poole & Real) how the nature of healthcare and healthcare organizations has changed and continue to change. The pervasiveness of managed care and the increasing role of insurance carriers are only two related examples of the changes that have significantly influenced who gets healthcare and how it is provided. Previous work on stress and burnout among healthcare workers has focused on care providers and their communication with coworkers and/or supervisors. Some research has also included home/work conflict as a stressor, but most has remained focused on communication within the organization. In the past 15 years, however, there has been some shifting by communication scholars to grapple with the new complexities of healthcare and its impact on provider–patient interaction and organizational communication. Since 1987, research on communication and job stress has developed in several ways. Perhaps most noteworthy is the expansion of populations studied to include mental health professionals, social workers, occupational therapists, and physical therapists as well as continuing studies of physicians and nurses. Second, while broad categories of stressors are similar, the specifics that comprise them have changed. In this chapter, we first examine job stress due to 1) structural changes brought about by managed care; 2) role changes at interorganizational and interpersonal levels; 3) emotional labor; and 4) home/work conflict. We then discuss social support and how supportive communication may impact job stress in healthcare organizations. Finally, we consider implications for future research examining the relationship between job stress and social support. JOB STRESS IN THE HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONS

Healthcare work is inherently stressful. Care providers experience ongoing, lifechallenging health issues as they care for those who suffer from a variety of serious traumatic/acute or chronic health problems. Healthcare work seems to attract people who exhibit certain characteristics; they talk about wanting to make a difference in people’s lives and often see their career choice as a calling. They are aware of the intrinsic stress of healthcare work, at least cognitively. However, once in the field, caregivers are likely to experience additional stressors such as workload (underload and overload), role conflict, role ambiguity, scarce resources, understaffing, physical strain (e.g., lifting and moving patients), and a lack of participation in decision making (see Ford & Ellis, 1998). This stress may affect caregivers physically, behaviorally, and/or attitudinally. Increases in substance

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

349

abuse, physical illness, relationship conflict, and psychological problems are not uncommon among healthcare workers and are costly to the organization in terms of higher absenteeism, turnover, or poor job performance. For patients, the impact of care provider job stress can be, literally, a matter of life and death. Preventable medical errors are the eighth most common cause of death in the United States, killing between 44,000 and 98,000 each year (Sexton, Thomas, & Helmreich, 2000). A study of surgery staff and intensive care unit staff found that poor communication and teamwork were frequent contributors to these errors, complicated by the fact that medical staff may deny their high stress levels or refuse to acknowledge their mistakes (Sexton et al., 2000). Healthcare providers’ stress also impacts patients’ level of satisfaction with their hospital stay, and patients who had more cynical nurses report less satisfaction with medical care and service (Leiter, Harvie, & Frizell, 1998). Within healthcare organizations, numerous stressors have been identified in various care occupations. Although there is some overlap, there are also some distinctive stressors within certain healthcare professions. In the following paragraphs, we highlight a few of the job stressors that appear to be most salient to particular caregiver professions. Occupational therapists may be at high risk for chronic stress because they are isolated from other healthcare professionals, a client base made up predominately of the disabled or elderly, and a need to justify their importance in the face of managed care. These stressors are exacerbated by a lack of positive feedback from supervisors, low pay, crowded work areas, heavy caseloads, and a lack of opportunity to move up the career ladder (Sweeney & Nichols, 1996). Mental health nurses have reported numerous stressors: inadequate staffing in the event of a dangerous situation; coping with changes in health service and hospital closures, and not being notified of changes before they take place; knowing that patients are getting inadequate care due to short staffing; lack of input to management about important changes; and low morale and poor organizational climate (Fagin et al., 1996). Hospital staff nurses have identified numerous job stressors including work overload, patient death and separation, the emotional demands brought about by patients and their families, poor communication with coworkers, and low social support (Hillhouse & Adler, 1997). Specifically, nurses who perceived low stressors, high social support, and high patient contact reported low burnout, while nurses who experienced patient death and suffering, conflict with other doctors and nurses, low social support on their unit, fewer patients, and moderate stress levels reported high burnout (Hillhouse & Adler, 1997). Stressors also appear to vary depending on the degree of status differences between the interactants. For example, conflict with peers may be easier to resolve and less threatening, while asymmetrical relationship (e.g., nurse-doctor) conflict, combined with heavy work and patient loads, may magnify nurses’ stress (Lee & Ashforth, 1996). Nurses also reported that role ambiguity, role conflict, workload, and daily pressure were stressors that affected their work lives (Ford & Ellis, 1998; Lee & Ashforth, 1996). Ford and Ellis (1998) note: Technological advances, changes in healthcare delivery structures, and continued pressure for cost and care accountability all have contributed to a work environment in which nurses increasingly feel understaffed, overworked, stressed, and uncertain. In addition, nurses continue to cope with the stresses associated with caregiving to patients and their families who are facing difficult, often life-threatening circumstances. (p. 38)

For medical residents, stress has been related to workload, with negative relationships reported between number of hours worked and quality of care as well as between quality

350

APKER AND RAY

of sleep and quality of care (Firth-Cozens & Moss, 1998). HIV/AIDS healthcare workers identified stressors including confrontation with death and dying, problems of interacting with clients (Kleiber, Enzmann, & Gusy, 1994), emotional overload, lack of support for staff, and lack of training (Guinan, McCallum, Painter, Dykes, & Gold,1991). In addition, past research suggests that nondirect care providers working in healthcare organizations are not immune to experiencing aspects of job stress. For instance, at the administrative level, among directors, associate medical directors, and chiefs of staff at VA centers, burnout was associated with both age and tenure. Further, those with intermediate or high burnout levels reported less role clarity, more role conflict, fewer resources, and low levels of job satisfaction (Mirvis, Graney, & Kilpatrick, 1999). This line of scholarship, then, illustrates that healthcare professionals experience many different kinds of job stress, some of which are tied to particular occupational characteristics, skills, or work settings. However, following the arguments posed by Ray and Miller (1990), it is important to avoid solely taking a microlevel perspective when examining workplace stressors and burnout in healthcare organizations. Thus, we next address the greater, more overarching sources of job stress that affect healthcare professionals regardless of their particular medical specialty or occupation. SOURCES OF JOB STRESS

Ray and Miller (1990) advocate adopting a systems perspective that highlights the critical nature of the interdependencies between all components within the organization and their impact on the provision of care. These authors further argue that when the system works efficiently and effectively, it remains in balance. However, if this balance is disrupted, the outcome is potentially dangerous for both care providers and recipients. The stress resulting from structural changes is likely to spill over to the interpersonal relationships between caregivers, subsequently affecting the quality of care they provide. In this section, we first discuss the structural change that has had the most significant impact on healthcare, managed care. Managed Care Stressors It has become unbearable and I plan to quit medicine. So many stupid things compromise my patient care that I’m ready to practically give my practice away. . . . When I see a Medicare patient, 110,000 pages of regulations come between us. . . . Keeping up with medicine is tough enough, but I’m also expected to read the Federal Register every day looking for new rules from the bureaucrats. (Physician after being asked how the medical profession has changed; Laster, 2001, p. B3)

Probably the structural change that has most dramatically transformed the nature of healthcare in the United States has been managed care. In response to dwindling economic resources, rising healthcare costs, and increased competition, growing numbers of healthcare organizations are restructuring the work roles, tasks, and environments of their employees (Geist & Hardesty, 1992; Saxton & Leaman, 1998). Popular cost-cutting measures include increasing workers’ administrative and clinical workload, downsizing staff, emphasizing “team” care, and redefining conventional caregiver roles (Apker, 2001; Browne & Biancolillo, 1996; Mayer & Rushton, 1998). These cost management tactics have had an impact on the communication among and between healthcare workers.

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

351

Research by Miller and her colleagues (Apker, 2001; K. I. Miller, 1998; K. I. Miller & Apker, 2002; K. I. Miller, Joseph, & Apker, 2000) indicates that caregiver interactions on the “front lines” of managed care have changed interpersonal, group, and organizational communication dynamics. For example, Miller and Apker (2002) found that traditional nursing communication—characterized by education and empathy—has been extended in the managed care era to include processes such as professional collaboration and change management. RNs who were direct care providers in healthcare organizations affected by managed care initiatives, desired more and better quality communication from administrators and managers regarding managed care (Miller et al., 2000). Doctors involved in managed care contracts reported problematic communication with managed care organizations and reduced job satisfaction, particularly in the area of clinical autonomy (Lammers & Duggan, 2002). Lammers and Geist (1997) identified numerous ways in which managed care has changed the relationship between providers and patients. They argue that as “health consumers,” the public is forced to make decisions about coverage and providers before they need healthcare. It is now up to individuals to gather information, develop criteria, and choose medical services and providers, usually within a narrow set of options. Patients are more dehumanized—reduced to an illness within a category of treatments, often with little continuity of care providers. Marketing is targeted to our shared aggregate characteristics, not our individual variations. Costs have shifted from posttreatment payment to prepayment as determined by insurance companies and managed care organizations. People who don’t meet specific criteria (i.e., below poverty level for Medicaid, not covered by Medicare, or work in small organizations not required to provide health coverage) end up without coverage and must either buy their own insurance or get treatment in emergency rooms. As a result of these changes, Lammers and Geist (1997) further argue that communication within the provider–patient relationship has changed in numerous ways. For example, communication with physicians who adhere to their managed care organization’s rules is likely to become more formal, and potentially adversarial; but for doctors who attempt to bypass these regulations, communication is likely to become more conspiratorial. Either way, these additional stressors have changed the nature of the care provider’s role and its subsequent impact on patient care. Thus, managed care appears to exert powerful pressures on the work lives and relationships among healthcare professionals and their relationships with patients. Such structural changes in healthcare delivery may become manifest in healthcare workers’ experience of stress. In addition to the pervasive structural changes brought about by managed care, caregivers face other individual and organizational job factors that can bring about feelings of stress. Next, we discuss three types of stressors: 1) interorganizational and interpersonal role stress; 2) emotional labor; and 3) home/work conflict. Role Stress

Role stress, including its relationship to various negative outcomes, gained notoriety because of the early work of R. L. Kahn and colleagues (R. L. Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964), and it has been the subject of much research in the decades since. Role has been defined as the behavioral expectations of individuals who occupy a particular position. Communication is crucial for both defining and enacting the role (Miller et al., 2000). Role stress has traditionally been divided into role conflict and role ambiguity. Role conflict refers to a person having to engage in two or more incompatible roles simultaneously. Role ambiguity refers to a lack of clarity regarding the definition

352

APKER AND RAY

and expectations for a particular role. In healthcare organizations, research suggests that worker role stress may arise at both interorganizational and interpersonal levels. We begin by taking a macro-approach to role stress by examining relationships between caregiving organizations, especially those interorganizational relationships that have emerged and flourished in the managed care era. We will then consider the interpersonal factors that may contribute to worker stress. Interorganizational Role Stress. Perhaps the most visible way in which we see interorganizational role stress is when experts in healthcare find themselves fighting regulations put in place by those who view healthcare from a business perspective. Unfortunately, interorganizational role stress affects care providers at all levels, and, in some cases, results in conflict about how to balance “bottom-line” profit concerns with appropriate care coordination. Often, the outcome of these problems is heightened provider stress that subsequently spills over into patient care. For instance, cost containment strategies result in outside organizations dictating the length of hospital stays, coverage of treatments, and care. This leads to frustration, as “nurses often feel that the dismantling of ‘hard won,’ high-quality patient care merely in the interest of cost containment and constraining resource availability is completely unacceptable” (Porter-O’Grady, 1998, p. 262). Doctors, too, are affected by this type of interorganizational role stressor. Research conducted by Post (1997) of stress and coping among family physicians indicates that doctors consider negotiating with third-party managed care or government systems over the care to be provided to the patient to be a major job frustration. Similar interorganizational stressors have resulted from the institution of diagnosis related groups (DRGs). DRGs were designed to contain costs for Medicare patients. The DRG system was implemented in 1984 and was set up to “control cost increases in Medicare, to achieve some predictability over [Social Security] expenditures, and ultimately to avoid the bankruptcy—perhaps even the destruction—of this program for helping the nation’s elderly receive adequate healthcare” (Morreim, 1985, p. 30). DRGs are part of a prospective system in which funding agencies set in advance what they will pay hospitals to care for specific illnesses before the care is needed for a specific patient (Birnenbaum, 1997). The rate is based on the average cost of providing treatment for anyone with that particular illness. If costs exceed the reimbursement rate, hospitals will lose money, but if costs are consistently below the rate, hospitals benefit by sharing in the profit. Thus, there is an incentive for hospitals to stay at, or below, the reimbursement level. The impact that this system, and others like it, has on the entire organization is pervasive (Sultz & Young, 1997). Medicare patients are assigned a DRG when they enter the hospital, and subsequent care is determined based on this diagnosis. As Geist and Hardesty (1992) noted, “Under DRGs, the premise that quality patient care will be delivered regardless of cost loses ground to cost containment” (p. 238). The implications for communication are also pervasive (du Pr´e, 2000). Not only is care streamlined and work roles redefined in a managed care environment, but communication between patients and care providers is also impacted (Post, 1997). For example, explaining how DRGs will impact a patient’s care is considered “dirty work,” work that no one wants to perform (Hughes, 1971), and usually falls to the nurses. Thus, those providers having the most frequent and intense contact with patients and their families, and usually the strongest interpersonal relationships, are faced with explaining the intricacies of the managed care system to the patient and family (Finkelman, 2001). Certainly, the influence of managed care has been visible in a variety of healthcare contexts, but perhaps it is most pronounced in inpatient settings such as hospitals, which have

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

353

traditionally been the most expensive component of healthcare delivery (Sultz & Young, 1997). Here, the cost management strategies described above have been accompanied by increased patient acuity levels and mandated decreases in patient lengths of stay. These pressures are further complicated when hospitals lack the infrastructure and resources to help their employees cope with and respond to managed care (K. I. Miller et al., 2000). It is not surprising, then, that hospital-based healthcare workers report that managed care has affected their professional practice as well as led to rising levels of job stress and frustration. For example, RNs blamed managed care for increasing their workload and heightening pressure to speed up patient care at the expense of care quality (Apker, 2001), while nurse practitioners saw managed care as a source of uncertainty and confusion in their jobs (Cohen, Mason, Arsenie, Sargese, & Needham, 1998). Murphy, Ruch, Pepicello, and Murphy (1997) report that the complexities of working in a managed care system caused reduced morale, decreased job satisfaction, and higher levels of stress. In professions such as nursing, which are traditionally challenged by staff burnout and turnover, recruiting personnel and maintaining care quality has become increasingly difficult for healthcare organizations (Buiser, 2000; Miller & Apker, 2002). Clinical nurse specialists and nurse practitioners report that managed care poses potential threats to professional security and care quality (Harrison, 1999) and is associated with workplace stressors such as workload demands, encroachment on professional practice, and administrative red tape. Managed care has also influenced the stress experienced by physicians, particularly in the areas of control over work and collegial and patient relationships. A key characteristic of the managed care era is that third-party payers exert influence over clinical decisionmaking and healthcare delivery (Saxton & Leaman, 1998; Wilkerson, Devers, & Given, 1997). Physicians report that interference by nonphysicians such as insurers was a source of stress that led to feelings of decreased professional autonomy and, ultimately, reduced job satisfaction (Simpson & Grant, 1991). As one physician notes, “managed care companies acknowledge they push for the least intensive setting possible for care and that multiyear outpatient [mental health] therapy is generally insurance history” (Levick, 1998, p. A1). In research examining the relationship between managed care, communication problems, and physician satisfaction, Lammers and Duggan (2002) found that for some doctors, contact with managed care organizations was a factor in predicting communication problems that led to lower satisfaction. In addition, a number of physicians also reported worrying about the stress-related aspects of their jobs created by managed care (e.g., more workload, rising patient volume, etc.) and the effects of these stressors on their relationships with colleagues and patients. In a similar study, doctors reported dissatisfaction with how managed care has intensified demands on their productivity, cost-containment, and case mix (McMurray et al., 1997). In another study, doctors believed that managed care has contributed to their job stress by placing more pressure on duties such as charting, completing paperwork, and complying with constantly changing regulations (Post, 1997). Interpersonal Role Stress. Role stress related to interpersonal relationships is another common source of stress for healthcare professionals. As mentioned earlier, many organizational aspects of managed care have significantly affected caregivers on an interpersonal level, particularly those who work directly at the patient’s bedside. For example, hospital RNs report feeling more stress as they care for more highly acute patients (Letvak, 2001) who must be the “sickest of the sick” before being admitted (Apker, 2001). In this line of research, work by Miller and her colleagues (K. I. Miller, 1998; K. I. Miller & Apker, 2002; K. I. Miller et al., 2000) and others (Buiser, 2000; Harrison 1999; Murphy et al., 1997) suggests that nurses have new role sets in a managed care environment that

354

APKER AND RAY

involve more (and increasingly complex) responsibilities. Duties such as care coordination, supervision, and case management now demand that nurses interact in new ways with traditional coworker groups such as physicians and nursing aides and extenders. Now more than ever, RNs must communicate with allied health personnel and third-party payors as part of their nursing roles. This research reveals that managed care requires new communicative skills and relationships of nurses that may lead to rising stress in a profession already characterized by burnout and turnover (K. I. Miller & Apker, 2002). As Porter-O’Grady (1998) observed, “It is disheartening to know that the focus of healthcare service is changing when the personal evidence available to nurses suggests that the patient in the bed still has a set of needs and demands that must be met, regardless of the degree of shift toward outpatient care” (p. 262). Nurses are increasingly expected to perform traditional bedside care in addition to conducting administrative duties (e.g., documentation, answering phones, admitting new patients, etc.) and managing unlicensed staff (Apker, 2001). The struggle to balance clinical and nonclinical work roles is not without consequences, as nurses often report greater job stress, less personal accomplishment, and reduced time to spend with patients (Murphy et al., 1997; Harrison, 1999). Furthermore, research by K. I. Miller et al. (2000) indicates that nurses who attempt to negotiate traditional clinical responsibilities with new work roles, such as case manager and discharge planner, experience ambiguity in the process of role development. Interestingly, research results were mixed; some RNs reported that job uncertainty was a significant source of stress and strain while other nurses indicated that their role ambiguity was source of empowerment and creativity (K. I. Miller et al., 2000). Other empirical work reveals that healthcare professionals may experience stress related to role conflict even when their jobs are purposefully redesigned to reduce role-related stressors. In the case of a hospital work-redesign program—implemented to enhance nurse case managers’ quality of work life—job structuring changes resulted in higher levels of role conflict and ambiguity in ways that increased nurses’ job stress (Tonges, 1998). Work stress related to role conflict can also have negative physical consequences for nurses. For instance, in one study, nurses who reported work stress perceived more problematic physical symptoms and believed they were less healthy (Douglas, Meleis, & Paul, 1997). The stress accompanying the balance of multiple role demands also affects physicians who are taking on more administrative duties beyond providing direct patient care (de Jonge, Mulder, & Nijhuis, 1999; K. I. Miller & Ryan, 2001). For example, research suggests that physicians’ role conflict, combined with the loss of clinical autonomy, results in reduced job satisfaction (McMurray et al., 1997; Simpson & Grant, 1991). Experiencing role-related conflict also affects those employed in allied health and support staff positions. A study of role conflict among physical therapists found that therapists who perceived incompatible role demands from patients and coworkers reported higher levels of role stress and diminished emotional and physical well-being (Deckard & Present, 1989). Similarly, social workers reported significant role stress and conflict as they balanced relationships with patients, the patients’ families, and other caregivers (Seifert, Jayaratne, & Chess, 1991). Healthcare employees in non-direct-care jobs are also not immune from the effects of role stress. A study of non-direct-care professionals working in a retirement center, for example, found that food service, housekeeping, and administrative workers experienced role stress similar to their direct-care counterparts (Miller, Zook, & Ellis, 1989). In sum, then, although some scholars warn against spreading caregivers too thinly in times of increased patient acuity and reduced patient lengths of stay (Tillman, Salyer,

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

355

Corley, & Mark, 1997), today’s healthcare workers serve increasing numbers of patients and, in the process of delivering medical care, they perform more (and more varied) tasks (Murphy et al., 1997). As health organizations downsize personnel and restructure job tasks, healthcare professionals may be in positions where they experience multiple—and potentially conflicting—roles. And, in addition to the actual job characteristics of their role, care providers are expected to present a certain front when enacting their role. This enactment, through emotional labor, may, in fact, act as an additional stressor, as discussed in the next section of this chapter. Emotional Labor

Emotional labor refers to “the management of feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” that is “sold for a wage” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7). According to Hochschild (1983), workers must “induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (p. 7). Emotional labor is particularly relevant to service occupations (e.g., flight attendants, bill collectors, fast food workers) in which displaying socially desired emotions is a part of the service transaction (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Wharton & Erickson, 1993). There has been some discussion of emotional labor in human service contexts, with K. I. Miller, Stiff, and Ellis (1988) differentiating between those who are able to maintain “empathic concern” (feeling for the other) versus “emotional contagion” (feeling with, or parallel to, the other). While empathic concern is more likely to have positive outcomes, emotional contagion is more likely to result in burnout. In the context of healthcare organizations, the notion of emotional labor is certainly applicable to caregivers because much of their communication involves affective content as they provide medical services to patients and their families. Research reviewed here indicates that emotional labor may be, in fact, characterized by numerous pros and cons for healthcare professionals. For example, healthcare workers may perform emotional labor to potentially reduce workplace stress and burnout brought about by the highly emotional circumstances that often characterize medical settings (Putnam & Mumby, 1993). Studies have also shown that caregivers may use emotional labor strategies to achieve a variety of instrumental tasks. O’Brien’s (1994) study of RNs employed in a variety of healthcare contexts echoes these findings by illustrating that caregivers labor emotionally in their efforts to persuade patients to adopt healthy lifestyles and behaviors. Findings from Sass’s (2000) ethnographic account of nursing home caregivers reveal that staff members display a wide range of emotional expressions in order to achieve a variety of goals and functions at work. Sass notes that the outcomes of caregivers’ emotional labor include information transfer, task achievement, relational definition, compliance gaining, and emotion management. In a case analysis of healthcare personnel working in a cardiac care center, Morgan and Krone (2001) found that caregivers used established organizational rules regarding emotional labor to perform scripted work roles and necessary job activities. Healthcare staff tended to use professional emotional displays to gain adherence from uncooperative patients. From these studies, it appears that emotional labor has a certain degree of utility for buffering and protecting healthcare professionals from work-related stressors. However, on the opposite end of the spectrum, other scholars note that emotional labor can be a significant source of stress and burnout for those working in service industries (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987, 1989, 1991), especially those employed in caregiving professions (Kahn, 1993). Healthcare workers are often forced to

356

APKER AND RAY

deal with competing professional, organizational, and personal goals. Not only must they manage their emotions when caring for patients but when interacting with families, doctors, coworkers, and various support staff. Within healthcare organizations, the efficiency of interdependent action among the various staff and departments, coupled with juggling symmetrical and asymmetrical roles, requires careful management of emotions to provide the best care possible. In addition to these ongoing exigencies, workers must maintain a positive face even when forced into a double bind by their employer. For example, trying to persuade a patient that a less expensive treatment (which happens to be covered by managed care) is preferable to the more expensive (but not covered) treatment requires substantial presentation and persuasion skills. Thus, in today’s healthcare organizations, the labor of managing emotions takes place between and within several intra- and interorganizational levels. Juggling these emotions is likely to exacerbate other stressors and increase levels of burnout. In the realm of medical and nursing education, for instance, studies of residents and students highlight the reality that emotion management is an unspoken topic. Thus, healthcare professionals-in-training must learn emotional labor strategies through unspoken rules and trial-and-error processes (Hafferty, 1988; Smith & Kleinman, 1989; Smith, 1992). According to Hafferty (1988), medical training such as cadaver labs are forums in which students and residents learn either to enact coping mechanisms such as displaying detached concern or suffer ridicule and isolation from their peers and supervisors. Hafferty argues that this type of emotional socialization promotes “maladaptive coping strategies in clinical settings” which may negatively affect the well-being of both physicians and their patients (p. 354). Smith and Kleinman (1989) found that medical residents and students informally learned the affective neutrality from their more experienced peers and supervisors, revealing that medical education taught emotional labor strategies that led to problematic physician–patient communicative behaviors such as depersonalizing, blaming, and joking. Other research shows that student nurses were not taught the value of emotional labor in caregiving nor how to give emotional care without burning themselves out. In addition, these nurses suppressed their own feelings in order to care for patients, often to the detriment of their own emotional health (Smith, 1992). Researchers argue that healthcare professionals do not leave behind the job stressors and burnout associated with emotional labor once they complete their medical training. For example, Miller, Birkholt, Scott, and Stage (1995) found that human service workers experienced job stress and burnout as they engaged in emotional labor behaviors. Meyerson (1994) found that revealing emotions that conflicted with traditional caregiver role expectations (e.g., objectivity, neutrality, and rationality) resulted in increasing incidents of stress and burnout suffered by healthcare personnel. Morgan and Krone (2001) argue that the limits healthcare professionals place on their emotions may have potentially negative effects in terms of workplace stress and burnout. Similarly, Henderson (2001) found that although some nurses detached themselves from patients to safeguard their own emotional health, they did so in ways that minimized the feelings and emotions that may have fostered more effective ways to cope with stress. These authors further conclude that healthcare organizations should be encouraged to increase workers’ awareness and expression of emotions in order to reduce potential job-related stressors. It is unrealistic, however, to suggest that job stressors are confined to healthcare organizations. Stress impacts, and is impacted by, life within and outside the workplace, often resulting in conflict between the home and work spheres. We now address and discuss these tensions.

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

357

Home/Work Conflict

Over the past 15 years, there has been an increase in research on the impact of home/work role conflict on healthcare providers. So far, the results of this research have been contradictory. Role conflict between work and child or elder care has become a concern as many parents find themselves members of the “sandwich generation,” caught between simultaneously caring for their children and their aging parents. These individuals (who are often working mothers) report high levels of stress from their multiple caregiving roles (Letvak, 2001). Others, such as single parents, must juggle their work and home responsibilities, a difficult task in the best of circumstances. For example, one study of nursing aides in a nursing home (Ray & Miller, 1994), found that those with children, regardless of how few or many, reported more stress. In addition, aides who were cohabitating reported the most stress, more than those who were either married or single. Existing empirical research indicates that balancing home and work responsibilities may lead to negative outcomes among healthcare professionals. For example, Decker (1997) found that job/nonjob conflict such as work interference in family life was a significant contributor to nurses’ feelings of stress. A study of nurse executives’ perceptions of home/work conflict in the medical occupations further suggests that juggling the needs of work and home are particularly stressful for female healthcare workers and may be important predictors of burnout (Bormann, 1993). In a study of nurses, Bacharach (1991) found that work-based role conflict was an important antecedent to work–home conflict, observing that work-based role conflict spilled over into work–home conflict, leading to greater burnout. This argument was supported by Aston and Lavery (1993), who reported a negative relationship between coworker support and quality of life, suggesting that conflict at work may strain relationships with spouses. D. Miller and Gilles’ (1996) research on the work/home stress experienced by oncology and HIV health staff also indicated that work stress negatively affected workers’ domestic and social lives, particularly in regard to relationships with partners. On the other side, however, Chapell and Novak (1992) found that talking to family about work problems significantly reduced stress of nursing assistants in nursing homes, while support from family and friends buffered burnout. A study of Hong Kong public health nurses found that prioritizing family and work tasks, having domestic maids and/or relatives to perform household chores, and strong spousal support helped reduce nurses’ home and work conflict (Shiu, 1998). In Mexico, nurses with greater work, maternal, and spousal role integration reported fewer physical symptoms related to work stress, while those with more spousal and maternal stress perceived themselves as less healthy (Douglas et al., 1997). Physicians also find themselves caught in home/work role conflict. Although women comprise about 45% of medical students, they are still disproportionately in the lowerstatus, lower-pay medical specialties such as family medicine and internal medicine. These women are faced with two major decisions. The first is whether they are willing to put in the long, intense years necessary to reach the top tier of their profession (i.e., surgery, neurology, orthopedics). The implications of this decision are clear; aiming for this type of career will require a level of commitment not conducive to maintaining personal relationships or raising children. However, even female physicians in other specialties often find that they are not experiencing the career they originally had in mind. Instead, many arrange to work less and have more flexible hours. One study, for example, found that 25% of female doctors surveyed said they worked less than 40 hours per week, compared to 12% of male doctors. Seventeen percent of female doctors said they worked 30 hours per week or less,

358

APKER AND RAY

while only 8% of male doctors worked this little (Steinhauer, 1999). Some researchers suggest that that the principal sources of stress for women doctors are conflict between personal life and work (Bynoe, 1994) and being torn between professional duties and family responsibilities (Stewart et al., 2000). Relatedly, in a study conducted by McMurray et al. (1997), female doctors identified balancing work and family commitments as a greater determinant of job satisfaction than their male counterparts. Certainly, it is important for healthcare organizations to understand the causes and consequences of stress in the workplace in order to avoid outcomes such as increased worker turnover, reduced productivity, and rising absenteeism. For communication scholars, though, a primary focus of job stress research has been to go beyond the causes of stress and to consider the role of social support in reducing stress and influencing burnout and turnover (e.g., Tai, Bame, & Robinson, 1998). In the following section, we discuss how supportive communication may function, or dysfunction, as a buffer to job stress in healthcare organizations. SUPPORTIVE COMMUNICATION It is ironic that an organization dedicated to restoring health and promoting well-being often is detrimental to the health and well-being of the people working there. (Dye, 1985, p. 3)

Kahn (1993) argued that primary caregivers (e.g., nurses, physicians, social workers) are often the individuals who require the greatest caregiving themselves because the nature of their jobs encourages them to provide substantial emotional resources to others. Unfortunately, in the absence of supportive communication from their coworkers and supervisors, caregivers own emotional resources may be depleted in ways that place them at greater risk of burnout. In their 1987 book, Communicating Social Support, Albrecht and Adelman conceptualized supportive communication as interaction that reduces one’s perceptions of uncertainty and helps the individual develop a sense of control over stressful circumstances. Albrecht and Adelman (1987) also argue that people cope best when they feel actively involved and well informed. To begin our discussion, we turn our attention to a specific consideration of the many functions of supportive communication within healthcare organizations. Functions of Supportive Communication

Uncertainty is a significant component of the illness experience, as individuals struggle to make sense of the physical, social, emotional, and psychological signs that are associated with disease (Radley, 1994). As a way of coping with the stress related to illness, supportive communication functions to reduce uncertainty, subsequently increasing the person’s perception of personal control. Thus, it is argued that people who receive social support will experience less uncertainty regarding illness, and consequently, they are better able to cope with the stressors that often accompany ill health (du Pr´e, 2000). However, rather than support reducing uncertainty, other scholars argue that it is more likely that support can help us to manage our uncertainty. According to Babrow and colleagues (Babrow, Hines, & Kasch, 2000; Babrow, Kasch, & Ford, 1998; Ford, Babrow, & Stohl, 1996), the theory of problematic integration provides a useful framework for understanding how supportive communication enables people to manage uncertainty in health and illness situations. Problematic integration theory is a general perspective of communication that describes how people understand and form evaluations of complex,

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

359

ambiguous, and conflicting information (Babrow, 1992, 1995). In circumstances of illness, Babrow et al. (2000) argue that the equilibrium and predictability of day-to-day living is disrupted, forcing individuals to redefine their identities. Stress increases as a result. These authors further argue that it is critical to determine the probability of certain outcomes and evaluate their desirability. People try to integrate desirable outcomes with high probabilities. How the uncertainty is managed, whether it is reduced, maintained, or increased, depends on the assessment of the support recipient, the situation, and the use of appropriate communication skills (Babrow et al., 2000). In addition to this shift in the conceptual framework for the supportive communication– stress relationship, communication research has continued to focus on two levels. One approach has been at the individual level, where the emphasis is on recipient perceptions of support or categories of support. Previous research on social support has made a significant contribution in linking workplace phenomena with healthcare issues. Social support has been established as a coping mechanism or as a buffer of workplace stress and burnout (e.g., Miller, Ellis, Zook, & Lyles, 1990; Ray, 1991; Ray & Miller, 1991) and has been linked to workplace role ambiguity (Ray & Miller, 1991; Zimmermann & Applegate, 1994). The second approach has been at the macro level, examining supportive ties within a network analytic framework (Ray, 1991). This research has primarily used perceptual data. Other research suggests additional approaches to further explicate how supportive communication is interactively constructed and may play a role in the stress and burnout experienced by healthcare workers. Zimmermann and Applegate (1994), for example, suggest a message-centered approach to social support. This approach focuses on “actual supportive strategies and practices produced by people” (p. 53). In other words, social support is viewed as an interactional accomplishment with an emphasis on how it is strategically created in talk. These authors further suggest examining supportive messages through organizational storytelling, facework, and comforting behaviors. Miller and Ray (1994) discuss ways to identify supportive messages and their meaning among organizational members. At the individual level, they suggest adapting the memorable message concept (Knapp, Stohl, & Reardon, 1981) to identify specific supportive and unsupportive messages. At the macro level, Miller and Ray (1994) suggest investigating how organizational members are linked through semantic networks, where linkages are not based on interaction patterns but on shared meaning and interpretation. These methods were combined in a study of nursing home assistants and, although preliminary, the findings from this study reinforced the potential utility of this conceptualization and methodology. Sources of Support

At the interpersonal level, supportive communication can occur between and among all levels in healthcare organizations. Outside the organization, support may come from friends, spouses, partners, family members, and even acquaintances. However, coworkers may have the benefit of shared knowledge, context, and experiences (Ray, 1987). Lee and Ashforth (1996) highlight the importance of coworker social support in research which suggests that workers’ experience of emotional and physical strain is related to poor social support in their work environment. In a study of the relational characteristics of supportive messages among nursing professionals, Metts, Geist, and Gray (1994) found that work relationships offered greater tangible assistance (e.g., providing needed goods and services) than nonwork relationships, and emotional support offered during work episodes was more effective than when it was offered outside of work settings.

360

APKER AND RAY

Researchers specially studying healthcare workers have identified the importance of support from coworkers, particularly peers and supervisors, as coping mechanisms for job-related stress (Ellis & Miller, 1993; Miller et al., 1990; Ray & Miller, 1990, 1994). For example, in a study of nurses, Miller et al. (1989) found that coworker support lessened nurses’ experience of burnout by reducing their emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and supervisory support reduced nurses’ depersonalization. In their study of supportive and nonsupportive messages communicated among nurses, Ford and Ellis (1998) note that “RNs as peers and nursing supervisors as superiors continue to be a reliable source of organizational support for nurses under stress” (p. 53). Relatedly, research regarding issues such as assertiveness, personal control, and participation in decision-making also shows that such factors are important in creating a supportive communication environment for healthcare workers. Ellis and Miller (1993) found that nurse assertiveness and participation in decision-making with physician colleagues was important in increasing RNs’ feelings of personal control which, in turn, reduced perceptions of burnout. Among social workers, Jayaratne, Himle, & Chess (1988) found coworker support significantly mediated the relationship between the stressors of role ambiguity and role conflict and the burnout characteristics of depersonalization and emotional exhaustion. They also found that supervisor support was not helpful in reducing burnout. Russell, Altmaier, and Van Valzen’s (1987) findings reinforce the importance of “social integration” among coworkers as a mediator of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. For nurse manager–staff nurse relationships, supervisors who used a rhetorical message design approach (one that is designed to build consensus and harmony) experienced the highest levels of relational support and lowest levels of burnout (Peterson & Albrecht, 1996). Thomas and Ganster’s (1995) study of work-family role conflict among healthcare professionals found that supervisor behaviors that were seen as supportive of employees’ nonwork demands were instrumental in reducing worker stress and strain. While this line of research has underscored the importance of social support, it has focused on recipients’ perceptions of accessible and available support or on characteristics of ongoing support networks (Miller & Ray, 1994). What has typically not been considered are actual support messages and their shared meaning between support providers and recipients. In addition to emotional support, managers and administrators can provide instrumental and informational support by implementing organizational structures and policies that help workers minimize and cope with job-related stressors. For example, organizational programs such as flexible scheduling practices increased healthcare workers’ perceptions of control over work, and reduced the negative physical and mental health outcomes typically associated with stress and strain (Thomas & Ganster, 1995). Other studies have shown that training programs can be effective in teaching healthcare workers stress reduction and coping skills and can be helpful in improving levels of burnout (Lees & Ellis, 1990; Rowe, 1999). An organizational environment that promotes social support is also important. A study conducted by Hullet, McMilan, and Rogan (2000) found that healthcare workers in a nursing home felt higher levels of personal accomplishment when they perceived their organizational culture valued and rewarded supportive communication among staff members and between workers and patients. It is clear, then, that supportive communication has beneficial effects on support recipients. We generally assume that supportive messages are given with the best of intentions. However, sometimes what appears to be support is actually masking a hidden agenda. This is more likely to be the case in hierarchical organizations or when there are scarce resources, criteria that fit many healthcare organizations. In the next section, we consider how supportive communication may, in fact, be dysfunctional.

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

361

Dysfunctions of Supportive Communication Much of what gets labeled “support” may be in reality, strategic manipulation on the part of those with power to maintain their position and to secure the status quo by slipping their hidden agendas on the coattails of ostensibly supportive communication. (Ray, 1993, p. 107)

As the quotation above suggests, sometimes what appears to be support may actually be a stressor. Ray observed that within the organizational context, there are “relationships embedded in differing levels of power, which may influence the intent and implications of social support” (p. 108). She identified several dysfunctions of support: 1) as commodity, 2) as information retrieval, 3) as codependency, and 4) as hegemony. Support as commodity establishes a situation where the support recipient owes the provider, so that “support may act as political currency, allowing providers to dictate to recipients when they are ready to ‘cash in their chips” (p. 108). As information retrieval, there is an assumption of a hidden agenda for the provider to uncover information they couldn’t otherwise obtain. Support may also function to perpetuate codependency, so that newcomers quickly learn their roles within communicative and organizational norms. In this case, behavior that appears to be supportive “may actually be individuals enacting their own addictive behaviors, enabling them to repeat familiar patterns. Ostensible social support must maintain the closed system in a way that is acceptable to organizational members . . . maintaining the status quo is a key defining characteristic of support as codependency” (p. 109). Hegemony refers to “the process by which one group actively supports the goals and aspirations of another dominant group, even though those goals may not be in the subordinate group’s interest” (Mumby, 1988, p. 55). Support as hegemony occurs when communication is used by those in power to maintain the status quo so that they remain in power. Support does not always serve these dysfunctions but healthcare organizations—based on asymmetrical relationships, competition for resources, and capitation—provide a fertile breeding ground for such communication. The scholarship reviewed in this chapter illustrates that job stressors and supportive communication in healthcare organizations are fruitful subjects for researchers to continue to explore. To conclude our discussion of this literature, we briefly identify issues that we believe are promising topics for future study, particularly for organizational and health communication researchers. Specifically, we consider issues of managed care, alternative healthcare settings, and lay caregiving. IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Healthcare professionals work in an increasingly complex healthcare environment, one characterized by constant change at systemic, organizational, and individual levels. The effects of managed care policies and initiatives have dramatically transformed the delivery of healthcare in the United States and shifted healthcare workers’ job roles and practices (Geist & Hardesty, 1992; Wilkerson et al., 1997). By all accounts, the managed care era is far from over and healthcare systems will continue to adapt and respond to managed competition in a variety of ways. Cost containment, capitation, HMOs, preferred provider organizations, and changes in Medicare have impacted not only what and how care is provided but also the communication between and among providers and recipients. A special 2001 issue of Journal of Applied Communication Research (vol. 29, issue 2) “Communication in the Age of Managed Care,” illustrates that communication is a central process in the managed care era as

362

APKER AND RAY

caregivers, patients, insurers, and others make sense of and adapt to new roles, relationships, and practices. Although it remains uncertain how managed care will ultimately affect healthcare workers and consumers, it seems likely that the widespread changes in healthcare delivery brought about by managed care will continue. We anticipate that communication will remain of paramount importance in the transformation from a feefor-service to managed care system and it will continue to have an impact on the health of care providers and the quality of care they are able to provide. Research reviewed in this chapter reveals that managed care is a significant job stressor for many of today’s healthcare professionals. One interesting area for scholars to investigate is the relationship between communication about managed care (e.g., sources of information, quantity and quality of communication, patterns of communication between caregivers) and healthcare providers’ experiences of stress. For example, does talk about managed care heighten caregiver stress or does it manage uncertainty and give caregivers a greater sense of control over managed care changes? Moreover, where and from whom (e.g., coworkers, supervisors, patients, the media) do caregivers receive information about managed care and how do these sources influence subsequent communication about managed care changes? In addition, how does such communication help (or hinder) healthcare providers’ sensemaking of and coping with managed care changes in their work lives and relationships? Communication scholars are well suited to study these research topics and to contribute to the growing body of literature regarding managed care. A second area for researchers to consider is to extend the study of job stressors and supportive communication into more varied organizational contexts such as outpatient clinics, home care settings, and holistic care provider practices. Although hospitals remain an important component of healthcare delivery and a significant setting in which to continue the study of stress and social support, economic changes brought about by managed care and shifting healthcare consumer preferences have led to more and more patients seeking medical care outside of inpatient settings (du Pr´e, 2000). We encourage researchers to investigate job stressors and supportive communication within the wide range of healthcare organizations that exist. A useful starting point may be to consider whether findings from past research, primarily conducted in hospital or other inpatient settings, extend to different organizational contexts. Or, are there characteristics about these new environments that may generate unique job stressors and alternative forms and sources of supportive communication? For example, healthcare professionals working in patients’ homes may have more communication with family members than they would working in a hospital. It seems likely that in some cases, these interactions with patients’ relatives may add to caregiver stress, while in other situations family members may be a valuable source of social support. The research reviewed in this chapter illustrates that researchers are studying stress and social support among healthcare professionals representing a greater variety of medical disciplines (e.g., occupational therapists, physical therapists, doctors, nurses, social workers). In the future, we believe that scholars will again expand their scope of examination to study stress and social support among lay caregivers, a topic that is related to our suggestions about new organizational healthcare contexts. Certainly, the idea of relatives or family members caring for sick or injured loved ones is not a new idea (Bethea, Travis, & Pecchioni, 2000; Ellis, Miller, & Given, 1989; Ruppert, 1996a, 1996b; Scharlach, 1994). However, factors such as people living longer with chronic diseases and rising medical costs have led many people who are not healthcare professionals to take on caregiving duties for others. As du Pr´e (2000) argues, lay caregivers may experience the same stress

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

363

related to caregiving as their professional counterparts, but they often lack the training and supportive communication to help them cope. Although scholarship in other disciplines indicates that stress and social support in lay caregiving is a promising area of research (Bourgeois, Beach, Schulz, & Burgio, 1996; Faria & Schall, 1997; Ruppert, 1996a, 1996b), these topics have not yet been fully examined by communication researchers. Issues of interest for communication scholars may include how lay caregivers balance work/home conflict with their caregiving responsibilities. In addition, what is the impact of seeing loved ones suffer and change? What are the physical, psychological, and communicative effects for lay caregivers who have insufficient medical training? How can they be bolstered or buffered from stress with supportive communication? Although these questions require future investigation, it appears likely that they will be of increasing significance as lay caregiving becomes more common. CONCLUSION

This chapter has reviewed research from the past 15 years regarding stress and social support in healthcare organizations. The literature presented here indicates that the healthcare landscape has become increasingly complex for healthcare providers, and significant stressors often accompany these complexities in healthcare delivery and systems. Research suggests that healthcare professionals experience many different types of job stress, but issues of managed care, role changes, emotional labor, and home/work conflict have been particularly noteworthy. As researchers’ conceptualization of job stress has evolved, so has their understanding of supportive communication. Past scholarship suggests that social support serves a variety of helpful functions for caregivers. However, other scholars speculate that supportive communication may also negatively affect healthcare organizations by furthering the communicative dysfunctions that may already exist among healthcare professionals. The field of stress and supportive communication has a rich research history among organizational and health communication scholars. It may seem that there is not much more to unearth about these topics, but we would argue that the research reviewed in this chapter indicates otherwise. Topics such as managed care, and all of its systemic, organizational, and individual implications present researchers with myriad opportunities for new discoveries about the job stressors and supportive communication that occurs in healthcare organizations. It is through continued scholarly investigation that we will better understand the demands that impact healthcare professionals and the communication processes that characterizes delivery of care. REFERENCES Albrecht, T. L., & Adelman, M. B. (Eds.). (1987). Communicating social support. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Apker, J. (2001). Role development in the managed care era: A case of hospital-based nursing. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 29, 117–136. Ashforth, B. E., & Humphrey, R. H. (1993). Emotional labor in service roles: The influence of identity. Academy of Management Review, 18, 88–115. Aston, J., & Lavery, J. (1993). The health of women in paid employment: Effects of quality of work role, social support and cynicism on psychological and physical well-being. Women and Health, 20, 1–25.

364

APKER AND RAY

Babrow, A. S. (1992). Communication and problematic integration: Understanding diverging probability and value, ambiguity, ambivalence, and impossibility. Communication Theory, 2, 90–130. Babrow, A. S. (1995). Communication and problematic integration: Milan Kundera’s “lost letters” in The book of laughter and forgetting. Communication Monographs, 62, 283–300. Babrow, A. S., Hines, S. C., & Kasch, C. R. (2000). Illness and uncertainty: Problematic integration and strategies for communicating about medical uncertainty and ambiguity. In B. B. Whaley (Ed.), Explaining illness: Messages, strategies and contexts (pp. 41–67). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Babrow, A. S., Kasch, C. R., & Ford, L. A. (1998). The many meanings of “uncertainty” in illness: Toward a systematic accounting. Health Communication, 10, 1–24. Bacharach, S. B. (1991). Work-home conflict among nurses and engineers: Mediating the impact of role stress on burnout and satisfaction at work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 12, 39–53. Bethea, L. S., Travis, S. S., & Pecchioni, L. (2000). Family caregivers’ use of humour in conveying information about caring for dependent older adults. Health Communication, 12, 361–376. Birnenbaum, A. (1997). Managed Care: Made in America. Westport, CT: Praeger. Bormann, J. S. (1993). Chief nurse executives’ balance of their work and personal lives. Nurse Administrative Quarterly, 18, 30–39. Bourgeois, M. S., Beach, S., Schulz, R., & Burgio, L. D. (1996). When primary and secondary caregivers disagree: Predictors and psychosocial consequences. Psychology and Aging, 11, 527–537. Browne, R., & Biancolillo, K. (1996). The integral role of nursing in managed care. Nursing Management, 27, 22–24. Buiser, M. (2000). Surviving managed care: The effect on job satisfaction in hospital-based nursing. MEDSURG Nursing, 9, 129–134. Bynoe, G. (1994). Stress in women doctors. British Journal of Hospital Medicine, 5, 267–268. Chapell, N. L., & Novak, M. (1992). The role of support in alleviating stress among nursing assistants. The Gerontologist, 32, 351–359. Cohen, S. S., Mason, D. J., Arsenie, L. S., Sargese, S. M., & Needham, D. (1998). Focus groups reveal perils and promises of managed care for nurse practitioners. Nursing Practitioner, 23, 48–77. Deckard, G. J., & Present, R. M. (1989). Impact of role stress on physical therapists’ emotional and physical well being. Physical Therapy, 69, 713–718. Decker, F. H. (1997). Occupational and nonoccupational factors in job satisfaction and psychological distress among nurses. Research in Nursing & Health, 20, 453–464. de Jonge, J., Mulder, M. J., & Nijhuis, F. J. (1999). The incorporation of different demand concepts in the job-demand model: Effects on healthcare professionals, Social Science & Medicine, 48, 1149–1160. Douglas, M. K., Meleis, A. I., & Paul, S. M. (1997). Auxiliary nurses in Mexico: Impact of multiple roles on their health. Health Care for Women International, 18, 355–367. du Pr´e, A. (2000). Communicating about health: Current issues and perspectives. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. Dye, F. W. (1985). Supportive communication networks and job stress: A study of intensive care nurses. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Kentucky, Lexington. Ellis, B. H., & Miller, K. I. (1993). The role of assertiveness, personal control, and participation in the prediction of nurse burnout. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 21, 327–342.

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

365

Ellis, B., Miller K. I., & Given, C. (1989). Caregivers in home health situations: Measurement and relations among critical concepts. Health Communication, 1, 207–226. Fagin, L., Carson, J., Leary, J., De Villiers, N., Bartlett, H., O’Malley, P., West, M., Mcelfatrick, S., & Brown, D. (1996). Stress, coping and burnout in mental health nurses: Findings from three research studies. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 2, 102–111. Faria, S. H., & Schall, M. B. (1997). Assisting lay family caregivers: Promoting independence as a method of coping. Home Care Provider, 2, 65–68. Finkelman, A. W. (2001). Managed care: A nursing perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Firth-Cozens, J., & Moss, F. (1998). Hours, sleep, teamwork, and stress: Sleep and teamwork matter as much as hours in reducing doctors’ stress. British Medical Journal, 7, 1335–1336. Ford, L. A., Babrow, A. S., & Stohl, C. (1996). Social support messages and the management of uncertainty in the experience of breast cancer: An application of problematic integration theory. Communication Monographs, 63, 189–207. Ford, L. A., & Ellis, B. H. (1998). A preliminary analysis of memorable support and nonsupport messages received by nurses in acute care settings. Health Communication, 10, 37–63. Geist, P., & Hardesty (1992). Negotiating the crisis: DRGs and the transformation of hospitals. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Guinan, J. J., McCallum, L. W., Painter, L., Dykes, J., & Gold, J. (1991). Stressors and rewards for being an AIDS emotional-support volunteer: A scale for use by care-givers for people with AIDS. AIDS Care, 3, 137–150. Hafferty, F. W. (1988). Cadaver stories and the emotional socialization of medical students. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 29, 344–356. Harrison, J. K. (1999). Influence of managed care on professional nursing practice. Image: Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 31, 161–166. Henderson, A. (2001). Emotional labor and nursing: An under-appreciated aspect of caring work. Nursing Inquiry, 8, 130–138. Hillhouse, J., & Adler, C. (1997). Investigating stress effect patterns in hospital staff nurses: Results of a cluster analysis. Social Science & Medicine, 45, 1781–1788. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feelings. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hughes, E. (1971). The sociological eye. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Hullett, C. R., McMilan, J. J., & Rogan, R. G. (2000). Caregivers’ predispositions and perceived organizational expectations for the provision of social support to nursing home residents. Health Communication, 12, 277–300. Jayaratne, S., Himle, D., & Chess, W. A. (1988). Dealing with work stress and strain: Is the perception of support more important than its use? Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 24, 191–202. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 29 (2001). Special Issue: Communication in the Age of Managed Care. Kahn, W. A. (1993). Caring for the caregivers: Patterns of organizational caregiving. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 539–563. Kahn, R. L., Wolfe, D. M., Quinn, R. P., Snoek, J. D., et al. (1964). Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity, New York: Wiley. Kleiber, D., Enzmann, D., & Gusy, B. (1994). Stress and burnout in AIDS healthcare: Are there special characteristics? In L. Bennett, D. Miller, & M. Ross (Eds.), Health workers and AIDS: Research, intervention and current issues in burnout and response. Reading, PA: Harwood Academic Press.

366

APKER AND RAY

Knapp, M. L., Stohl, C., & Reardon, K. K. (1981). “Memorable” messages. Journal of Communication, 31, 27–42. Lammers, J. C., & Duggan, A. (2002). Communication predictors of physician’s satisfaction with managed care. Health Communication, 14, 493–514. Lammers, J. C., & Geist, P. (1997). The transformation of caring in the light and shadow of “managed care.” Health Communication, 9, 46–60. Laster, L. (2001, January 21). A look at . . . quitting medicine. Washington Post, B3. Lee, R. T., & Ashforth, B. E. (1996). A meta-analytic examination of the correlates of the three dimensions of job burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81, 123–133. Lees, S., & Ellis, N. (1990). The design of a stress-management programme for nursing personnel. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 15, 946–961. Leiter, M. P., Harvie, P., & Frizell, C. (1998). The correspondence of patient satisfaction and nurse burnout. Social Science & Medicine, 47, 1611–1617. Letvak, S. (2001). Nurses as working women. AORN Journal, 73, 675–676, 678, 680–682. Levick, D. (November 8, 1998). When slashed writes are not enough: Insurers tighten access to mental healthcare. The Hartford Courant, p. A1. Mayer, G., & Rushton, N. (1998). The hospital nurses’ role in managed care. Nursing Management, 29, 25–29. McMurray, J. E., Williams, E., Schwartz, M. D., Douglas, J., Van Kirk, J., Konrad, T. R., Gerrity, M., Bigby, J. A., & Linzer, J. L. (1997). Physician job satisfaction: Developing a model using qualitative data. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 12, 711–714. Metts, S., Geist, P., & Gray, J. L. (1994). The role of relationship characteristics in the provision and effectiveness of supportive messages among nursing professionals. In B. R. Burleson, T. L. Albrecht, & I. H. Sarason (Eds.), Communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships, and community (pp. 229–246). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Meyerson, D. E. (1994). Interpretations of stress in institutions. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39, 628–653. Miller, D., & Gilles, P. (1996). Is there life after work? Experiences of HIV and oncology health staff. AIDs Care: Psychological & Socio-Medical Aspects of AIDS/HIV, 8, 167–182. Miller, K. I. (1998). Nurses at the edge of chaos: The application of “new science” concepts to organizational systems. Management Communication Quarterly, 12, 112–127. Miller, K. I., & Apker, J. (2002). On the front lines of managed care: Professional changes and communicative dilemmas of hospital nurses. Nursing Outlook, 50, 154–158. Miller, K. I., Birkholt, M., Scott, C., & Stage, C. (1995). Empathy and burnout in human service work: An extension of a communication model. Communication Research, 22, 123–147. Miller, K. I., Ellis, B. H., Zook, E. G., & Lyles, J. (1990). An integrated model of communication, stress, and burnout in the workplace. Communication Research, 17, 300–326. Miller, K. I., Joseph, L., & Apker, J. (2000). Strategic ambiguity in the role development process, Journal of Applied Communication Research, 28, 193–214. Miller, K. I., & Ray, E. B. (1994). Beyond the ties that bind: Exploring the “meaning” of supportive messages and relationships. In B. R. Burleson, T. L. Albrecht, & I. G. Sarason (Eds.), Communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships, and community (pp. 215–228). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Miller, K. I., & Ryan, D. J. (2001). Communication in the age of managed care: Introduction to the special issue. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 29, 91–96. Miller, K. I., Stiff, J. B., & Ellis, B. H. (1988). Communication and empathy as precursors to burnout among human service workers. Communication Monographs, 55, 250–265. Miller, K. I., Zook, E. G., & Ellis, B. H. (1989). Occupational differences in the influence of communication on stress and burnout in the workplace. Management Communication Quarterly, 3, 166–190.

16. STRESS AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

367

Mirvis, D. M., Graney, M. J., & Kilpatrick, A. O. (1999). Journal of Healthcare Management, 44, 353–365. Morgan, J. M., & Krone, K. J. (2001). Bending the rules of “professional” display: Emotional improvisation in caregiver performances. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 29, 317–340. Morreim, E. H. (1985). The MD and the DRG. Hastings Center Report, 15, 30–38. Mumby, D. (1988). Communication and power in organizations: Discourse, ideology, and domination. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Murphy, E. C., Ruch, S., Pepicello, J., & Murphy, M. (1997). Managing an increasingly complex system. Nursing Management, 28(10), 33–36. O’Brien, M. (1994). The managed heart revisited: Health and social control. Sociological Review, 42, 393–413. Peterson, L. W., & Albrecht, T. L. (1996). Message design logic, social support, and mixedstatus relationships. Western Journal of Communication, 60, 291–309. Porter-O’Grady, T. (1998). Contemporary issues in the workplace: A glimpse over the horizon into the new age of healthcare. In Mason, D. J. & Leavitt, J. K. (Eds.), Policy and politics in nursing and healthcare (3rd ed., pp. 261–279). Philadelphia, PA: WB Saunders. Post, D. M. (1997). Values, stress and coping among practicing family physicians. Archives of Internal Medicine, 6, 252–255. Putnam, L. L., & Mumby, D. K. (1993). Organizations, emotion and the myth of rationality. In S. Fineman (Ed.), Emotion in organizations (pp. 36–57). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Radley, A. (1994). Making sense of illness: The social psychology of health and disease. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rafaeli, A., & Sutton, R. I. (1987). Expression of emotion as part of the work role. Academy of Management Review, 12, 23–37. Rafaeli, A., & Sutton, R. I. (1989). The expression of emotion in organizational life. In L. L. Cummings & B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 11, pp. 1–42). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Rafaeli, A., & Sutton, R. I. (1991). Emotional contrast strategies as means of social influence: Lessons from criminal interrogators and bill collectors. Academy of Management Journal, 34, 749–775. Ray, E. B. (1987). Supportive relationships and occupational stress in the workplace. In T. L. Albrecht & M. B. Adelman (Eds.), Communicating social support (pp. 172–191). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Ray, E. B. (1991). The relationship among communication network roles, job stress, and burnout in educational organizations. Communication Quarterly, 39, 91–102. Ray, E. B. (1993). When the links become chains: Considering dysfunctions of supportive communication in the workplace. Communication Monographs, 60, 106–111. Ray, E. B., & Miller, K. I. (1990). Communication in healthcare organizations. In E. B. Ray & L. Donohew (Eds.), Communication and health: Systems and applications (pp. 92–107). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ray, E. B., & Miller, K. I. (1991). The influence of communication structure and social support on job stress and burnout. Management Communication Quarterly, 4, 506–527. Ray, E. B., & Miller, K. I. (1994). Social support, home/work stress, and burnout: Who can help? Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 30, 357–373. Rowe, M. M. (1999). Teaching healthcare providers coping: Results of a two-year study. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 22, 511–527. Ruppert, R. A. (1996a). Caring for the lay caregiver. American Journal of Nursing, 96, 40–46. Ruppert, R. A. (1996b). Psychosocial aspects of lay caregiving. Rehabilitation nursing, 21, 315–320.

368

APKER AND RAY

Russell, D. W., Altmaier, E. M., & Van Valzen, D. (1987). Job-related stress, social support, and burnout among classroom teachers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 72, 269–274. Sass, J. S. (2000). Emotional labor as cultural performance: The communication of caregiving in a nonprofit nursing home. Western Journal of Communication, 64, 330–358. Saxton, J., & Leaman, T. (1998). Managed care success: Reducing risk while increasing patient satisfaction. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen. Scharlach, A. E. (1994). Caregiving and employment: Competing or complementary roles? The Gerontologist, 34, 378–385. Sexton, B., Thomas, E. J., & Helmreich, R. L. (2000). Errors, stress, and teamwork in medicine and aviation: Cross sectional surveys. British Medical Journal, 320, 745–749. Siefert, K., Jayaratne, S., & Chess, W. A. (1991). Job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover in healthcare social workers. Health and Social Work, 16, 193–202. Shiu, A. T. (1998). Work and family role juggling and mood states of Hong Kong public health nurses with children. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 28, 203–211. Simpson, L. A., & Grant, L. (1991). Sources and magnitude of job stress among physicians. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 14, 27–42. Smith, A. C., & Kleinman, S. (1989). Managing emotions in medical school: Students’ contacts with the living and the dead. Social Psychology Quarterly, 52, 56–69. Smith, P. (1992). The emotional labour of nursing. London: Macmillan. Steinhauer, J. (1999, April 2). Life vs. work: For female doctors, a difficult choice. San Diego Union Tribune, E-3. Stewart, D. E., Ahmad, F., Cheung, A. M., Bergman, B., et al. (2000). Women physicians and stress. Journal of Women’s Health & Gender-Based Medicine, 9, 185–190. Sultz, H., & Young, K. (1997). Healthcare USA: Understanding its organization and delivery. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen. Sweeney, G., & Nichols, K. (1996). Stress experiences of occupational therapists in mental health practice arenas: A review of the literature. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 42, 132–137. Tai, T. W., Bame, S. I., & Robinson, C. D. (1998). Review of nursing turnover research, 1977–1996, Social Science & Medicine, 47, 1905–1924. Thomas, L. T., & Ganster, D. C. (1995). Impact of family-supportive work variables on workfamily conflict and strain: A control perspective. Journal of Social Psychology, 80, 6–15. Tillman, H. J., Salyer, J., Corley, M. C., & Mark, B. A. (1997). Environmental turbulence: Staff nurse perspectives. Journal of Nursing Administration, 27, 15–22. Tonges, M. C. (1998). Job design for nurse case managers: Intended and unintended effects on satisfaction and well-being. Nursing Case Management, 3, 11–23. Wharton, A. S., & Erickson, R. J. (1993). Managing emotions on the job and at home: Understanding the consequences of multiple emotional roles. Academy of Management Review, 18, 457–486. Wilkerson, J., Devers, K., & Given, R. (1997). Competitive managed care: The emerging healthcare system. New York: Jossey-Bass. Zimmermann, S., & Applegate, J. (1994). Communication social support in organizations: A message-centered approach. In B. R. Burleson, T. L. Albrecht, & I. G. Sarason (Eds.), Communication of social support: Messages, interactions, relationships, and community (pp. 50–70). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

17 Groups and Teams in Health Care: Communication and Effectiveness Marshall Scott Poole Texas A&M University

Kevin Real University of Kentucky

INTRODUCTION

Health care teams have played an important role in patient care for nearly 100 years (Brown, 1982; R. N. Wilson, 1954). The “team imperative” has waxed steadily stronger over the past 40 years owing to the ever increasing complexity of medical technology and treatments, the burgeoning specialization of medical professions, the desire to address the many facets of patient care, the growing power of regulatory and certification agencies, and the move to managed care and integrated health care systems. Rundall and Hetherington (1988) noted that “it is difficult to think of a substantial task within our modern health care service organizations that does not require a team, or work group, for its completion” (p. 188). However, despite the consistent and sometimes effusive praise for the team concept and despite numerous exhortations to utilize teams for patient care, practice often belies the rhetoric. The National Health Service of England (1993) quoted in Couchman (1995) published a report that observed that teamwork is “more easily talked about and aspired to than achieved. Rigid role demarcation, tradition, vested professional interest, poor communications leading to confusion and misunderstandings about responsibilities, have all been blamed for lack of progress” (quoted in Couchman, 1995, p. 32). In the United States, Banta and Fox (1972) concluded from a study of interdisciplinary health care teams in poverty settings that “teams did not function as they had been envisioned. The participants were too diverse and too unfamiliar to each other for the teams to function ideally” (p. 697). These observations reflect the variability in health care team functioning that we observed in our literature review. Merely setting up teams and encouraging teamwork is

369

370

POOLE AND REAL

not sufficient to ensure effective group functioning. A number of factors and processes influence team effectiveness, and communication figures prominently among them. This chapter describes what we know and what we need to know about communication and group effectiveness in health care settings. After advancing some definitions, we present a short selective history of health care teams in the United States. Then we consider the nature and variety of groups in health care and discuss the nature of previous research studies on health care groups. The fourth section details four key processes related to the effectiveness of groups and teams in health care and current research on factors that influence these processes. The review focuses on a broad range of health care groups, going beyond the interdisciplinary teams that have received a great deal of attention in recent years. Often lost in the hoopla surrounding the “team” concept are unnoticed groups such as work groups on hospital floors and routinized teams such as day surgery units. This review considers groups and teams broadly under the assumption that it is often the comparisons and contrasts that highlight important variables and processes. DEFINITIONS

A work group can be defined as three or more individuals who must interact interdependently and adaptively to achieve common goals (Vinokur-Kaplan, 1995). Groups vary in terms their “entitivity” (Campbell, 1958) or “solidarity.” Dimensions on which groups may vary include these (Wilson, 1977): The degree of interdependence among members in terms of (a) the activities required to carry out their work (task interdependence) or (b) rewards and punishments incurred by the group (outcome interdependence). The degree to which members perceive the group to be a group (i.e., a bounded entity with its own identity). The degree to which members are motivated to participate in the group. The degree to which members have shared knowledge, experiences, norms, and values and are aware of their commonalities. The degree to which members interact with each other.

The higher on each of these dimensions a group is, the greater the group’s solidarity. Team adds a normative dimension to the group concept in that the ideal team is supposed to be high on all five dimensions of solidarity. Teams have a well-defined focus and a sense of purpose and unity that members of other types of groups do not share. However, despite their sometimes lofty aspirations, teams vary in solidarity, and their variation figures importantly in the extant literature. In this chapter, we use the term group to refer to people assigned to the same work unit or task and the term team to refer to a group intended to achieve high levels of solidarity, purpose, and unity, whether or not it actually does so. Departures from this ideal will be specified in terms of key dimensions of structure and process discussed below. Several distinctions must be made regarding professional and departmental differentiation. Disciplines can be distinguished based on the level of training and type of socialization their members undergo. Physicians form one discipline, nurses a second, social workers a third, and so on. Specialties can be distinguished within disciplines based on the area of care focused on. Among physicians and nurses, for example, specialties such as surgery,

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

371

pediatrics, and geriatrics can be distinguished. Functions are associated with particular departments or divisions in a health care organization, and any department or division may be staffed by one or more disciplines and specialties. The next section sets the stage for this review by presenting a brief history of team approaches to health care in the United States. Following this is a discussion of basic types of health care teams, the people who make up these teams, and the environment in which they operate. The fourth section considers the approaches utilized in research on health care teams, noting two key limitations of most prior research. Section 5 reviews current knowledge about communication in health care teams in terms of key outcomes, work processes, and role negotiation. The final section summarizes key trends in the review and suggests new directions for research on health care teams. HISTORY OF HEALTH CARE TEAMS IN THE UNITED STATES

The history of health care teams in the United States can be roughly divided into four periods. The first period, from 1910 to 1945, has been termed by T. M. Brown (1982) a period of “fitful growth.” During these years, advances in medical science spurred increasing specialization of physicians and other care providers, and this created interest in team approaches to care. Teams were justified by the argument that no single person could adequately master and represent all areas of medicine and allied professions such as social work and psychology. Teamwork would enable caregivers to attend to both scientific and social sides of the patient’s problems (Davis & Warner, 1918). During this period, a number of writers (though by no means all) emphasized the importance of equalizing the influence of the professions in teams so that physicians did not control them. For example, Dorothy Rogers (1932) wrote, It becomes a self-evident fact that the game depends upon no player considering himself the sole performer, or failing to recognize the ability of each member of the team to fill his post with skill and precision, to play the game for the glory of the game itself. What more worthy contest than that of hospital life! What more creditable, or skillful team members are to be found among the professional personnel of these institutions! (p. 659)

T. M. Brown (1982) termed the second period, from 1945 to 1970, “high tide,” because it witnessed extraordinary growth of the health care industry and, with it, the growth of specialization and team approaches. The trends of the 1930s and 1940s accelerated, and numerous disciplines were joined in health care teams covering the entire spectrum of health problems (Julia & Thompson, 1994). Major medical centers, with their plethora of specialties, were an important force in increasing the use of teams (T. M. Brown, 1982). Comprehensive care and the community outreach movement, both given massive infusions of government funding, were particularly suited to team approaches. As noted below, the emphasis on teams during this period also served to equalize to some extent the influence of newer allied fields and nursing on the care process. In the early 1970s came a period of “re-evaluation” that saw closer scrutiny of the teams that were accepted with enthusiasm during the high tide. Questions regarding whether health care teams had met their potential were raised. Nagi (1975) observed that most studies of teams had focused on interpersonal dynamics and had neglected to measure quality of care. He called for empirical studies to test whether team approaches showed measurable improvements in the quality of care and to discover what team structures

372

POOLE AND REAL

contributed to effectiveness. Although enthusiastic discussions of the value of teamwork continued to appear (e.g., Ducanis & Golin, 1979), work in this period emphasized objective study and research to evaluate and improve team functioning. The period from 1980 to the present constitutes the fourth phase, “consolidation.” During this period, powerful institutional forces reshaped health care and with it team approaches. The structure of health care delivery systems changed, especially with the increased prevalence of managed care, developed to control and reduce health care–related expenditures for both patients and employers (Robbins, 1998). Managed care organizations, to varying degrees, attempt to keep costs down while simultaneously maintaining high standards of quality. Writing during this period suggested that effective interdisciplinary care teams were needed to meet the challenges of rapid economic change and increased competition (Hansen & Hayes, 1998; Whorley, 1996). During this period, there was also increasing pressure on health care organizations to meet heightened standards of care. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued standards that required health care organizations to implement quality improvement structures, most of which required interdisciplinary team approaches (Drinka, 1996; Julia & Thompson, 1994; LaVallee & McLaughlin, 1994). As a result, teams seem to be more securely situated as an integral part of health care than ever. Schofield and Amodeo (1999) added a cautionary note, however, when they observed that the need for interdisciplinary teams may diminish if the emphasis on shortened hospital stays, formal written care protocols, and home-based care increases. Health care teams have hardly been a neutral subject in any of the four periods. Various segments of the medical professions have used teams as a justification for their own agendas and political moves. During the first period of team growth, specialist physicians advocated teams as a means of eliminating general practitioners, who were portrayed as hopelessly limited in their knowledge. Indeed Silver (1958, cited in T. M. Brown, 1982, p.13) saw the health care team as a “compound replacement of the family doctor.” Throughout the 20th century, members of nursing and other allied professions, such as psychology, social work, occupational therapy, and neuropathology, used appeals to the imagery of teamwork to justify increases in status and influence vis-`a-vis the hierachical domination of physicians (T. M. Brown, 1982; Schatzman & Bucher, 1964). Following World War II, nurses who graduated from professional schools shifted the definition of teamwork to signify an arrangement in which a graduate nurse assumed leadership of auxiliary nursing personnel, including practical nurses, maids, orderlies, and secretaries (see, e.g., E. Brown, 1948). T. M. Brown (1982) documented similar attempts by social workers and psychologists to use the language of teamwork to consolidate their positions and power. Nor have the ideological uses of teams been confined to advancing the interests of professions. In the 1960s, discourse about teams took on the flavor of the time, emphasizing egalitarian values, community control, and outreach (T. M. Brown, 1982). In the 1990s, teams were viewed as ideal vehicles for quality improvement, and various accrediting bodies went so far as to require hospitals and health organizations to use teams in quality improvement and service delivery. In sum, articles on health care teams are often ideologically tinged with the notion that teams are desirable and beneficial. It is thus sometimes difficult to determine whether the authors’ conclusions derive from careful reflection on the data or case at hand or from selective observation of facts that favor the team.

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

373

THE NATURE OF HEALTH CARE TEAMS Types of Health Care Groups

Several typologies of health care groups have been advanced (see, e.g., Drinka, 1996; Latella, 2000; McElhaney & Briggs, 2000; Rundall & Hetherington, 1988). Most of these give a restricted picture of health care groups due to limitations in the authors’ focus. Typologies framed around interdisciplinary health care teams rarely acknowledge the formal organization of work units, focusing instead on the coordination and collaboration of different disciplines and specialties. Typologies in articles on health care organizations focus more on formally established work groups and assume that interdisciplinary care occurs within a matrix. It is important to take both aspects of health care group organization into account. At least six generic types of health care groups can be distinguished. Ad hoc groups are formed for a limited period of time to address a problem and disband when they achieve their goals. Examples of ad hoc groups include a quality improvement team formed to improve postoperative procedures or an advisory group established to work with architects in the redesign of a hospital floor. An ad hoc group may be composed of members from one or several disciplines or departments. It is organized around its task and typically establishes its own structure, rules, and procedures. Its leader may be appointed by management or chosen by its members. Nominal care groups provide care through independent consultation of professionals directed by a primary care physician. This physician refers the patient to different specialists, who provide care independently; their inputs are coordinated by the physician. This group has a classic “wheel” structure—the primary care physician is at the center and the other care providers deliver services as requested. Unidisciplinary groups are organized around a single discipline. Although there are supporting personnel in many unidisciplinary groups, they play a strictly subsidiary role, and their contributions are specified and managed by the disciplinary members. Unidisciplinary groups are often relatively permanent formal work groups, such as nursing units or hospital floors (Kaluzny, 1985; Rundall & Hetherington, 1988), or group practices based on one or more specialties. Communication systems in these types of groups vary widely, but there is pressure to routinize and formalize information sharing and decision making so that the group can operate effectively with the minimum necessary communication. Multidisciplinary teams are composed of practitioners from multiple disciplines who work in conjunction with each other but function autonomously (Kresevic & Holder, 1998; Ogland-Hand & Zeiss, 2000). Providers from each discipline set their own disciplinespecific goals, work within their own professional boundaries, and submit their own findings and recommendations (Latella, 2000). Multidisciplinary teams are often hierarchically organized, with a designated leader in charge of coordinating overall patient care (Ogland-Hand & Zeiss, 2000). It is common for these teams to operate in individual “silos” with various professions working sequentially rather than simultaneously on their own specific aspect of patient care. One prerequisite for effective multidisciplinary teams is a good communication system that can directly or indirectly inform members of what others are doing. Interdisciplinary teams, on the other hand, consist of practitioners from two or more disciplines who work interdependently in the same setting, communicating both formally and informally to share information (Ogland-Hand & Zeiss, 2000; Weiland, Kramer,

374

POOLE AND REAL

Waite, & Rubenstein, 1996). Members contribute their disciplinary perspectives to develop treatment plans and then collaborate in their implementation (Kresevic & Holder, 1998; Ogland-Hand & Zeiss, 2000). “The true strength of interdisciplinary teamwork is ongoing communication, trust in each other’s competency and expertise, a perspective of equality within the team, and the desire to work toward shared goals” (Kresevic & Holder, 1998, p. 788). In addition to passing information through the communication system, interdisciplinary team members must engage in active collaboration to achieve success and ensure the overall well-being of the patient. Before defining the last type of team, it is important to note that the terms multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary are often used interchangeably (Schofield & Amodeo, 1999). This confounding of the two terms makes it difficult to determine what type of team is involved in some studies, but the confusion can usually be resolved through descriptions of how the teams work. Transdisciplinary teams are “interdisciplinary teams in which members have developed sufficient trust and mutual confidence to engage in teaching and learning across disciplinary boundaries” (Weiland et al., 1996, p. 656). Instead of adhering to rigid social and professional hierarchies, a transdisciplinary team chooses its leaders based on the needs of the patient (Latella, 2000; Weiland et al., 1996). One team member is generally designated to be the primary therapist, depending on the needs of the case, and he or she undertakes some of the activities that would ordinarily be performed by another discipline or specialty, consulting others when necessary. “For example, a nurse may be the primary therapist/leader for a client whose treatment or reason for admittance is to stabilize psychiatric medications” (Latella, 2000, p. 35). An effective transdisciplinary team requires cross-training of members so that members have the knowledge and skills to provide care and know their limitations so that they can seek input and help from other members when appropriate. Effective transdisciplinary teams, then, require communication systems for teaching and learning as well as for information-sharing and collaboration. The transdisciplinary team model attempts to capitalize on its members’ strengths by assigning them cases that best suit their skills and dispositions. It also attempts to minimize the duplication of services resulting from patient contact with multiple members of the team (Latella, 2000). The multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary care models that require members from different specialties or disciplines to work directly with many or most of the team’s cases place demands on personnel that may result in overload and stress. However, the transdisciplinary model allows professionals with limited time to cover more cases by entrusting some of the work and decision-making to others while keeping them available for advice, consultation, and quality control. Ideally, both the transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary models create an environment in which each profession contributes its own expertise to the decision-making process in an egalitarian fashion (Weiland et al., 1996). However, Frank (1961) registered the warning that interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity may bring with them dilution of professionalism as members attempt to work in areas for which they were not thoroughly trained. The same work can be accomplished using different team structures, so there is no one-to-one correspondence between areas of care and team types. Although most surgical teams are in effect unidisciplinary teams organized around the surgeon and other participating physicians, some are interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams in which professionals from several disciplines collaborate on the surgery. Cancer care can be delivered by unidisciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary teams. Teams of a given type also vary along critical parameters of group structure and organization, such as the following:

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

375

Boundedness: the degree to which team members report to a supervisor in the team itself versus a matrix form of organization in which members from more than one department work on the team and report to their department head and to the team’s authority structure. Centralization: The degree to which power to make decisions and determine group actions is concentrated in a few members. In a decentralized team, power is more or less evenly distributed across the membership. Diversity: The degree to which the team members are similar. Key types of diversity in health care teams include the mix of disciplines and specialties as well as important social categories such as gender, age group, and race.

Roles in Health Care Groups

Health care groups typically have differentiated role structures. A surgical team, for example, comprises members from three or more distinct disciplines or specialties working together. Medical groups for complicated or long-term care cases are impressively complex: Fountain (1993) reported that oncology care groups may encompass as many as 18 distinct roles and 24 specialties! Even routinized groups, such as a hospital ward, bring together several different types of nurses, orderlies, phlebotomists, and other health professionals. One challenge for health care teams is to encourage communication and coordination among members whose training often makes it difficult for them to appreciate and understand one another. We consider this issue in our discussion of team processes in a later section. Health care groups face several other challenges with regard to roles. In multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary teams, an important issue is who takes on the task of leading or coordinating the team. Considerations of occupational status would suggest that physicians generally assume responsibility for managing teams, but in practice nurses often serve in leadership roles (with physicians or Ph.D.s setting the parameters of care and resolving especially difficult cases) (Fountain, 1993). Fountain (1993) observed that nurses asked to fill the leadership role are often unprepared because nursing education stresses technical aspects of care rather than management skills (the same can be said of most physicians). Miller and her colleagues found that nursing care coordinator roles develop in complex and uncertain environments and possess considerable role ambiguity (Miller, Joseph, & Apker, 2000). As holder of the highest status role, the physician—“captain of the ship”—may often feel the need and obligation to step in for the uncertain team leader. The dynamics of role negotiation, discussed below, are complex and continuous in health care groups. A second issue is core versus peripheral members. There is generally a subgroup of core members who work with each other more or less continuously. This core is supplemented by peripheral members, some of whom work with a patient frequently and others of whom see the patient only a few times. How to include peripheral members in a meaningful way in the work of the team and how far to trust their ideas and suggestions over those of the core members is a challenge for all teams. Their ideas often represent novel thinking and may stimulate better care, but these may also upset the group’s equilibrium and cause tensions among core members. An implicit issue in every health care group is the role of the patient and the patient’s significant others. Should the patient be regarded as a member of the health care team or as a passive subject to be worked on? Lammers and Krikorian (1997) observed that the patient is the “silent member” of every health care group, a subject who becomes agent as

376

POOLE AND REAL

the group connects with his or her care. Beckhard (1972) wrote about “the patient system” in comprehensive health care; this system includes families and friends, who can have a “variety of physical, emotional, and social problems” and “present a varied set of needs for service” (p. 289). Involving the patient is thus often considerably more complex than simply consulting the person being treated. Some health care teams involve the patient and significant others directly in care as a matter of values, whereas others seek to ascertain patient needs and familial preferences but leave care options mostly to the professionals. Health Care Teams as Bona Fide Groups

Berteotti and Seibold (1994) and Lammers and Krikorian (1997) studied health care teams using the bona fide group perspective (Putnam & Stohl, 1990, 1996; Stohl & Putnam, 1994). Bona fide groups are “characterized by stable yet permeable boundaries and interdependence with context” (Putnam & Stohl, 1990, p. 248), characteristics shared by most groups in health care. In many respects, health care groups are moving targets, able to form and disband according to each patient’s medical needs. Although specific disciplines and roles may remain the same, the individuals who fill these roles may continually change, on a daily or sometimes even hourly basis. Stable and permeable boundaries are evidenced by the consistent structure of many teams that experience fluctuation in membership. Interdependence with context is demonstrated by the continual changes in patient care and the transitions from one area of medical practice to another. Thus, many of the concepts of the bona fide group construct are especially relevant in the study of health care teams. One of the cleanest illustrations of the bona fide group perspective involves how group boundaries shift through multiple group membership and conflicting role identities in health care teams. “In organizational groups, members carry residues of occupational training, hierarchical status, and departmental membership” (Putnam & Stohl, 1996, p. 150). A primary issue in health care teams concerns how individual members can transcend their own disciplinary perspectives and work collaboratively toward improving patient wellbeing (Drinka & Clark, 2000; Ducanis & Golin, 1979). Often, however, the traditional hierarchy of medical care is brought into force in health care groups, rendering physicians as de facto leaders (Cambell-Heider & Pollock, 1987; Feiger & Schmitt, 1979). Team members can experience conflicting role identities as they struggle with the professional demands and loyalties that come with belonging to multiple groups. When interacting in one group, they bring in membership “residues” from other groups. The permeability of a group’s boundary can determine the degree to which members identify with that particular group or with other groups (Alderfer & Smith, 1982; Lichtenstein, Alexander, Jinnett, & Ullman, 1997). Although there are many interdisciplinary groups in health care, many health professionals probably spend the bulk of their time in uni- or multidisciplinary functions. Many also spend time in more than one type of group, from ad hoc to transdisciplinary groups, at the same time. Multiple group memberships influence team dynamics (Vinokur-Kaplan, 1995), pointing to the importance of studying health care groups in their organizational contexts. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF HEALTH CARE TEAMS

A variety of methods have been used in the empirical study of health care teams. The largest class of articles report case studies of health care teams (e.g., Berteotti & Seibold, 1994; Buggs, Valadez, & Lund, 1993; Cohen, Rubin, & Gombash, 1992; Coser, 1958;

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

377

Crepeau, 1994; Drinka, 1991; Fisher & Opper, 1996; Fuller & Jordan, 1994; Houston, Clute, Ryan-Crepin, Kimball, & Matthews, 1994). Case studies are valuable because they give a sense of the situations that health care groups face and the factors that affect the team. However, case studies vary widely in the rigor with which observations are taken and recorded and in the level of objectivity of the writer. Most case studies are based on observations and interviews at a global level by researchers not specially trained in fieldwork. A considerable number are reports of team success from a member of the team, so it is sometimes difficult to determine whether biases have affected the conclusions. There are also case studies that are carefully planned and pay special attention to controlling or allowing for possible inferential problems (e.g., Berteotti & Seibold, 1994; Simon, 1999). These usually focus on a particular problem, such as the role of power in the medical team or the social construction of diagnoses, and employ a specific framework, such as discourse analysis. Another popular design is the controlled trial, in which team and nonteam modes of care are compared (e.g., Becker, McVey, Saltz, Feussner, & Cohen, 1987; Hogan & Fox, 1990; Hogan, Fox, Badley, & Mann, 1987; Jackson et al., 1993; Katon et al., 1999; McCrone, Beecham, & Knapp, 1994; Muijen, Cooney, Strathdee, Bell, & Hudson, 1994; Reuben et al., 1995; Vinokur-Kaplan, 1995; Winograd, Gerety, & Lai, 1993). Table 17.1 lists a number of empirical studies of health care groups, many of which are controlled trials. In most of these studies, the unit of analysis is the individual patient; patients under team care are compared to those under other modes of care using random assignment of patients to conditions (Becker et al., 1987; Hogan et al., 1987; Hogan & Fox, 1990; Katon et al., 1999; Reuben et al., 1995; Winograd et al., 1993). These studies are useful because they enable more rigorous determination of effects due to team approaches. Most reports of controlled trials detail the disciplines and specialties involved and the care they delivered but contain only cursory references to team structure or process. There is also lack of variation in team structure in most studies because often only a single treatment team is involved in the team condition. Hence there is no way to separate the effects of particular team dynamics or compositions from the effects of team care. Several other approaches have also been employed, though less frequently. Several studies report surveys of existing teams or team members (Abramson & Mizrahi, 1996; Alexander, Lichtenstein, Jinnett, D’Aunno, & Ullman, 1996; Baggs et al., 1999; Benson & Ducanis, 1995; Bloom & Alexander, 1982; Castle & Banaszak-Holl, 1997; Gaare, O’Sullivan, King, & Gilbride, 1990; Vinokur-Kaplan, 1995; Zimmerman, 1994; Zimmerman & Applegate, 1992). These are among the most useful studies in this area because they contrast care across teams and organizations. Historical or archival studies have also been conducted. Examples include a study based on chart audits (Cosgrove et al., 1998), an analysis of patient assessment records (Fuller & Cowan, 1999), and a retrospective medical record cohort study (Fazal et al., 1995). A few studies have also utilized interaction analysis (e.g., Feiger & Schmitt, 1979). Two general observations about research on health care teams are in order. First, there are many more overviews and exhortatory articles that praise the team approach and present tips for working with teams than studies that systematically report on health care teams (Keith, 1991; Nagi, 1975; Schofield & Amodeo, 1999; Weiland et al., 1996). Of the systematic studies, about half are descriptive case studies that provide little or no detail on group processes or outcomes. The study text typically describes the medical problem and any unusual demands it makes, the professionals involved in the team and the roles they filled, and the care that was given and ends with general observations on member and patient reactions and some “lessons learned.” Among the studies that do more

378 Controlled study (185) Survey (79) Controlled study (20)

Child development

Cardiology

Community health

Geriatrics

Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation

Bailey et al. (1995)

Bakst & Marra (1955) Banta & Fox (1972)

Becker et al. (1987)

Benson & Ducanis (1995) Benton et al. (1951)

Hospice

Case study

Intensive care

Baggs et al. (1999)

Berteotti & Seibold (1994)

Retrospective scale (72) Controlled study (90)

Emergency room

Argote (1982)

Case study

Survey, interview, records (322)

Interview, survey, records (30)

Survey (1,060)

Mental health

Alexander et al. (1996)

Interview (103)

Method (N)

Social work

Medical Area

Abramson & Mizrahi (1996)

Authors

TABLE 17.1

Interdisciplinary

Unspecified

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Unspecified

Interdisciplinary

Unspecified

Unspecified

Multidisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Type of Team

Findings

Home care for single-disease category is probably unjustified. Hospital, although more expensive, provides better and more effective service. Community poverty created stress; role relations were strained, especially between nurses and social workers. High motivation to work in this setting is necessary but not sufficient. No differences were found in the type or rate of hospital-acquired complications between intervention and control group. Nurses shared consistent view of their role and how they believed others saw this role. Locus of control similar among team members. No significant difference for treatment group in muscle strength gain or activities of daily living. Coordination hampered by interpersonal dynamics and structural aspects of team, which limited information access and led to ambiguous role relationships.

Significant differences for rankings: Social workers focused more on interaction with physicians, while physicians focused more on competence of social workers. The greater the diversity in tenure, age, occupation, and team size, the greater the negative assessment of team functioning. The greater the gender diversity, the more positive the assessment of team functioning. Use of programmed means of coordination best for ERs experiencing low uncertainty; nonprogrammed means best for ERs experiencing high uncertainty. Nurses’ (not physicians’) reports of collaboration positively related to patient outcomes. Unit-level collaboration associated with patient outcomes. Fairly high independent agreement across professionals in team.

Studies of Health Care Teams

379

Case study

Geriatrics

Rehabilitation Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation

Hospital

Castle & BanaszakHoll (1997)

Cohen et al. (1992) Copp (1966a)

Copp & Harris (1966b) Coser (1958)

Erickson & Perkins (1994) Fazal et al. (1995)

Cosgrove et al. (1998) Drinka (1991)

Controlled study (44)

Nursing

Buggs et al. (1993)

Case study Retrospective cohort (85)

Epidemiology (hospital)

Case study

Geriatrics

Orthopedics

Historical/archival

Rehabilitation

Case study Controlled study (190)

Survey, records (473)

Case study

Case study

Psychiatry

Brodsky (1969)

Quasi-controlled (1,230)

Nursing

Bloom & Alexander (1982)

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Multidisciplinary

Multiple types

Unspecified

Interdisciplinary Unspecified

Top management teams

Unidisciplinary

Multidisciplinary

Unidisciplinary

continued

Tuberculosis team isolated more patients more quickly, decreased length of stay, and saved money.

Two forms of coordination, hierarchical authority and lateral coordination, are differentially predicted by structural variables of staff professionalism and unit size. On larger units, there is hierarchical control, where units with greater staff professionalism provide lateral and hierarchical coordination. Psychiatrist needs to ensure greater communication about patients’ medical conditions between shifts and to involve nurses in patient treatment plans more. Infections decreased, costs were reduced. Anecdotal reports of improved staff and patient satisfaction. Demographic characteristics of top management teams (higher job tenure, higher education, and professional involvement) predict adoption of management innovations. Use of team is an effective way to manage patients. Rehabilitation improves patients’ functional status, disabilities, and return to work and reduces time off work and financial loss through illness. Rehabilitation improves patients’ functional status and disabilities. Confirms results of a larger trial in an urban community. In the medical ward, decisions made by consensus. In the surgical ward, decisions made by fiat. Nurses on the surgical ward knew more about patients and were inclined more toward innovation and less toward rituals. Geographic isolation of rehab patients improved some aspects of care but not uniformly across rehab teams. Provided evidence that practicing professionals can learn to assume functional leadership roles to help a team survive and thrive over time. Reported improved knee and hip treatments.

380 Controlled study (132) Controlled study (113) Case study

Geriatrics

Mental health

Psychiatry

Katon et al. (1999)

Nursing

Houston et al. (1994) Jackson et al. (1993) Controlled study (414) Controlled study (228)

Follow-up (180)

Pediatrics

Geriatrics

Quasi-controlled (12)

Geriatrics

Hennessy & Shen (1986) Hochstadt & Harwicke (1985) Hogan & Fox (1990) Hogan et al. (1987)

Controlled study (108)

Geriatrics

Survey (262)

Dietetics

Quasi-controlled (2)

Psychiatry

Case study (100)

Case study

Dietetics

Psychiatry

Quasi-controlled (4)

Method (N)

Geriatrics

Medical Area

Germain et al. (1995)

Fuller & Jordan (1994) Gaare et al. (1990)

Feiger & Schmitt (1979) Fisher & Opper (1996) Fuller & Cowan (1999)

Authors

Multidisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Multidisciplinary

Multidisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Multidisciplinary

Multidisciplinary

Multidisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Type of Team

TABLE 17.1 (Continued)

There was a significant increase in rate of new referrals, suggesting the team brought about increased access to mental health care. Treatment group showed significant improvements in adherence to medication, satisfaction w/care, and depressive outcomes compared to those provided usual care.

Intervention group had improved mental status, received fewer medications, and had lower short-term death rates. TQM and teams reduced patient transport time in a hospital setting.

There were different degrees of collegiality by team, but the more collegial the team, the more successful were patient outcomes. Nursing support team can dramatically reduce problems of hospital nutrition. Accuracy of consensus predictions was found to be comparable with actuarially based studies over similar time scales. Reasserts role for clinical judgment in risk assessment. Team deemed useful as way of identifying, evaluating, and intervening with hospitalized substance abusers. Physicans believed they were the primary decision-makers for nutrition care for their patients. Dietitians differed with this view; more than half viewed themselves as primary decision-maker. Length of stay of entire treatment group was significantly shorter than for controls. No difference for rehospitalization rates among patients surviving study length. Improved rate of home discharge. Rater agreements affected by measurement constraints, value differences, and work roles. Compared to previous research, findings indicate that multidisciplinary teams play a central role in service acquisition for abused children. Intervention group had improved survival rate and improved health.

Findings

381

Psychiatry

Psychiatry

McCrone et al. (1994) Pisetsky et al. (1992)

Geriatrics

Mental health

Lichtenstein et al. (1997)

Reuben et al. (1995)

Geriatrics

Lichtenberg et al. (1990)

Geriatrics

Case study

Hospital pharmacy

Leape et al. (1999)

Poulin et al. (1994)

Controlled study (81)

Hospital

Larson et al. (1996)

Controlled study (2,353)

Survey (817)

Survey (1,004)

Controlled study (32)

Controlled study (225)

Quasi-controlled (24)

Survey (139)

Intensive care

King and Lee (1994)

Controlled study (40)

Rheumatology

Katz et al. (1968)

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Multidisciplinary

Unidisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Field experimental

Unspecified

Multidisciplinary

continued

An effective liaison involves several important elements: frequent on-site communication, evolving collaborative arrangement with acceptance of each other’s roles, self-awareness, flexibility, and recognition by psychiatrist of physicians’ needs. A large percentage of social workers are members of teams, and the majority of these are satisfied with team membership. Team members have more influence over job tasks, experience greater time pressure, and spend more time in meetings and on paperwork and less time with clients than nonmembers. No differences were found in the survival rate or measures of functional and health status between intervention and control groups.

Team treatment was beneficial: less deterioration in activities of daily living and disease activity, more numerous improvements, and less deterioration in financial independence. Although Navy nurses and physicians perceived they were involved in collaborative practice behavior at a moderate level, physicians reported that collaboration existed to a greater extent than did nurses. Shared information mentioned earlier than unshared information. As discussion proceeded, members decreased the amount of shared information but increased not-yet-discussed unshared information. Team leaders repeated more of the case information brought forth. The presence of a pharmacist on team in ICU was associated with substantially lower rate of adverse drug events caused by prescribing errors. After training, aides scored significantly higher on test; attendance at team meetings also increased 60%. Aides were noticeably more outspoken at team meetings. Generally consistent with basic premise of intergroup relations model: As teams become more diverse in terms of identity and organizational group characteristics, intergroup relations suffer and perceived level of team integration declines. Community support team brought about short-term cost reductions.

382

Geriatrics

Chronic diseases

Geriatrics

Mental retardation

Rehabilitation

Mental health

Nursing

Hospice

Hospice

Runyan (1975)

Silliman (1990)

Sipperstein et al. (1994)

Unsworth et al. (1995)

Vinokur-Kaplan (1995)

Wells et al. (1998)

Zimmerman (1994)

Zimmerman & Applegate (1992)

Medical Area

Rubenstein et al. (1984)

Authors

Case study

Quasi-experimental (335) Survey (33)

Survey (98)

Scale study (74)

Survey (567)

Controlled study (142)

Quasi-controlled (1,006)

Controlled study (123)

Method (N)

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Unspecified

Interdisciplinary

Type of Team

TABLE 17.1 (Continued)

Experimental group experienced lower mortality, less chance of spending time in a nursing home, decreased costs, and increased functional status and morale. Control group experienced an increase in acute-care days, hospital readmissions, and nursing-home days. Treatment group had increased professional or clinical visits, had decreased blood pressure after transfer, utilized fewer hospital days, and had lower mortality rates than did control group. Family caregivers in experimental group were more likely to report good general health but less likely to have good emotional health at follow-up. Physicians had significantly lower expectations and more pessimistic prognoses for children with moderate or severe mental retardation than other professionals. Only consensus was on children with mild mental retardation. There were reliable within-team agreements but considerable between-team differences for housing recommendations for stroke patients. Overall team effectiveness is best predicted by fulfillment of the task according to prescribed standards, group cohesion, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Perceived high physician involvement associated with greater collaboration than perceived low physician involvement. Team members with more complex interpersonal construct systems were less satisfied with team communication and more willing. Greater satisfaction with comforting communication was positively associated with greater satisfaction with team communication; comforting satisfaction was positively associated with team task effectiveness.

Findings

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

383

than offer general descriptions, most focus on team processes or the effects of events on teams without explicitly incorporating good measures of outcomes. Only a few studies report group characteristics, structure, processes, and outcomes so that the impact of team dynamics on outcomes can be explored. Schofield and Amodeo (1999) reviewed 224 studies of interdisciplinary health care teams and found that, of these, 86 (38%) had little useful content, 55 (25%) were descriptive, 51 (23%) focused on team processes (mostly anecdotally), 21 (10%) reported systematic empirical observations, and only 11 (5%) reported the impact of teams or team functioning on outcomes. Our own review largely replicated Schofield and Amodeo’s statistics. Clearly there is room for more research in this area. A second set of issues revolves around research design. A problem with many studies of health care teams is that their research designs do not consider a number of factors that are required to understand the source and significance of team effects. These include the actual amount of time with patients (treatment intensity), the point in the treatment process when the team becomes involved, the scope of work (e.g., consultation, active intervention, decision making), and the surrounding organizational context. Indeed, in many articles the treatment itself needs elaboration. Keith (1991) commented that “a perusal of the rehabilitation literature concerning types of treatment programs and their outcomes reveals a curious lack of interest about the specifics of treatment. Descriptions commonly include only a phrase, such as ‘comprehensive rehabilitation’ or ‘inpatient rehabilitation’ to characterize what happened in treatment” (p. 272). In a similar vein, relatively few studies of health care teams incorporate systematic observational methods or formal instruments for measuring characteristics of groups or their processes. Important variables that are often omitted or reported only impressionistically include group size, leadership style, members’ training and experience in management skills, decision-making process, communication pattern, and interaction pattern. Moreover, few studies take into account the situation in which the group works, such as other group memberships or the larger organizational or institutional context. Although research on health care teams must be regarded in light of these two limitations, many of the studies have contributed to our understanding of how health care teams operate, including their communication dynamics. We turn now to a summary of substantive knowledge in this area. COMMUNICATION AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF HEALTH CARE TEAMS

This review is organized around an input-process-output framework, which assumes that health care groups are best understood as systems. Outcomes

Starting with outcomes is useful, because outcomes are the standards against which team processes are gauged. Hackman and Walton (1986) delineate three general types of outcomes that should be considered in the study of groups: productivity, group maintenance, and member need satisfaction. Productivity is the extent to which the group is performing its work effectively and attaining its goals. Typical gauges of productivity include amount and quality of work and efficiency. In health care studies, productivity is evaluated in several ways, including objective measures, such as mortality and morbidity, length of hospital stay, relapse, and

384

POOLE AND REAL

compliance with medical regime, and subjective measures, such as patient perceptions of quality of care and patient satisfaction. What is the evidence that group or team care results in higher productivity than traditional modes of delivery? Although some controlled studies have found positive aspects of team care (Hogan & Fox, 1990; Hogan et al., 1987; Jackson et al., 1993; Katon et al., 1999; Leape et al., 1999; McCrone et al., 1994), other studies have found no differences in patient outcomes between team care and nonteam care (Becker et al., 1987; Reuben et al., 1995). Given the mixed findings, it is important to consider possible reasons for the different results.Unfortunately, few studies investigate the linkage between group processes and outcomes, and we could not find a single study that examined differences between groups in terms of processes and outcomes. Despite these limitations, there is evidence in the studies listed in Table 17.1 to confirm Halstead’s (1976) conclusion that team care is (a) generally more effective than nonteam care, (b) responsible for improving or maintaining patient health, (c) usually associated with increased utilization of health services, and (d) open to investigation from many different methodological points of reference. Clearly, though, future studies that examine process in addition to input and outcome will add to our knowledge of how health care teams operate. Group maintenance is the extent to which a group improves its ability to function effectively and increases its integrity as a social unit. As mentioned previously, many case studies of health care teams have focused primarily on how to improve team dynamics and functioning and hence have been concerned with this outcome; however, most of these cases have assessed group maintenance in a loose, impressionistic way. More rigorous measures of group maintenance in health care settings include team morale and cohesiveness and team members’ level of understanding and acceptance of each other’s roles and perspectives (e.g., Weiland et al., 1996). Several studies of health care groups feature maintenance. Baggs et al. (1999) noted that nurses’ reports of collaboration were positively related to patient outcomes, and VinokurKaplan (1995) reported that overall team effectiveness is best predicted by fulfillment of the task according to prescribed standards, team cohesion, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Alexander et al. (1996) found that greater diversity in tenure, age, occupation, and team size was associated with negative assessments of team functioning by team members but that greater gender diversity was associated with positive assessments. Member need satisfaction is the extent to which the group satisfies members’ individual needs. To the extent the group does this, it motivates members to continue to participate actively and also lessens the likelihood of dysfunctional consequences such as burnout or absenteeism. To some extent, measures of satisfaction with the group tap this dimension. Poulin, Walter, and Walker (1994) found that the majority of social workers who were members of teams were satisfied with team membership and report having greater job autonomy, even though they spent more time in meetings and on paperwork and less time with clients than social workers who did not work in teams. Zimmerman and Applegate (1992) studied stress management in interdisciplinary hospice teams and found that satisfaction with comforting strategies was positively related to members’ satisfaction with team communication and perceptions of team effectiveness. (A surprising finding of their study was that amount of training in hospice work was negatively related to use of person-centered comforting strategies.) Although there are many studies of need satisfaction among individual health care workers, we found relatively few studies of health care teams that assessed this outcome.

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

385

Attaining satisfactory outcomes on all three dimensions simultaneously is a challenge for any group. Often groups must trade off one goal against another, hoping that over the long run all three can be met. For instance, a group under high pressure to be productive may temporarily disregard group maintenance or need satisfaction, then later try to reinforce these outcomes through social activities and a period of more relaxed work. Group Processes and Team Effectiveness

In this section we organize the studies on health care groups around two processes important to their effectiveness. The first part of the section focuses on the production goal by summarizing the literature on group work processes and communication. The second part considers group maintenance and need satisfaction goals and centers on the negotiation of roles and on status and power dynamics in health care teams. Almost all studies we have found pertain to these two themes. In the conclusion we will note areas that need more research. Providing Care: Group Structure, Task Communication, and Collaboration

This section discusses four factors that influence the effectiveness of health care groups in carrying out their work: complexity, diversity, autonomy, boundedness. Each of these poses challenges that must be met by the group if it is to provide effective care. Medical Work and Group Processes. Perhaps the key parameter influencing group effectiveness is the fit between group structure and processes, on the one hand, and the group’s work on the other (Hackman & Morris, 1975; McGrath, 1984). The group’s work, typically conceptualized as a collection of more or less interdependent tasks, must be pursued using a proper combination of structures and processes. Feedback on its effectiveness and problems it encounters push the group to adopt structures and processes that meet the demands of its work, and failure to adapt means that the group will be less effective. Evidence regarding this relationship can be found in studies that investigate the relationship between variables from two or more of the following classes: group work (generally defined in terms of group tasks), group structures, group processes, and effectiveness (generally defined in terms of group productivity). One key variable is the complexity of the group’s work. Wood (1986) developed a general definition of complexity in terms of three analytical facets: component complexity, the number of distinct acts that must be executed and the number of cues that must be processed during task performance; coordinative complexity, the amount of coordination required among cues, acts, and people during task performance; and dynamic complexity, the degree to which actors must adapt “to changes in the cause-effect chain or meansends hierarchy during task performance” (p. 71). In studies of health care groups, work complexity has been conceptualized and measured in several ways, including (a) task variability, the degree to which the tasks the group undertakes vary over time and the number of exceptional cases encountered (e.g., Argote, 1982); (b) task clarity (an inverse indicator), the degree to which the members can define and agree on what the group’s basic set of tasks are (Beckhard, 1972); (c) uncertainty, the degree to which members could predict their workload and the tasks they would be called on to perform (Argote, 1982; Schoonhoven, 1981); and (d) complexity of the medical problem, as indicated by

386

POOLE AND REAL

the number of ailments, degree of interrelation among them, and length of time in care (Drinka, 1996; Fountain, 1993; Kresevic & Holder, 1998; Ogland-Hand & Zeiss, 2000). In general, the higher the task variability, uncertainty, and complexity of medical problems and the lower the task clarity, the more complex the group’s work. Based on Van de Ven and Delbecq (1973), we can distinguish three types of group systems appropriate for different levels of work complexity. At low levels of complexity, routine group systems are most effective. Routine group systems are characterized by (a) standardized work procedures with clearly defined assignments; (b) centralized (authoritarian) leadership and decision-making; and (c) communication processes that emphasize hierarchical communication flow, regular formal meetings, and the use of formal communication modes such as forms and databases. At moderate levels of complexity, programmed group systems are most effective. Health care teams with programmed systems have (a) flexible work procedures that rely on rules, procedures, and programs; (b) decentralized (participatory) leadership and decision-making; and (c) two-way, informal, active communication. Contrary to a common assumption, rules, procedures, and programs allow members greater freedom to take actions and decisions on their own, thus promoting decentralization and flexibility while maintaining quality care. For high levels of complexity, adaptive systems are best. Teams with adaptive systems do not have welldefined procedures but instead leave members free not only to apply programs but to adapt and innovate. They rely on highly trained members to improvise in response to uncertain conditions, and they stress participatory decision making more than programmed systems. Adaptive group systems are very communication intensive, as members interact to solve problems and create novel approaches. Consistent with research on other types of groups, studies of health care teams indicate that work complexity is related to particular configurations of structural and process characteristics that are adapted to varying levels of complexity. Two kinds of evidence can be marshaled in support of this claim. First, studies of health care groups suggest that work complexity is related to the nature of the group system. A survey of 135 nursing units by Leatt and Schneck (1984) found that uncertainty was positively correlated with decentralized management, communication among coworkers, use of formal controls, and clear role definitions, and it was negatively correlated with communication with the head nurse and structural differentiation of positions. In our terminology, routine systems were employed for low complexity work and programmed systems for higher complexity work. The units surveyed by Leatt and Schneck ranged from low to moderately high levels of complexity, so this study reveals little about groups facing very high complexity. Nor did Leatt and Schneck measure outcomes. Case studies of health care groups also lend support to the correlation of complexity and system type. Of the 30 cases we reviewed, programmed systems were used for complex medical care, such as geriatric care (Becker et al., 1987; Feiger & Schmitt, 1979; Hogan & Fox, 1990; Hogan et al., 1987; Reuben et al., 1995), rehabilitation (Cohen et al., 1992; Unsworth, Thomas, & Greenwood, 1995), mental health (Alexander et al., 1996; Jackson et al., 1993; Vinokur-Kaplan, 1995), psychiatric care (Fuller & Jordan, 1994), social work (Abramson & Mizrahi, 1996), child development (Bailey, Buysse, Simeonsson, Smith, & Keyes, 1995), pharmacy (Leape et al., 1999), and comprehensive community health care (Beckhard, 1972), and also for dealing with unstructured problems, such as occur in quality improvement (LaVallee & McLaughlin, 1994) and emergency room care (Argote, 1982). Routine systems, on the other hand, are more common in hospital units, which deliver regularized services (Rundall & Hetherington, 1988), and they have been found

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

387

in dietetics as well (Fisher & Opper, 1996). Contrary to the hypothesis, however, Baggs et al. (1999) found that hospital intensive care units can operate as both routine systems and programmed systems. Two quantitative studies directly test the idea that the match between task complexity and group system is related to effectiveness. Schoonhoven (1981) studied the impact of the organization of surgical teams on severe morbidity. She found that work units with higher levels of uncertainty were more effective if they had decentralized decision-making and staff were given control over their work schedules. Conversely, units with lower levels of uncertainty were more effective with more centralized structures (characteristic of routine systems). Argote’s (1982) study of emergency rooms indicates that under conditions of high uncertainty, units with high levels of staff autonomy, general procedures, and mutual adjustment among members were most effective, whereas under conditions of low uncertainty, units with scheduled meetings, centralized authority, and tightly specified procedures were most effective. Both studies support the premise that programmed systems are more effective at higher levels of work complexity and that routine systems are more effective at lower levels. Rundall and Hetherington (1988) reported a survey of the clinical departments in a multihospital system that is consistent with these conclusions. High levels of uncertainty were correlated with decreased coordination among units that were centralized and had routinized procedures and specialized jobs, with a resulting decrease in quality of care. Work groups with decentralized structure, less rigid procedures, and more flexible jobs did not display this decrease in coordination and maintained higher levels of quality of care. Feiger and Schmitt (1979) conducted quantitative case studies of four interdisciplinary teams and found that the team with nondirective, consultative, and engaged interaction (characteristic of programmed systems) was more effective than teams with more authoritarian leadership centered around the physician. The structure of units has also been shown to influence communication in teams. Thomas (1994) studied communication in nursing units organized around two routine systems (functional and primary wards) and a programmed system (team wards). She found that units with primary nurses assigned to each patient exhibited more effective communication than did functional or team wards. In view of the nature of the tasks generally undertaken in nursing units, a routine system is more appropriate, and Thomas’s results are consistent with this surmise. This study also suggests that there are variants of the systems and that some of these are more effective than others. Diversity, the range of different disciplines and specialties in a health care group, is another important factor that influences work processes. Diversity is positively correlated with work complexity in that effective treatment of complex cases tends to require a more diverse set of professionals. It is also positively related to group size in that more diverse groups tend to be larger. A number of studies report that coordination problems increase as diversity increases (for summaries, see Beckhard, 1972; Couchman, 1995; Nagi, 1975; case studies include Keith, 1991; Simon, 1999; Vinokur-Kaplan, 1995; for a survey study supporting these results, see Lichtenstein et al., 1997). Diversity creates coordination problems in several ways. First, different professions often conceptualize medical work differently. Whereas an internist is trained to focus on physical maladies, a psychologist thinks in terms of counseling, and a social worker is taught to focus on helping patients manage their social milieu (Couchman, 1995). Similarly, Simon (1999) observed that neurosurgeons and biophysicists sometimes made widely different estimates of the difficulty of treating cancers based on their professional predispositions. Professions may differ in terms of their models of care, treatments (including durations), methods of assessing patients, and contact with patients (Couchman, 1995;

388

POOLE AND REAL

Horwitz, 1969). These differences may foster miscommunication, misunderstanding of how members of other professions fit into the group, and conflicts when diagnoses or treatment regimes contradict each other. The specialization that comes with diverse health care groups may also decrease the effectiveness of patient care. Keith (1991) noted that ineffective coordination among specialties may decrease patient independence. If each specialty gives the patient orders for care, the patient’s ability to make his or her own decisions becomes sapped, especially when the orders conflict. Larson, Christensen, Abbott, and Franz (1996) conducted an experiment with physicians that indicated that shared information—more likely to occur among medical personnel with similar training and experiences—has a higher probability of being discussed in medical teams. This study suggests that diverse teams should pay special attention to the generation of mutual knowledge and the surfacing of unique information. It also points to an essential team leader responsibility: to highlight information not held by most members. Also of interest is their suggestion that, properly utilized, the medical chart could facilitate this process. In addition to differing in their approach toward care, health professions may also differ in their approach to working on teams. A survey by Abramson and Mizrahi (1996) found that physicians and social workers held different views of collaboration. Social workers were more interested in the process of collaboration, whereas physicians were more interested in the outcome or product. Social workers asked to report positive and negative experiences in collaborating with physicians emphasized the themes of quality of interaction and respect (or lack thereof) from physicians. Most physicians, on the other hand, touched on the competence of the social workers (or lack thereof). Of interest was the finding that physicians agreed less in their definitions of effective collaboration than did social workers. Attitudes toward collaboration are also shaped by professional training that fosters an authoritarian, “take charge” attitude. This type of training, common in the case of physicians, poses a barrier to trust among professionals and a barrier to power sharing. As Beckhard (1972) noted, “An internist trained to a doctor-patient relationship may have real difficultly in ‘sharing’ the patient with other health workers” (p. 311). Although diversity poses coordination challenges, it also provides a rich resource base for the group. Handled properly, diverse groups may be more effective and more creative than more homogenous groups (Larkey, 1996). There are at least two ways to use diversity effectively. First, the group members can develop a well-defined division of labor that specifies the areas each profession covers and how the various professions will be coordinated. This multidisciplinary approach substitutes for communication because most decisions about coordination are already made and who will handle exceptions is identified. Wilson’s (1954) classic study of teamwork in the operating room articulates this approach admirably (see also Frank, 1961). Second, members of the team can attempt to develop an understanding and appreciation of each other’s professional perspectives. Drinka (1994) stated that “collaboration requires that team members recognize conflicting views, contribute appropriate expertise, and discuss new possibilities” (p. 88). She argued that the management of interdisciplinary conflicts is a critical indicator of collegial interaction. Group development interventions have been worked out to facilitate the communication necessary to promote interdisciplinarity in groups (Sandor, Copeland, & Robinson, 1998; Vinokur-Kaplan, 1995). Curricula for professional schools that prepare members for collaboration have also been proposed and implemented (Clark, 1997; Couchman, 1995; Drinka, 1996). In the case of transdisciplinary teams, members “cross-train” one another, enabling them to substitute for each other in many care situations.

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

389

Autonomy refers to the degree to which the group has control over major decisions regarding structure and personnel and how care will be delivered. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary health care teams often operate using a “matrix” structure. That is, personnel from functional units are assigned to the team but are still formally under the command of their functional unit head. Thus, the members are subject to dual control. This arrangement may cause several problems that have the potential to reduce group effectiveness. If functional unit managers retain more power over promotion and compensation than the team has, then members will be driven by incentives from outside the team itself, undermining group cohesiveness and motivation to collaborate. Team members’ strong identification with different functional departments can have many of the same deleterious effects as disciplinary differences in professionally diverse teams (see Butterill, O’Hanlon, & Book, 1992). Lichtenstein et al. (1997) found the following: If a team is not adequately bounded [in our terms, autonomous], the conflicts and relationships that exist in the larger system between occupational groups such as physicians and nurses, between newer and older organizational members, between members of different generations, or between males and females may also be experienced by members of the same team who represent these groups. (p. 417)

Cross-cutting communication channels may also introduce confusion and misunderstandings in teams that are matrixed (Beckhard, 1972). Demands of the functional unit and the health care group may conflict. Finally, if administrators control the functional unit and govern the decision making of active health care personnel, the quality of care may be compromised. For a health care group to function effectively, the lines of authority must be clear and authority should be vested where the information necessary for making decisions is most accessible. Because matrix structures create ambiguous authority relationships, the leader of the health care group and the leader of functional group must communicate effectively and form a good relationship (Butterill et al., 1992). Establishing clear boundaries for the group and effective relationships with other groups and units is also important, as is shown below. Boundedness. In the previous quotation, Lichtenstein et al. introduced an important correlate of autonomy, boundedness, which is the extent to which the group has clear boundaries and functions as an independent entity. In general, the more unstable and fluid the group, the lower its boundedness. Low boundedness is characteristic of many health care teams, as the members often have multiple team assignments. The only occupational therapist in a geriatric facility, for example, may be assigned to all four of its treatment units. The amount of time the therapist dedicates to any given unit will ebb and flow, depending on demand and the treatment philosophy of the unit. Ogland-Hand and Zeiss (2000) observed that in many multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary health care groups, each member has regular contact with “segments” of the team and must initiate contact with members outside these segments in order to interact with them at all. To overcome problems due to boundedness and the bona fide nature of most health care groups, teams need to create opportunities for communication among members who are overworked or “just passing through.” Ogland-Hand and Zeiss (2000) noted that meetings supposed to be dedicated to maintaining a team’s “minimum data set” afford opportunities for members to interact and work out problems and issues. Other such opportunities include screening meetings, shift change reports, medication reviews, and team rounds (Kresevic

390

POOLE AND REAL

& Holder, 1998; Ogland-Hand & Zeiss, 2000). Simon (1999) and Wilson (1954) both commented on the importance of socializing as a means of maintaining the team and also of managing the tension inherent in medical work. Comments. An interesting problem with much research on work processes in medical groups is that it rarely studies directly the impact on outcomes of the fit of processes and structure to the demands placed by factors such as complexity, autonomy, and diversity. In many cases, the variables in each category are simply related to effectiveness one by one, and the combinations of variables are not considered. More complex models of the influences on health care group effectiveness are needed. A second observation is that this research does not give much consideration to outcomes other than productivity or quality. Although perhaps understandable from the perspective of health care delivery, outcomes related to group maintenance or member need satisfaction receive less attention than they should. Some of these outcomes have been addressed to a greater extent in the literature on negotiation in health care groups. Negotiating: Roles, Power, and Conflict

The negotiation of roles, status, and influence in health care groups is promoted by professional identities, the nature of the work itself, and the bona fide nature of health care groups. Most members of health care groups—physicians, nurses, social workers, psychologists, occupational therapists, and others—are also members of professions that encourage them to maintain certain standards of care and to increase their own influence in the group to further this end (Ducanis & Golin, 1979). Because different professional viewpoints are not always compatible, struggles for control, implicit or explicit, are probably inevitable. Although there is a rough pecking order among professions (i.e., those with an M.D. degree generally enjoy higher status than those with a master’s or Ph.D.) and within each profession, there is still sufficient ambiguity to encourage members to lay claim to preferred roles and attempt to increase their influence. Keith (1991) documented a good example in his discussion of how physiologists and orthopedic surgeons often contend for leadership in geriatric rehabilitation units. The nature of medical work also encourages negotiation. The complexity of the work confronting health care teams can lead to uncertainties that can only be resolved through agreements among members about what should be done and who should do it. Most studies of negotiation of the order in medical groups have centered on groups that engage in complex, uncertain work, such as mental health care (Schatzman & Bucher, 1964), but negotiation processes have been observed on hospital wards (Stelling & Bucher, 1972). Negotiation of work occurs on two levels in health care groups: on the individual level, negotiation of the division of labor, responsibility, and authority, and on the meta-level, negotiation of who has the right to determine the division of labor, responsibility, and authority. A third factor that promotes negotiation is the bona fide nature of health care groups. The turnover of members, the temporary addition of specialists and others to the working group, and the uncertain boundaries of many health care groups necessitate negotiations to handle disruptions in the group and to reconsider the established order when it is called into question by changes. Negotiation influences all three group outcomes: it helps to determine work processes and patient outcomes, it structures the group and influences its level of functioning as a unit, and it affects whether members meet their own needs. Although some members are

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

391

aware of the role of negotiations in determining their position in the health care group, it is safe to say that many are not. These latter members maintain a focus, not on negotiation per se, but on patient outcomes or their own fulfillment at work. Negotiations in a health care team may occur during conflicts, but they may also occur more subtly, in micro-level transactions about how the team will operate. The rules that govern the roles of various professionals in health care teams are ambiguous, leading to necessary and continual negotiation (Geist & Hardesty, 1982; Strauss, Schatzman, Bucher, Ehrlich, & Sabshin, 1964). Schatzman and Bucher’s (1964) classic study of the division of labor on the wards of a mental hospital provides important insights into the nature of negotiation in health care groups. The researchers found five distinctively different role and status structures in five wards with roughly equivalent staff compositions and tasks. These structures were the product of negotiation within the context of the medical ideology that prevailed in the ward. The ideology (itself a product of negotiation) established which members were in a position to make authoritative claims and shaped the types of claims that were regarded as valid. In a ward where psychotherapy was the established ideology, the psychiatrist was held to be most qualified to make claims about what various members should be doing, and arguments had to be cast in psychiatric terms to succeed. In another ward, which emphasized transactional therapy, all professional staff members were regarded as equally qualified to serve as “parent,” and the patients were divided into four groups, each working with one of the professionals. Negotiation is often triggered in health care teams by their constant struggle to clarify and manage ambiguities regarding role expectations. Beckhard (1972) noted that medical roles are continuously evolving in society, and the evolution of roles tends to undermine or problematize even the most carefully planned structures. The undermining of structures can be beneficial if it encourages needed adaptations. It can also have potentially negative effects if the ambiguity is used to shift responsibility or duties onto members inappropriately. Some commentators (e.g., T. M. Brown, 1982) have suggested that when nurses, social workers, and psychologists became more common on health care teams, some physicians implicitly delegated them the role of providing for the patient’s social and emotional needs and neglected this aspect of care themselves. Knight and Field (1981, described in Thomas, 1994) studied a cancer care ward in which more qualified nurses gravitated toward administrative and management tasks, leaving most of the direct patient care to junior nurses and nursing assistants. Dealing with patients’ anxiety about their condition was a particularly taxing aspect of their roles for the junior nurses and nursing assistants. Knight and Field reported that many evaded this type of interaction by working in places on the ward where they did not have to communicate with troublesome patients or by indicating by their actions that they had no time to talk. Clark (1997) described how the discourse of medicine external to the group may also shape role negotiations. According to Clark, the traditional “voice” of medical practice constructs the reality of the patient’s condition according to medical imperatives that distance the practitioner from the patient as well as depersonalize and decontextualize the patient in the interest of “objective” clinical judgment. “Nursing and social work, on the other hand, have countervailing pressures to take on a real understanding of the ‘patient as a person’” (p. 448). This discourse can thus channel role negotiations so that the physician specializes in those parts of work that are concerned with the patient’s “objective” health status and the nurse specializes in “social” and “personal” aspects of care (T. M. Brown, 1982). Negotiations over division of labor in a group can be triggered by the resistance of those whose voice was silenced by the ideology, by problems with patients, or by coalitions of lower status members (Shatzman & Bucher, 1964). Many of these negotiations occur

392

POOLE AND REAL

“tacitly” as members work together. In a fascinating study of imaging groups, Simon (1999) described how neurosurgeons and biophysicists jockey for professional prominence in sharp arguments over the interpretation of images. The degree to which negotiation occurs is also influenced by the degree of “domain consensus”—the degree to which there are generally accepted roles and divisions of labor—in a particular area of health care (Lammers & Krikorian, 1997). Surgery tends to have a high level of domain consensus (e.g., Wilson, 1954), whereas community medicine has a relatively low level (e.g., Banta & Fox, 1972). Negotiations are also shaped by the professional styles of group members. Banta and Fox’s (1972) classic study illustrates the different perspectives that health care professionals have on complex social problems, as evidenced by the conflict between community health nurses, social workers, and physicians in their struggle to define the team’s mission. Abramson and Mizrahi (1996) reported that the social workers in their study focused more on interaction with the physicians, and that the physicians focused more on the competence of the social workers, indicating that the higher status of the physicians allowed them to judge the competence of social worker. The numerous articles advising nurses (Fountain, 1993), social workers (Horwitz, 1969), and mental health professionals (Couchman, 1995; Lorenz, Mauksch, & Gawinski, 1999) on how to interact with physicians testify to the importance and potential impact of style differences in health care teams. They also indicate that resistance to the presumption of physician control and advocacy for increased input are explicit parts of the discourse of these professions. The interdisciplinary team literature emphasizes the need for mutual respect and power sharing among members of health care groups (e.g., Clark, 1997; Drinka, 1996; Sandor, Copeland, & Robinson, 1998). However, countervailing forces, including the assertiveness of professions and established status and power structures, tend to lead to the reassertion of physician dominance as teams progress (Freidson, 1970; Nagi, 1975). Indeed, Brown, Crawford, and Darongkamas (2000) reported that professional boundaries can often be actively reinforced by the experience of interdisciplinary teamwork as members struggle to clarify blurred identities introduced by the demands of collaboration. Drinka (1996) noted that one of the problems introduced by the expanding role of nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants in primary care is the anxiety and tension it produces among physicians, which may lead to their rejection of team models (see Williams, 1992). In one of the few studies that systematically coded group interaction, Feiger and Schmitt (1979) found that even in teams initially committed to interdisciplinary collegiality, status differences reasserted themselves over time. Of interest was their finding that the team that best resisted the erosion of collegiality provided the best care. The negotiations that occur in health care teams have their share of conflict. Several factors, including the complex and pressing work, the strong authority position of the physician, and hesitancy to confront professionals outside one’s own discipline, encourage avoidance or suppression of conflict (Drinka, 1996; Folger, Poole, & Stutman, 2000). Sands, Stafford, and McClelland (1990) found that conflict within interdisciplinary teams was expressed both overtly and covertly within a format that required the team to reach consensus in a short period of time. However, Drinka (1994) proposed that the “maturity” of a health care team could be gauged by how it handled conflicts. She found evidence to suggest that the team “survived over time because there were leaders who were willing to try out new ideas and confront conflict” (p. 123). Through dealing with conflict effectively, groups are often able to build stronger relationships among members based on the trust that “things will work out” and the good will that constructive behavior generates (Folger et al., 2000).

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

393

Although most negotiation research has focused on role negotiation, negotiation processes can also extend to the social construction of medical work in the team. In the previous discussion of task complexity, there was an implicit assumption that teams had more or less stable tasks that were defined independently of team processes. However, the members of health care groups also have a hand in task definition and redefinition. As mentioned in the discussion of diversity, different professionals are likely to interpret and define tasks differently based on their particular specialties. A social worker is most likely to focus on aspects of a case related to community, family, and personal issues and problems, whereas an internist will focus on organic physical problems. The definition that predominates will determine how the case and the care tasks are are interpreted. Schatzman and Bucher’s (1964) study provides some evidence that this does indeed occur. Personnel in four of their five wards interpreted their therapeutic tasks differently depending on the treatment ideology that prevailed (and whether the physician, psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker perspective dominated the discussion). Further, the prevailing ideology shaped the work members undertook and how they evaluated their own effectiveness. Vinokur-Kaplan (1995) observed that a social worker would define geriatric care as inherently involving the patient’s significant others in decision making, whereas for members of other professions such a concern would not necessarily be so important. Although inclusion of negotiation processes certainly muddies the relationship between team structure, processes, and outcomes, it is important to consider. Comment. As the review indicates, research on negotiation in health care teams is broad and deep. However, one striking characteristic of these studies is their tendency to push outcome variables—in particular, the consequences for the patient—into the background. Negotiation studies focus attention on the members of the team or unit and their struggles to define and carry out their work. Less attention is given to effectiveness of health care units or teams. CONCLUSION

A large and growing literature contains many insights about health care teams, communication, and effectiveness. This literature suggests that health care teams can be organized in a number of different ways. The six team types identified in our review—nominal, ad hoc, unidisciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary—embody different assumptions about how care should be delivered, the relationships among health professionals, and communication practices in health care teams. As this review indicates, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams have received the lion’s share of attention in formal studies of health care teams. There is a need for more studies on the other types of health care teams. It is also important to note that the team types represent not only empirical descriptions, but also embody ideologies concerning the “right” way to care for patients. As we conducted this review we found it difficult at times to determine whether findings were fair and even-handed or were tainted by ideological biases. Although the team types are useful, they may also straightjacket thinking about health care teams. It is easy to move from thinking that a team is organized around a certain set of principles (e.g., “interdisciplinarity”) to thinking that it always behaves in that mode. The few studies that offered in-depth descriptions, as well as our own experiences, indicate that the same team may carry out some activities in an interdisciplinary manner and others in an unidisciplinary manner. For instance, a pediatrics practice might rely on an egalitarian discussion among all members to rate child functioning (see Bailey et al., 1995) but then

394

POOLE AND REAL

turn over major care decisions to the physicians. The shifting modalities of work in medical care groups may be ignored in a scheme that puts too much emphasis on absolute team types. One promising direction in this area is the development of contingency theories relating (a) team structure and processes, (b) contingency variables such as task or team composition, and (c) effectiveness. The basic premise of such theories is that, depending on the contingencies facing the team, some structures and processes will result in more effective team functioning and improved patient care than will others. Our review indicates that progress has been made toward specifying such a theory based on the contingencies of task complexity and diversity of group composition. However, the ability to relate team structure and communication and workflow processes to these contingencies is tempered by factors such as the degree of autonomy the team enjoys and the fact that health care teams must constantly struggle with shifting memberships and boundaries in an ever changing environment. Although contingency theories hold promise, their ability to explain the relationship between the communication and effectiveness of a health care team will be limited by the degree to which the team works in what Putnam and Stohl (1990) have called the “bona fide” group situation. The multiple standards that can be used to judge effectiveness also complicate theories of communication and team outcomes. If productivity and quality of care are important criteria, so too are maintenance and development of the team and satisfaction of member needs. Without meeting these latter two criteria, even teams that deliver very high quality care will eventually degrade and lose the people who make them effective. The frequency with which conflicts can develop between different goals poses a key challenge for health care teams. For instance, doing excellent work often requires a focus on task that detracts from developing relationships among team members or attending to the needs of individuals. Theories should take into account the tensions between effectiveness criteria and develop models showing how these might be handled effectively. The sheer number of different professional and ancillary roles in health care teams is one of their most distinctive and interesting features. This makes the process of role negotiation a critical area of inquiry for communication research. Role negotiation is common and continuous in health care teams. Some is explicit, most is implicit, accomplished gradually through the patterning of interaction among team members and between team members and clients. Power and status play an important role in negotiations; those with greater amounts of each naturally tend to dominate negotiations and partition work in ways that suit them. Negotiations are influenced by the discourse of the professions represented on the team: physician discourse presumes the importance and leading role of doctors, whereas the discourse of nursing, social work, clinical psychology, and other professions stresses the need to establish the legitimacy of nonphysician roles and to advocate for more significant input into the care process. Role ambiguity and the resulting negotiations can also give rise to conflict in health care teams. The suggestion by Drinka (1994) that some teams have more capacity than others to manage and learn from conflict points to an interesting direction for future research. An important theme in studies of role negotiation in health care teams should be the impact of the negotiations on quality of care and other patient outcomes. However, most studies focus almost solely on the negotiations themselves and leave outcomes as a sidebar. Studies of the impact of nursing ward organization indicate that quality of communication with patients is affected by informal reorganization due to role negotiations (Thomas, 1994). This and suggestive sidebar comments from the role negotiation studies suggest that the negotiation-outcome relationship is an important focus of future investigation.

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

395

The role of negotiation in the social construction of the team’s tasks is another topic worthy of further research. The contingency model treats tasks as independent of team structure and processes. However, as noted above, negotiation processes do not just influence how the work is done, they often define and construct the task set that the team engages in. Greater understanding of how medical work is constructed in teams can enable us to better gauge the limits of contingency models. The burgeoning literature on the social construction of medicine can provide useful insights and guidance in this inquiry (e.g., Georges, 1996; Koenig, 1988). The review of methods used in health care team research suggests some improvements. In particular, more rigorous, careful studies of team communication and its relationships to exogenous and outcome variables are needed. Most research on health care teams has utilized an input-output model in which the characteristics of the team and its outcomes are studied, but little rigorous attention has been paid to team processes. And when processes are studied, the most common practice is to report summary impressions of the communication and interaction processes that occurred in the teams rather than analyze them systematically. Another shortcoming of studies in this area is that they do not control for the amount and type of care given or characteristics such as team size, composition, and history, which makes it difficult to compare across teams. Future research should include these variables. There are several areas that remain largely unexplored in research on health care teams. Although most studies focus on internal processes of health care groups, Ancona (1987) marshals significant evidence that relations with external groups and individuals may be a stronger influence on group effectiveness under some circumstances. Boundary spanning or attention to external relationships is particularly important for health care groups embedded in the matrix structure discussed above (Hirokawa, DeGooyer, & Valde, in press). The group’s leader must maintain good relations with managers of functional units and legitimate the approach to care that the unit takes to ensure that unit managers assign good personnel to the group and do not interfere in group functioning (Butterill et al., 1992). Members must make their functional mangers aware of the importance of the group and keep up with their work in the functional unit. Another key boundary-spanning role is justifying the team’s action and decisions to management. Drinka (1996) argued that an important part of managing an interdisciplinary health care team is recognizing its position in the organization and working to maintain the legitimacy of the team in the eyes of upper management. Boundary spanning in health care teams has not received much attention in formal research and is an important area for future inquiry. A related topic that should be explored is interteam relationships. Health care team development is another relatively neglected process. Implicit within many studies of team effectiveness is a model of team development. When explicit models are offered (Drinka, 1994; Ogland-Hand & Zeiss, 2000), they are straightforward adaptations of the traditional “forming,” “storming,” “norming,” and “performing” stages of group development based on global observations rather than detailed analysis of group interactions and activity. Detailed and systematic studies of medical team development would enable us to move beyond this overly simple view and consider issues such as changes in the relationship of members from different disciplines and specialties and the management of complex tasks over time. In view of the emphasis on developing interdisciplinary teams, one particularly important type of change involves shifting the structure of the team so that all members are allowed input on decisions and activities. As we have noted, however, this requires physicians to set aside their traditionally dominant position and treat members of other professions and disciplines as peers. Maintaining this balanced

396

POOLE AND REAL

structure is difficult, and there is a tendency for the traditional physician-dominated arrangements to reassert themselves. Longitudinal studies of health care teams could clarify how this occurs and how teams could be managed to create and sustain collegial relationships among members from different disciplines and specialties. A final understudied area is “unteamworthy” behavior. Negative behavior such as browbeating, ostracism, and harsh attacks can cause stress and otherwise discomfit members. Teams with complex, stressful work and power differentials are especially likely to experience such behavior as a reaction to their difficult situations. The frequency, causes, and impacts of this behavior on health care teams are in need of research. Another type of exceptional behavior, whistleblowing, is a sensitive subject in much of the health care literature, in view of its legal implications. Erde (1982) noted that professional norms require reporting incidents that represent negligence of or harm to patients, but group norms grounded in collegial decisions-making and collegial relationships act as disincentives. Erde argued that the ideology of teamwork is often used to suppress dissent and curtail or punish whistleblowers as “uncommitted” members. The dynamics of team communication surrounding ethically driven behavior such as whistleblowing offer an important horizon for future research. Teams are arguably the cornerstone of modern medical care. Communication is the cement that holds teams together and joins them to the organization. Three decades of research on health care teams has offered some insights on the relation of communication to team organization, work processes, and effectiveness. However, much remains to be discovered, and we hope that the next generation of studies will expand the horizons of our knowledge an order of magnitude beyond what we now have. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Preparation of this chapter was supported by National Science Foundation grant SBR9712950 under the Transformation to Quality Program. This chapter reflects the opinions of the authors and not of the foundation. REFERENCES Abramson, J. S., & Mizrahi, T. (1996). When social worker and physicians collaborate: Positive and negative interdisciplinary experiences. Social Work, 41, 272–281. Alderfer, C. P., & Smith, K. K. (1982). Studying intergroup relations embedded in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, 35–65. Alexander, J. A., Lichtenstein, R., Jinnett, K., D’Aunno, T. A., & Ullman, E. (1996). The effects of treatment team diversity and size on assessments of team functioning. Hospital and Health Services Administration, 41, 37–53. Ancona, D. G. (1987). Groups in organizations: Extending laboratory models. In C. Hendrick (Ed.), Annual review of personality and social psychology: Group and intergroup processes (pp. 207–231). Newbury, Park, CA: Sage. Argote, L. (1982). Input uncertainty and organizational coordination in hospital emergency units. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, 420–434. Baggs, J. G., Schmitt, M. H., Mushlin, A. I., Mitchell, P. H., Eldredge, D. H., Oakes, D., & Hutson, A. D. (1999). Association between nurse-physician collaboration and patient outcomes in three intensive care units. Critical Care Medicine, 27, 1991–1998. Bailey, D. B., Buysse, V., Simeonsson, R. J., Smith, T., & Keyes, L. (1995). Individual and

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

397

team consensus ratings of child functioning. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 37, 246–249. Bakst, H. J., & Marra, E. F. (1995). Experience with home care for cardiac patients. American Journal of Public Health, 45, 444–450. Banta, H. D., & Fox, R. C. (1972). Role strains of a health care team in a poverty community: The Columbia Point experience. Social Science and Medicine, 6, 697–722. Becker, P. M., McVey, L. J., Saltz, C. C., Feussner, J. R., & Cohen, H. J. (1987). Hospitalacquired complications in a randomized controlled clinical trial of a geriatric consultation team. Journal of the American Medical Association, 257, 2313–2317. Beckhard, R. (1972). Organizational issues in the team delivery of comprehensive health care. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 3, 287–316. Benson, L., & Ducanis, A. (1995). Nurses’ perceptions of their role and role conflicts. Rehabilitation Nursing, 20, 204–211. Benton, J. G., Brown, H., & Rinzler, S. H. (1951). Objective evaluation of physical and drug therapy in the rehabilitation of the hemiplegic patient. American Heart Journal, 42, 719– 732. Berteotti, C. R., & Seibold, D. R. (1994). Coordination and role definition problems in healthcare teams: A hospice case study. In L. R. Frey (Ed.), Group communication in context: Studies of natural groups (pp. 107–131). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bloom, J. R., & Alexander, J. A. (1982). Team nursing: Professional coordination or bureaucratic control? Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 23, 84–95. Brodsky, C. M. (1968). Communication and behavior on a small psychiatric unit. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 9, 525–535. Brown, B., Crawford, P., & Darongkamas, J. (2000). Blurred roles and permeable boundaries: The experience of multidisciplinary working in community mental health. Health and Social Care in the Community, 8, 425–435. Brown, E. (1948). Nursing for the future: A report prepared for the National Nursing Council. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Brown, T. M. (1982). An historical view of health care teams. In G. J. Agich (Ed.), Responsibility in health care (pp. 3–21). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel. Buggs, C., Valadez, A. M., & Lund, C. A. (1993). Evaluating the effectiveness of an intravenous therapy team. Nursing Economics, 11, 249–255. Butterill, D., O’Hanlon, J., & Book, H. (1992). When the system is the problem, don’t blame the patient: Problems inherent in the interdisciplinary inpatient team. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 37, 168–172. Campbell, D. T. (1958). Common fate, similarity, and other indices of the status of aggregates of persons as social entities. Behavioral Science, 3, 14–25. Campbell-Heider, N., & Pollock, D. (1987). Barriers to physician-nurse collegiality: An anthropological perspective. Social Science and Medicine, 25, 421–425. Castle, N. G., & Banaszak-Holl, J. (1997). Top management team characteristics and innovation in nursing homes. Gerontologist, 37, 572–580. Clark, P. G. (1997). Values in health care professional socialization: Implications for geriatric education in interdisciplinary teamwork. Gerontologist, 37, 441–451. Cohen, H., Rubin, A. M., & Gombash, L. (1992). The team approach to treatment of the dizzy patient. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 73, 703–708. Copp, E. P. (1966a). A controlled trial of rehabilitation. Annals of Physical Medicine, 8, 151– 167. Coser, R. L. (1958) Authority and decision-making in a hospital: A comparative analysis. American Sociological Review, 23, 56–63.

398

POOLE AND REAL

Cosgrove, J. L., Nicholas, J. J., Barmark, J., Brewer, C., Mientus, J. M., McConnell, R. L., & Rinaldo, D. (1998). Team treatment. American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 30, 253–260. Couchman, W. (1995). Joint education for mental health teams. Nursing Standard, 10, 32–34. Copp, E. P., & Harris, R. (1966b). A further controlled trial of rehabilitation. Annals of Physical Medicine, 8, 220–223. Crepeau, E. B. (1994). Three images of interdisciplinary team meetings. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 48, 717–722. Davis, M., & Warner, A. (1918). Dispensaries: Their management and development. New York: MacMillan. Drinka, T. J. K. (1991). Development and maintenance of an interdisciplinary health care team: A case study. Gerontology and Geriatrics Education, 12, 111–127. Drinka, T. J. K. (1994). Interdisciplinary geriatric teams: Approaches to conflict as indicators of potential to model teamwork. Educational Gerontology, 20, 87–103. Drinka, T. J. K. (1996). Applying learning from self-directed work teams in business curriculum development for interdisciplinary geriatric teams. Educational Gerontology, 22, 433– 450. Drinka, T. J. K., & Clark, P. G. (2000). Health care teamwork. Westport, CT: Auburn House. Ducanis, A. J., & Golin, A. K. (1979). The interdisciplicary health care team: A handbook. Germantown, MD, Aspen. Erde, E. L. (1982). Logical confusions and moral dilemmas in health care teams and team talk. In G. J. Agich (Ed.), Responsibility in health care (pp. 193–213). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel. Erickson, B., & Perkins, M. (1994). Interdisciplinary team approach in the rehabilitation of hip and knee arthroplasties. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 48, 439–445. Fazal, B. A., Telzak, E. E., Blum, S., Pollard, C. L., Bar, M., Ernst, J. A., & Turett, G. S. (1995). Impact of a coordinated tuberculosis team in an inner-city hospital in New York City. Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 16, 340–343. Feiger, S. M., & Schmitt, M. H. (1979). Collegiality in interdisciplinary health teams: Its measurement and its effects. Social Science and Medicine, 13A, 217–229. Fisher, G. G., & Opper, F. H. (1996). An interdisciplinary nutrition support team improves quality of care in a teaching hospital. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 96, 176–178. Folger, J. P., Poole, M. S., & Stutman, R. (2000). Working through conflict: Strategies for relationships, groups, and organizations (4th ed.). New York: Longman. Fountain, M. J. (1993). Key roles and issues of the multidisciplinary team. Seminars in Oncology Nursing, 9, 25–31. Frank, L. K. (1961). Interprofessional communication. American Journal of Public Health, 51, 1798–1804. Freidson, E. (1970). Professional dominance. Chicago: Atherton. Fuller, J., & Cowan, J. (1999). Risk assessment in a multi-disciplinary forensic setting: Clinical judgment revisited. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 10, 276–289. Fuller, M. G., & Jordan, M. L. (1994). The substance abuse consultation team addressing the problem of hospitalized substance abusers. General Hospital Psychiatry, 16, 73–77. Gaare, J., O’Sullivan, J., King, D., & Gilbride, J. A. (1990). Perceptions of clinical decision making by dietitians and physicians. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 90, 54–58. Geist, P., & Hardesty, M. (1992). Negotiating the crisis: DRGs and the transformation of hospitals. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

399

Georges, E. (1996). Fetal ultrasound imaging and the production of authoritative knowledge in Greece. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 10, 157–175. Germain, M., Knoeffel, F., Wieland, D., & Rubenstein, L. Z. (1995). A geriatric assessment and intervention team for hospital inpatients awaiting transfer to a geriatric unit: A randomized trial. Aging: Clinical and Experimental Research, 1, 55–60. Hackman, J. R., & Morris, C. G. (1975). Group tasks, group interaction process, and group performance effectiveness: A review and proposed integration. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 8, pp. 45–99). New York: Academic Press. Hackman, J. R., & Walton, R. E. (1986). Leading groups in organizations. In P. S. Goodman & Associates (Eds.), Designing effective work groups (pp. 72–119). San Francisco: JosseyBass. Halstead, L. S. (1976). Team care in chronic illness: A critical review of the literature of the past 25 years. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 57, 507–511. Hansen, M. C., & Hayes, P. A. (1998). Integrating students into interdisciplinary teams: Extending the caring circle. Seminars for Nurse Managers, 6, 214–218. Hennessy, C. H., & Shen, J. K. M. (1986). Sources of “unreliability” in multidisciplinary team assessment of the elderly. Evaluation Review, 10, 178–192. Hirokawa, R., DeGooyer, D., & Valde, K. (in press). Characteristics of effective health care teams. In R. Y. Hirokawa, Cathcart, R., & Samovar, L. (Eds.), Small group communication: Theory and practice (8th ed.). Los Angeles: Roxbury. Hochstadt, N. J., & Harwicke, N. J. (1985). How effective is a multidisciplinary approach? A follow-up study. Child Abuse and Neglect, 9, 365–373. Horwitz, J. J. (1969). Dimensions of rehabilitation teamwork. Rehabilitation Record, 10, 37– 48. Hogan, D. B., & Fox, R. A. (1990). A prospective controlled trial of a geriatric consultation team in an acute-care hospital. Age and Ageing, 19, 107–113. Hogan, D. B., Fox, R. A., Badley, B., & Mann, O. E. (1987). Effect of a geriatric consultation service on management of patients in an acute care hospital. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 136, 713–717. Houston, K. L., Clute, C., Ryan-Crepin, K., Kimball, M., & Matthews, R. (1994). TQM brings collaboration to patient transport process. Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 9, 21–29. Jackson, G., Gater, R., Goldberg, D., Tantam, D., Loftus, L., & Taylor, H. (1993). A new community mental health team based in primary care: A description of the service and its effect on sevice use in the first year. British Journal of Psychiatry, 162, 375–384. Julia, M. C., & Thompson, A. (1994). Group process and interprofessional teamwork. In R. M. Casto & Associates (Eds.), Interprofessional care and collaborative practice (pp. 35–42). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Kaluzny, A. D. (1985). Design and management of disciplinary and interdisciplinary groups in health services: Review and critique. Medical Care Review, 42, 77–112. Katon, W., Von Korff, M., Lin, E., Simon, G., Walker, E., Unutzer, J., Bush, T., Russo, J., & Ludman, E. (1999). Stepped collaborative care for primary care patients with persistent symptoms of depression. Archives of General Psychiatry, 56, 1109–1115. Katz, S., Vignos, P. J., Moskowitz, R. W., Thompson, H. M., & Svec, K. H. (1968). Comprehensive outpatient care in Rheumetoid arthritis. Journal of the American Medical Association, 206, 1249–1254. Keith, R. A. (1991). The comprehensive treatment team in rehabilitation. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 72, 269–274. King, L., & Lee, J. L. (1994). Perceptions of collaborative practice between navy nurses and physicians in the ICU setting. American Journal of Cortical Care, 3, 331–336.

400

POOLE AND REAL

Knight, M., & Field, D. (1981). A silent conspiracy: Coping with dying cancer patients on an acute surgical ward. Journal of Advances in Nursing, 6, 221–229. Koenig, B. A. (1988). The technological imperative in medical practice: The social creation of a “routine” treatment. In M. Lock & D. R. Gordon (Eds.), Biomedicine examined (pp. 465–496). Nitjoff, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kresevic, D., & Holder, C. (1998). Interdisciplinary care. Clinics in Geriatric Medicine, 14, 787–798. Lammers, J. C., & Krikorian, D. H. (1997). Theoretical extension and operationalization of the bona fide group construct with an application to surgical teams. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 25, 17–38. Larkey, K. L. (1996). Toward a theory of communicative interactions in a culturally-diverse workplace. Academy of Management Review, 21, 463–491. Larson, J. R., Jr., Christensen, C., Abbott, A. S., & Franz, T. M. (1996). Diagnosing groups: Charting the flow of information in medical decision-making teams. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 315–330. Latella, D. (2000). Teamwork in rehabilitation. In S. Kumar (Ed.), Multidisciplinary approach to rehabilitation (pp. 27–42). Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann. LaVallee, R., & McLaughlin, C. P. (1994). Teams at the core. In C. P. McLaughlin & A. D. Kaluzny (Eds.), Continuous quality improvement in health care (pp. 127–147). Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen. Leape, L. L., Cullen, D. J., Clapp, M. D., Burdick, E., Demoraco, H. J., Erikson, J. I., & Bates, D. W. (1999). Pharmacist participation on physician rounds and adverse drug events in the intensive care unit. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 262–270. Leatt, P., & Schneck, R. (1984). Criteria for grouping nursing subunits in hospitals. Academy of Management Journal, 27, 150–165. Lichtenberg, P. A., Strzepek, D. M., & Zeiss, A. M. (1990). Bringing psychiatric aids into the treatment team: An application of the veterans administration’s ITTG Model. Gerontology & Geriatrics Education, 10, 63–73. Lichtenstein, R., Alexander, J. A., Jinnett, K., & Ullman, E. (1997). Embedded intergroup relations in interdisciplinary teams. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 33, 413–434. Lorenz, A. D., Mauksch, L. B., & Gawinski, B. (1999). Models of collaboration. Mental Health, 26, 401–410. McCrone, P., Beecham, J., & Knapp, M. (1994). Community psychiatric nurse teams: Costeffectiveness of intensive support versus generic care. British Journal of Psychiatry, 165, 218–221. McElhaney, J. E., & Briggs, M. C. E. (2000). Team approaches to geriatric rehabilitation. In S. Kumar (Ed.), Multidisciplinary approach to rehabilitation (pp. 155–175). Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann. McGrath, J. E. (1984). Groups: Interaction and performance. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Miller, K., Joseph, L., & Apker, J. (2000). Strategic ambiguity in the role development process. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 28, 193–214. Muijen, M., Cooney, M., Strathdee, G., Bell, R., & Hudson, A. (1994). Community psychiatric nurse teams: Intensive support versus generic care. British Journal of Psychiatry, 165, 211– 217. Nagi, S. Z. (1975). Teamwork in health care in the U.S.: A sociological perspective. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 53, 75–91. Ogland-Hand, S. M., & Zeiss, A. M. (2000). Interprofessional health care teams. In V. Molinari (Ed.), Professional psychology in long term care (pp. 257–277). New York : Hatherleigh Press.

17. GROUPS AND TEAMS IN HEALTH CARE

401

Pisetsky, I., Keram, E., & Drossman, D. A. (1992). Building a psychiatric-medical liaison: Observations of the process. Psychiatric Medicine, 10, 149–163. Poulin, J. E., Walter, C. A., & Walker, J. L. (1994). Interdisciplinary team membership: A survey of gerontological social workers. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 22, 93–107. Putnam, L. L., & Stohl, C. (1990). Bona fide groups: A reconceptualization of groups in context. Communication Studies, 41, 248–265. Putnam, L. L., & Stohl, C. (1996). Bona fide groups: An alternative perspective for communication and small group decision making. In R. Y. Hirokawa and M. S. Poole (Eds.), Communication and group decision making (2nd ed., pp. 147–176). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Reuben, D. B., Borok, G. M., Wolde-Tsadik, G., Ershoff, D. H., Fishman, L. K., Ambrosini, V. L., Liu, Y., Rubenstein, L. Z., & Beck, J. C. (1995). A randomized trial of comprehensive geriatric assessment in the care of hospitalized patients. New England Journal of Medicine, 332, 1345–1350. Robbins, D. A. (1998). Managed care on trial: Recapturing trust, integrity, and accountability in healthcare. New York: McGraw-Hill. Rogers, D. (1932). Teamwork within the hospital. American Journal of Nursing, 32, 657–659. Rubenstein, L. Z., Josephson, K. R., Wieland, D., English, P. A., Sayre, J. A., & Kane, R. L. (1984). Effectiveness of a geriatric evaluation unit. New England Journal of Medicine, 311, 1664–1670. Rundall, T. G., & Hetherington, R. W. (1988). The social structure of work groups. In S. M. Shortell & A. D. Kaluzny (Eds.), Health care management (2nd ed., pp. 187–212). New York: Wiley. Runyan, J. W. (1975). The Memphis chronic disense program: Comparisons in outcome and the nurse’s extended role. Journal of the American Medical Association, 231, 264–267. Sandor, M. K., Copeland, D., & Robinson, S. (1998). Team-building interventions for interdisciplinary teams: A case study of a pediatric client. Rehabilitation Nursing, 23, 290–294. Sands, R. G., Stafford, J., & McClelland, M. (1990). “I Beg to Differ”: Conflict in the interdisciplinary team. Social Work in Health Care, 14, 55–73. Schatzman, L., & Bucher, R. (1964). Negotiating a division of labor among professionals in the state mental hospital. Psychiatry, 27, 266–277. Schofield, R. G., & Amodeo, M. (1999). Interdisciplinary teams in health care and human services settings: Are they effective? Health and Social Work, 24, 210–219. Schoonhoven, C. B. (1981). Problems with contingency theory: Testing assumptions hidden within the language of contingency “theory.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 26, 349– 377. Silliman, R. A., McGarrey, S. T., Raymond, R. M., & Fretwell, M. D. (1990). The senior care study. Journal of the American Gerontological Society, 38, 461–466. Silver, G. (1958). Beyond general practice: The health team. Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 31, 29–38. Sipperstein, G. N., Wolraich, M. L., & Reed, D. (1994). Professionals prognosis for individuals with mental retardation; Search for consensus within interdisciplinary settings. American Journal on Mental Retardation, 98, 519–526. Simon, C. M. (1999). Images and image: Technology and the social politics of revealing disorder in a North American hospital. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 13, 141–162. Stelling, J., & Bucher, R. (1972). Autonomy and monitoring on hospital wards. Sociological Quarterly, 13, 431–446. Stohl, C., & Putnam, L. L. (1994). Group communication in context: Implications for the study of bona fide groups. In L. R. Frey (Ed.), Group communication in context: Studies of natural groups (pp. 285–292). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

402

POOLE AND REAL

Strauss, A., Schatzman, L., Bucher, R., Ehrlich, D., & Sabshin, M. (1964). Psychiatric ideologies and institutions. New York: The Free Press. Thomas, L. H. (1994). A comparison of the verbal interactions of qualified nurses and nursing auxiliaries in primary, team and functional nursing wards. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 31, 231–244. Unsworth, C. A., Thomas, S. A., & Greenwood, K. M. (1995). Rehabilitation team decisions on discharge housing for stroke patients. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 76, 331–340. Van de Ven, A. H., & Delbecq, A. L. (1973). A task contingent model of work-unit structure. Administrative Science Quarterly, 183–197. Vinokur-Kaplan, D. (1995). Enhancing the effectiveness of interdisciplinary mental health treatment teams. Administration and Policy in Mental Health, 22, 521–530. Weiland, D., Kramer, B. J., Waite, M. S., & Rubenstein, L. Z. (1996). The interdisciplinary team in geriatric care. American Behavioral Scientist, 39, 655–664. Wells, N., Johnson, R., & Salyer, S. (1998). Interdisciplinary collaboration. Clinical Nurse Specialist, 12, 161–168. Whorley, L. W. (1996). Evaluating health care team performance: Assessment of joint problemsolving action. Health Care Supervisor, 14(4), 71–76. Williams, C. B. (1992, January). Everybody wants to play doctor. Medical Economics, pp. 37– 42. Wilson, R. N. (1954). Teamwork in the operating room. Human Organization, 12, 9–14. Wilson, S. E. (1977). Informal groups: An introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Winograd, C. H., Gerety, M. B., & Lai, N. A. (1993). A negative trial of inpatient geriatric consultation: Lessons learned and recommendations for future research. Archives of Internal Medicine, 153, 2017–2023. Wood, R. E. (1986). Task complexity: Definition of the construct. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 37, 60–82. Zimmerman, S., & Applegate, J. L. (1992). Person-centered comforting in the hospice interdisciplinary team. Communication Research, 19, 240–263. Zimmermann, S. (1994). Social cognition and evaluations of health care team communication effectiveness. Western Journal of Communication, 58,116–141.

18 Organizational Rhetoric and Healthcare Policymaking Charles Conrad Texas A&M University

Holly Gene McIntush Texas House of Representatives

Health policies and policymaking play a central role in almost every dimension of health communication (Miller & Ryan, 2001). Sometimes the effects are direct, as when laws mandate HIV testing of pregnant women, regulations forbid providers from discussing abortion as a treatment option, or negotiated settlements in state lawsuits against tobacco companies allow those companies to veto public health messages that are excessively graphic, condemning, or potentially effective. Sometimes the effects are indirect, as when laws allow HMOs and insurance companies to impose treatment-related gag rules on providers, Medicare regulations inadvertently encourage providers to diagnose patients in ways that maximize allowable charges for their treatment, or various policies create incentives to favor acute over preventative care (Moon, 1996). Given its importance, it is especially disconcerting to note that the healthcare policymaking process in the United States seems to be especially irrational and nonsystematic. The titles of a series of recent studies express this feeling: Reagan’s The Accidental System (1999) describes overall U.S. policy; Hacker’s The Road to Nowhere (1997) and Skocpol’s Boomerang (1996) trace the development and demise of the most recent federal effort toward comprehensive policymaking; and Aaron’s The Problem That Won’t Go Away (1996) and Kleinke’s Bleeding Edge (1998) offer little hope that a more coherent system will emerge in the near future. Conversely, formal organizations, both inside and outside of the healthcare sector, historically have had major effects on healthcare policy. Most often this influence occurs out of public view, through direct lobbying of legislators and members of the executive branch (Biersack et al., 1999; Goldstein, 1999). But recently organizations have engaged in rhetoric that has the goal of directly influencing public opinion on healthcare issues and policies. In this chapter we enter into the quagmire that is U.S. healthcare policymaking. In doing so, we have three goals in mind: (a) to summarize contemporary models of

403

404

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

the policymaking process, including the role that organizational discourse plays in it; (b) to examine the distinctive complexities of healthcare policymaking; and (c) to briefly illustrate those processes and complexities in an analysis of the development of Medicare. In the process we argue that the fragmented and incoherent nature of U.S. healthcare policy is not “accidental,” as Reagan’s title suggests, but instead is inherent in a complex interaction between the structure and processes of policymaking, the ideological bases of health discourse, and the rhetoric of healthcare reform. TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF PUBLIC POLICYMAKING

During the 2 decades after World War II, two highly rationalistic perspectives dominated theories of public policymaking in what came to be called the “community power debate.” Both started with the assumption that democratic governance is defined by conflict and competition, and both purported to describe and explain the processes and outcomes of public policymaking (Schattschneider, 1960, p. xvii). One approach, grounded in the work of Floyd Hunter (1953), C. Wright Mills (1959), Robert Michels (1958), and Talcott Parsons (1967), focused on the role that interest groups play in policy formation and implementation. Leaders of elite groups draw on a reservoir of private information, interpersonal connections, and political skills to ensure that policymaking fosters their individual interests, often in ways that contradict and undermine broader public interests (Adamany, 1975; Greider, 1992; Laumann & Knoke, 1987; Stone, 1987). When combined with cultural processes that generate psychological deference to authority figures by nonelites, elites can develop policy “oligarchies” that rule democracies through an “iron law” (Barker, 1993; Clegg, 1989, esp. chap. 3; Schattschneider, 1960). Developing public policy in public is threatening to power elites. Open policy conflicts can lead to the formation of coalitions of low-power actors that may upset political power balances, and it may even undermine the psychological processes that generate deference to elites (Vogel, 1989). Consequently, elites favor private management of differences through stable political processes and economic structures in which outcomes are more easily controlled. Elites can privatize conflicts through a variety of strategies, ranging from direct suppression through the power of the state, to manipulating formal rules so that decisions can be made in private, to quietly implementing policies in ways that violate their purpose (Deetz, 1992; Schattschneider, 1960; Stone, 1988). Conversely, nonelites generally prefer policymaking open to public scrutiny because it provides opportunities to broaden the scope of the conflict to include additional nonelites, perhaps creating coalitions that exceed a “minimum winning size” (Katz & Kahn, 1979). However, even if nonelites are able to overcome the elites’ advantages and successfully “go public” with a particular issue, the elites still can displace the conflict to other issues. Consequently, the most fundamental contested terrain in public policymaking is the policy agenda itself (Riker, 1980, 1982). The key research questions for elite theorists are these: (a) How can researchers determine which elite groups dominate particular political systems? (b) Under what circumstances and through what processes can nonelites upset social or political structures?1 1 Elite theorists attempt to assess power relationships by examining the outcome of key decisions or by determining the identity of persons who occupied formal leadership positions and/or who were reputed to be power holders by members of a given community. Each of these approaches is problematic, particularly since elite theory presumes that power holders do everything possible to disguise community power relationships. For a more extensive summary of the resulting “community power debate,” see Clegg, 1989; Conrad, 1983; and Domhoff and Dye, 1987.

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

405

A second approach to understanding policymaking was initiated by Robert Dahl and his associates during the late 1950s. Pluralist theory accepts the elite theorists’ notion that political power is vested in interest groups but argues that all-important social and political interests become organized and are represented in public policymaking. Group alliances constantly coalesce, divide, and re-form as significant issues are debated on the public agenda. The fragmented structure of the U.S. political system combines with the give and take of interest group politics to ensure that no single group or coalition of elite groups dominates policymaking (Adamany, 1970; Clegg, 1989; Stone, 1988, p. 20, note 6). As a result, although democratic structures and underlying processes may remain stable, decision making is constantly in flux as new issues occupy the attention of decision makers, old coalitions are discarded, new ones form, and new issues come to the fore. This pluralist model rapidly became the dominant perspective in political science— and just as rapidly encountered attack (Domhoff, 1967; Miliband, 1969). Most important, critics argued, the pluralist model simply is not empirically viable. Where Dahl argued that the United States is an inclusive pluralist system, critics demonstrated that American pluralism systematically excludes many groups based on class, race, and gender. Where Dahl concluded that major political actors represent a wide variety of interest groups, each of which has some political resources available to them, critics noted that some interests are not represented at all and that political resources are inequitably distributed among those that are represented.2 The pluralists asserted that, although each elite group may be internally oligarchical, competition among them keeps the system as a whole from becoming oligarchical. In response, critics complained that competition among a nonrepresentative group of elite oligarchies simply does not produce a balanced, representative pluralism (see especially Newton, 1969; Wright, 1985). Even in New Haven, the source of Dahl’s original data, differential access to resources like education reproduced an elite decision-making system (Soloway, 1987). Finally, critics argued, pluralist models focus solely on outcomes of decision-making events, ignoring both the intentions of political actors (Clegg, 1989; Wrong, 1979) and the processes through which elites control the public decision-making agenda (Bacharach & Baratz, 1962, 1963, 1970). For example, pluralist research would view an elite’s offer to form a temporary coalition with a nonelite group as evidence of competitive balance even if the elite’s intention was to co-opt the nonelite group or to undercut its ability to resist domination during subsequent, more important, conflicts. Similarly, pluralist models would not detect the use of successful threats (or more subtle processes) to persuade nonelites to not even raise an issue in public deliberations. Unfortunately, empirical studies of social and political change have not found clear evidence to support either the elitists’ predictions of political stability through elite dominance or the pluralists’ notions of social and political change through processes of constant balanced conflict. Instead, political systems at all levels seem to combine the two processes,

2 It should be noted that Dahl, in an article co-authored with another key advocate of pluralist theory, eventually repudiated his view that the power of interest groups was balanced, creating a broadly representative pluralist system: “Common interpretations that depict the American or any other market-oriented system as a competition among interest groups are seriously in error for their failure to take account of the distinctive privileged position of businessmen in politics” (Dahl & Lindblom, 1976, p. xxxvi). In a subsequent article, Lindblom (1977) argued that, because politicians typically defer to business leaders, “pluralism at most operates only in an imprisoned zone of policymaking” (p. 175; also see Lindblom, 1982). For extended applications of pluralist theory to healthcare policy, see Alford (1975) and Alford and Freidland (1985).

406

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

experiencing long periods of quiescence occasionally broken by periods of significant change (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993). TOWARD PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIA MODELS OF PUBLIC POLICYMAKING

By the late 1970s researchers were attempting to transcend the community power debate in two ways. First, social theorists interested in power relationships created a number of multilevel models that attempted to simultaneously capture the dynamics of overt policymaking activities and more covert power dynamics (Clegg, 1989; Giddens, 1984; Lukes, 1974). Second, political theorists responded by looking more closely at the processes through which issues are placed on the public agenda and how those issues are managed once there. Both efforts were stimulated by a rediscovery of E. E. Schattschneider’s concept of the “mobilization of bias,” and both led to the development of models of policy choice that focused on the “nonrational” nature of public policymaking. Mobilizing Bias

Schattschneider (1960) started by rejecting claims that the United States “faced a crisis in democracy.” The relatively new science of political polling had found that a majority of U.S. citizens knew very little about many of the issues that were “hot items” for politicians and political scientists. Similarly, voting data made it clear that political participation was low and declining. Schattschneider rather bluntly responded that the former critique conflated what professional politicians and political science professors thought was important with what the general populace knew was relevant to their daily lives: “It is an outrage to attribute the failures of American democracy to the ignorance and stupidity of the masses. The most disastrous shortcomings of the system have been those of the intellectuals whose concepts of democracy have been amazingly rigid and uninventive” (p. 132). People do not participate in politics simply because the issues that reach the agenda do not reflect their concerns and because the available options do not provide them with meaningful choices. In theory, elections can serve as an important means of constraining political elites and forcing them to defend their actions in public terms. But if elections do not provide voters with meaningful alternatives, voters realize that participation is a sham (Stone, 1987, pp. 243–45). Consequently, Schattschneider argued, the key issues facing democratic theorists are “what questions [the political system] refers to the public for decision or guidance, how it refers them to the public, how the alternatives are defined and how it respects the limitations of the public” (p. 137). Schattschneider’s response to these issues was the concept of mobilizing bias: “All forms of political organization have a bias in favour of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others because organization is the mobilization of bias. Some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out” (1960, p. 71). Pro-business and upper-class groups are more tightly organized than groups representing other interests, have more money and prestige, are better able to exploit the structures of legislative bodies, often obtain and use private information provided by politicians, and exaggerate their political power without challenge by legislators (Schattschneider, 1935). When their interests are threatened, elite groups are able to quickly mobilize these resources to control the decision-making agenda and to create interpretive frames that favor their positions on policy issues. Of course, it also is possible for nonelites to mobilize public

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

407

pressure on decision makers, but the fragmentation of nonelite groups and the federalist structure of the U.S. political system makes it much more difficult for them to do so.3 James Q. Wilson (1973) extended Schattschneider’s mobilization concept in a model that focuses on the extent to which the effects of a policy proposal are concentrated or diffused. Effects (“benefits” or “costs” in Wilson’s model) are concentrated if they are spread over a small number of people and/or if they touch a significant part of a person’s life or resources. Diffusion of effects inhibits organization of bias; concentration facilitates it. For example, price controls on prescription drugs initially have concentrated costs (on drug companies and their employees) and diffused benefits (for patients). Consequently, it is much easier to mobilize pressure on policymakers to oppose price controls than it is to mobilize pressure to enact them. Four types of policy conflicts are possible. In two types—when both sides are diffused or both sides are concentrated—neither side is strong enough to dominate the other. Key issues are not likely to become part of the policy agenda, and if they do, policymaking is likely to result in stalemate or in alternating victories for the two sides. The other two configurations yield unequal contests: concentrated interests almost always win against diffused ones. In the case of concentrated benefits versus diffused costs (e.g., restrictions on the right to sue providers, insurance companies, or HMOs), the group that stands to gain will mobilize whereas the larger group whose members stand to lose will remain passive and unorganized (at least in the short term). In the case of diffused benefits versus concentrated costs (e.g., laws facilitating lawsuits against providers, insurance companies, or HMOs), an organized opposition to the costs will easily defeat potential gainers. Unfortunately, Wilson’s model is limited to tangible gains and losses and excludes the emotional and relational dimensions of political experience. As Stone (1988) suggested, gains and losses will be perceived as “significant” only if they can be linked to actors’ values and frames of reference. Many health policy issues are difficult to manage precisely because different groups approach them with different degrees of emotional intensity. For example, using stem cells from aborted fetuses generates highly emotional responses from some interest groups. Supporters (researchers and potential beneficiaries of their research) tend to be “diffused” in many senses of the term. They do not seem to be as emotionally involved in the issue as the opponents, in part because their concerns are based on a possibility of successful research located in an undefined future. Researchers are dispersed, both geographically and in terms of academic discipline, and advocacy groups for different diseases have no natural connections outside of the fetal tissue issue. In contrast, opponents are incensed by concrete uses of fetal tissue in the present; and they are tightly organized through a variety of interlocked conservative political and religious groups (Klatch, 1987). As a result, opponents of stem cell research are both more likely to prevail in private deliberations within government bureaucracies, especially when bureaucrats and elected officials share their ideological bent. They also are better positioned to introduce the issue into public venues at propitious moments, are better equipped to define the debate in preferred terms, and thus are more likely to prevail in public policymaking. Mobilization also depends on advocates’ rhetorical skills—on their ability to define a particular proposal as beneficial to a sufficiently large group of people to gain policymakers’ attention and respect and to energize that coalition. When successful, leaders can 3

Schattschneider (1960) had a great deal of faith in the ability of political parties (appropriately reformed) to counter the power of elites. He did not anticipate the extent to which elites would come to control political parties. For an analysis of variations in the power of business elites over time, see Vogel (1989); for a similar treatment of business elites’ influence over health policy, see Imershein, Rond, and Mathis (1992).

408

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

mobilize nonelites sufficiently to overcome elite opposition and in the process produce significant social and political upheaval, both on particular issues and sometimes across multiple issues. But to do so they must overcome the structural and rhetorical advantages of elite groups. In sum, elite models explain stability well, pluralist models can explain change, but neither can explain both. The mystery is how the dual process of mobilization actually occurs. Contemporary models attempt to solve the mystery by significantly relaxing the rationalistic assumptions of traditional perspectives and by recognizing that there are multiple processes through which policy is developed. Policymaking and Garbage Cans

Governments are organized anarchies, to borrow Michael Cohen, James March, and Herbert Simon’s depiction of some kinds of organizations (1972).4 Public policymaking is characterized by ambiguous preferences, limited understanding of decision processes, and fluid participation. Political actors often fail (or refuse) to make their intentions and goals clear. Creating and maintaining ambiguity about one’s definition of a public problem does have a number of strategic advantages: It allows political actors to synchronize diverse motivations, expectations, and values (Cobb & Elder, 1983; Lindblom, 1959); mobilize support from different interest groups; and unite people who agree on the same policy but for different reasons (Stone, 1988, esp. chap. 6). In addition, strategic ambiguity allows political actors to carve out the time needed for private maneuvering and to placate all sides in a controversy by allowing them all to claim victory (Edelman, 1964; Eisenberg, 1984; Morone, 1994). Ambiguity also allows actors to reconcile their own ambivalence and to develop effective rationalizations for supporting particular policies (Converse, 1964). But strategic ambiguity also means that public policymaking is more a loose collection of ideas competing for attention than a coherent decision structure. In the resulting ad hocracies, decision makers discover their preferences through acting more than they act on pre-existing preferences (Cohen, March, & Olson, 1972; March & Simon, 1970; Weick, 1995). Policymaking deviates substantially from rational models of choice (Stone, 1988). Nonrational policy making also is encouraged by the differentiation and specialization that are inherent in bureaucratic structures. Although political actors may know their own specialties very well, they often do not fully understand either the overall policymaking process or how their actions contribute to that process. They operate by trial and error, learn partial lessons from experience, and manage crises haphazardly. Political actors drift in and out of the decision process, depending on the intensity of their interest in a given topic and the relevance of their pet proposals. Systems (political and organizational) are “a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work” (Cohen, March, & Olson, 1972, p. 2). When political actors do decide to become involved in a decision process, they use it like a “garbage can,” dumping into the discussion a plethora of concerns, only some of which are logically related to the problem at hand. Of course, some issues are dropped into 4

For a summary of models of decision making that focus on nonrationalities, see Conrad and Poole (2002). Masuch and Lapotin (1989) have persuasively argued that the garbage can model is applicable only to a small range of organizations. But policy scholars argue that the range includes policymaking bodies and government agencies.

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

409

the can more often than others, and some proposals are scrutinized more throughly and with greater precision. Through a variety of strategies, elites can push an issue through the process rapidly or can slow or halt the process altogether (Butler et al., 1980; Kingdon, 1995; Westerlund & Sjostrand, 1979). Nonrational garbage can processes seem to be applicable at every stage of policymaking (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993). Before an issue is addressed through public policymaking, long-standing conditions must be defined as “problems” of sufficient importance to be placed on the policy agenda. As we explain in the following section, this redefinition can come from inside or outside of normal policy institutions. Highly public crises (e.g., epidemics), political campaigns (e.g., Harris Wofford’s surprising victory in the 1991 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, in which health policy reform was the central issue), or seemingly unrelated events (e.g., the healthcare needs of Spanish American War Veterans, which led to Theodore Roosevelt’s advocacy of national health insurance) may suddenly elevate an issue or a proposal to the agenda. Alternatively, institutional actors may labor over a particular issue or “solution” for years before they find ways to successfully manipulate political “openings” and elevate it to the policy agenda. Thus, an issue’s appearance on the agenda usually results more from idiosyncratic political processes than from a careful assessment of the nation’s policy needs. Once “problems” are created and defined, they must be attached to potential solutions. In some cases this process is rational—problems are defined and analyzed, and policies are developed to deal with their causes. But in other cases the process is reversed (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Stone, 1988). For example, during the 1960s, when it was politically viable to advocate expanding social service programs, advocates of HMOs touted them as a means of increasing access to care by the poor. Later, when the Nixon administration focused on cost containment, HMO advocates argued that healthcare cost increases were driven by the fee-for-service payment system and could be controlled by increased reliance on managed care. Still later, when the public health community sought to focus on preventive care, HMOs were touted as a solution to that problem as well (Stone, 1988). Finally, after proposals are enacted, they must be implemented. The implementation process takes place in private, in often lengthy and fractious negotiations among institutional actors. The contested character of these negotiations is an open invitation for garbage-can processes to occur. For people steeped in the Western “grand narrative” of progress through rational action, nonrational garbage can processes seem to be somewhat bizarre. But when decision making is nonrational, the importance of discourse and rhetoric to public policy formation is magnified. In rational models, communication is impoverished—limited to the definition of problems and the collection, interpretation, and application of information. Of course, even these information-processing processes are infused with symbolic action, regardless of how narrowly they might be defined (Shelton, 2000; Stone, 1988, esp. chaps. 7 & 13). Numbers and facts are metaphors for and symbols of underlying value sets, definitions of democracy, and presumptions about the proper role of the state in economic decisions. In political action, numbers and facts are made, not discovered. The more nonrational a decision process is, the more central is discourse to its function and outcomes. Goals, core values, actors, interests, and issues all are contested terrain, and policymaking depends on the capacity of various spokespersons to create plausible narratives about health and the healthcare marketplace. Healthcare policy is a web of dilemmas and paradoxes, enigmas that are constructed, revised, and reconstructed through symbolic processes (Conrad & Millay, 2001). Political structures, economic systems,

410

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

and social ideologies create the “space” within which discourse functions. When the structures are fluid, the systems are chaotic, and the ideologies are replete with tensions and contradictions, then the space is enlarged, and the importance of discourse is magnified. Interests, Institutions, and Stability

Research on the actual processes used in policymaking suggests that policies are made through two processes, incrementalism and mobilization. The former is nonconscious, and many of its outcomes are unintended; the latter is conscious and strategic. The former fosters long-term policy stability; the latter leads to bursts of significant change. Because it is so difficult to accurately predict the outcomes of implementing a particular policy option, especially over the long term, decision makers develop a preference for making limited, reversible changes (Hayes, 1992; Lindblom, 1959). Once policies are developed, they eventually are institutionalized, and members of the relevant institutions have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Indeed, every group has an interest in establishing a monopoly on public understandings of a policy area and creating institutional arrangements that perpetuate that monopoly (Kingdon, 1984; Redford, 1969).5 For example, for decades a cozy triangle composed of the Department of Agriculture, farm interests, and cigarette companies controlled federal tobacco policy. Consumer groups, healthcare interests, and the FDA were, in comparison, unorganized and powerless to challenge the iron triangle’s stranglehold on policy (Kingdon, 1995). Policy monopolies are sustained through the cultivation of images of expertise, the structure of public policymaking, and the articulation of a supporting ideology. Claiming distinctive expertise is easiest for topics with high levels of technical complexity (e.g., genetic engineering). But any interest group can solidify its position by claiming that its interest area is technically complex. For example, the medicalization of psychiatric conditions allowed physicians to claim a unique kind of expertise that restricts outsiders’ and influence over related policies (Conrad & Schneider, 1980; Foucault, 1981). “Outsiders” who dare question the judgment of the professional experts can expect to experience their hostility, indignation, and resentment (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993). The views of policy experts are particularly difficult to challenge when they seem to be based on objective measurements, rules, and procedures. As a result, one of the most important activities of policy monopolists is to legitimize their control by creating seemingly neutral and objective procedures, rules, and regulations—DSM IV diagnostic codes, legal restrictions on the right to engage in psychotherapeutic activities, requirements for physician oversight of nonphysician therapists, mechanisms for controlling or influencing the approval of new psychotropic generic drugs or treatment regimes, and so on. Of course, creating supportive structures rarely occurs without conflict. Institutionalized rules inevitably have important policy consequences, which is why seemingly arcane decisions like changes in FDA regulations often become the focus of intense debate (Kriebel, 1991). Riker (1980) noted, “Institutions are no more than rules and rules are themselves the product of social decisions. . . . One can expect that losers on a series of decisions made under a particular set of rules will attempt (often successfully) to change institutions” (pp. 444–445). Institutional rules do change, slowly and incrementally, adding stability to the policymaking process. 5

Political scientists have studied policy monopolies in a variety of settings and have used a number of different terms to describe them—iron triangles, policy whirlpools, and subsystem politics are the most common. The classic study of healthcare policymaking triangles is Starr (1982).

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

411

Stability also is created by the structural configurations in which public policymaking takes place. In normal times, a rough equilibrium exists on any particular issue because the complex web of interest group pressures balance one another (Grossman & Helpman, 2001). Advocates adapt to these realities and focus their efforts on quietly influencing administrative decisions while waiting for opportunities to mobilize other stakeholders. They keep their favored issues alive by creating a kind of “steady-state noise,” issuing white papers, publicizing recent studies of the situation, testifying before legislative bodies, and/or participating in media events. Policy articles in the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association, talk show appearances by representatives of the AMA or FamiliesUSA, and reports by U.N. health-related agencies all keep healthcare policy matters in the public memory if not on the public policymaking agenda. During times of quiescence, the “hidden clusters” of institutional policymakers spend their time assessing conditions, issuing mandated reports, and devising and revising possible “solutions” to those conditions (Kingdon, 1995). As a result of their efforts, policies change slowly and steadily, largely outside of public attention. Public decision systems are disaggregated. One of the effects of this arrangement is the development of policies that are logically inconsistent with one another. For example, the U.S. tobacco industry long has benefited from institutional arrangements that define tobacco as an agricultural product little different from corn or wheat, whereas some federal agencies, in contrast to the Department of Agriculture, treat it as a threat to public health and actively discourage its use. As a result, policies emerge in very nonrational ways, as one institution offsets the activities of other institutions.6 Policy monopolies are sustained by ideologies as well as by images and decision structures. Monopoly control is strongest when it is based on a supporting ideology tightly linked to the dominant values of the society. For example, the specter of “socialized medicine” and all of its ideological baggage is readily available to opponents of virtually any government action that influences healthcare. Ideological commitments to “choice,” “free markets,” “provider-patient relationships,” and so on, make it very difficult for reformers to persuade decision makers to even appear to intervene in existing arrangements (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Kingdon, 1995; Riker, 1980, 1982). Political Upheavals and Punctuated Partial Equilibria

Of course, policy monopolies do not permanently control the policymaking process; change does occur. Two metaphors dominate theories of how policy equilibria are upset— streams and windows. Both were popularized by John Kingdon (1995), who suggested that during policy equilibria three processes operate—the identification and definition of social conditions as problems, the development and presentation of policies (that is, proposed solutions), and the vagaries of politics. Normally, the three streams are independent of one another. However, moments arise when the three streams come together, suddenly transforming issues that long had been the province of the hidden clusters of researchers, career bureaucrats, and lower-level political appointees into items on the public decision agenda (pp. 87, 145). Policy windows open and a “visible cluster” of high-level elected officials who receive a great deal of press and public attention suddenly deem the issue worthy of their attention (pp. 68–69). Some windows remain open long enough for major 6

Equilibrium also means that legislative bodies tend to process topics in a serial fashion, examining an issue only when it becomes visible, important, and controversial and moving on to other issues when the public furor over that issue subsides (McCubbins & Schwartz, 1984; Redford, 1969; Simon, 1983).

412

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

policy changes to be made; others close so quickly that little substantive action is taken. But, as Stone (1988) concluded, “Controlling the number and kinds of alternatives considered is the essence of the political game. Keeping things off the agenda is a form of power as important as getting them on” (p. 196). How and Why Policy Windows Open. Policy windows open when powerful publics are mobilized to act. Mobilization occurs when (a) conditions reach a critical mass or a crisis demands attention of the visible cluster and/or (b) a situation is successfully exploited by the hidden cluster of professional policymakers. Crises become crises only when they are perceived as such. Social conditions may exist for long periods of time without being defined in the public mind as problems that require action (Wildavsky, 1979). Highly visible events may trigger perceptions that a crisis exists. Or the transformation may occur when routine indicators of social conditions reveal changes that are perceived as significant. Whatever the triggering event might be, it leads to action only if advocates successfully use the available “evidence” to capture the attention of the media and policymakers (Cobb & Elder, 1991; Downs, 1972; Nelson, 1984; Walker, 1991). But crises, disasters, and other media events by themselves rarely open a policy window. The conditions that are accentuated by a triggering event must already exist, they must be salient to the public and to policymakers, they must be politically relevant, and attention to them must be sustained. For conditions to become “problems” (much less “crises”), they must be linked to core values of the public and the interests of decision makers. Sometimes advocates fail to make the former link. For example, some interest groups view access to healthcare by the poor as a right and favor a number of policies that correspond to this ideological position (Reagan, 1999). Others view healthcare as a commodity to be purchased like any other. Since most citizens have some access to healthcare—especially the politically powerful middle- and upper-class voters and seniors— they have little reason to define healthcare as a right. Add to this the pervasive bias among those groups against “welfare,” especially for “undeserving” citizens, and it is no surprise that advocates of increased healthcare access find it very hard to forge the necessary links to public values.7 Creating these links is especially difficult since opponents can readily connect virtually any proposal for increasing access to negative values like “government intervention,” “socialized medicine,” or “cost increases.” Since decision makers have little pragmatic political interest in meeting the healthcare needs of the poor (or any other group with limited clout), the issue rarely stays on the public agenda long enough for corrective policies to be implemented (Kingdon, 1995, p. 111). At other times, advocates successfully appeal to the public’s values but fail to satisfy the interests of decision makers. For example, restraining the cost of government programs is a highly visible issue for the public. But in many cases government spending benefits powerful political constituencies. One of the policymakers that John Kingdon (1995) interviewed provided a pithy summary: “Economists somehow think that waste is a politically potent issue. But they get to the Hill and discover that Congressmen favor waste. . . . For a politician, the costs are the benefits” (p. 137). Policy windows also may open from the inside, when members of the hidden cluster detect a sudden increase in a particular social ill and find ways to link those conditions 7

For example, AARP strongly supported the Clinton healthcare plan until it received a deluge of complaints from its members in Florida and Arizona that the plan would spend taxpayer dollars to provide healthcare for illegal immigrants.

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

413

to powerful symbols or important public values (Aberbach, Putnam, & Backman, 1984; Cobb & Elder, 1983; Cobb & Ross, 1997; Cohen, 1981; Edelman, 1967; Rochefort & Cobb, 1992, 1994; Stone, 1988, esp. chap. 7). For example, during the 1980s, professional policymakers published studies showing that healthcare costs were increasing rapidly and by doing so moved cost containment to the top of the public policy agenda, just as the publication of data revealing rising hospital costs put that issue on the agenda during the mid-1970s. Proposals that the hidden cluster long had been developing suddenly became sellable—programs to control costs (e.g., utilization reviews of Medicare costs, DRGs for hospitals, and HMOs) or programs that cost very little (e.g., immunizations for children).8 When these policy windows open, entrepreneurs are able to exploit a critical mass of sentiment: “Advocates lie in wait in and around government with their solutions at hand, waiting for . . . a development in the political stream that they can use to their advantage” (Kingdon, 1995, p. 165). As long as an entrepreneur is well connected, understands the power of symbolism, and has strong negotiating skills, he or she may be able to raise an issue to the top of the political agenda. Entrepreneurs often are legislators, but they also may come from the ranks of political appointees. Paul Ellwood energetically sold HMOs to the Nixon administration as an appropriate Republican response to healthcare cost increases (Bauman, 1976; Brown, 1983; Falkson, 1980; Marmor, 2000). Later, Hale Champion, undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration, moved HMOs to the top of his administration’s agenda (Kingdon, 1995). Of course, there is no guarantee that these open windows will result in successful policies. For example, in 1979 “insider” pressures led Congress to enact catastrophic health insurance in spite of overwhelming evidence that it was exactly the wrong plan because it would encourage providers to deemphasize primary care and use the highest cost treatments available (Kingdon, 1995, p. 57). Similarly, external pressures to contain costs led to the adoption of DRGs, which encouraged hospitals to diagnose patient conditions in ways that placed the patients in more severe categories or, worse yet, discharge ill patients as soon as they use up their allotted reimbursement (Moon, 1996; Stone, 1988). In contrast, political processes may keep the best proposals from even being considered regardless of how they arrive on the policy agenda. How and Why Windows Close. Sometimes policy windows close because the coalition that forced the issue onto the agenda is not stable enough to sustain pressure on decision makers.9 In other cases the precipitating event that vaulted the issue into the forefront is not followed up by similar events or discourse that keeps the issue alive. The public has a limited attention span; the media’s is even shorter (Downs, 1972; Kingdon, 1995). In addition, the public and the media tend to focus on an issue late in the decision process, when it is most newsworthy or dramatic but after the deliberations have largely run their course (Jones & Strahan, 1985; Rankin, Neely, & Melber, 1984; Simon, 1977, 1985; Walker, 1991). However, the most important factors that cause policy windows to

8 Ironically, these “indicators” may lead policymakers to act to “solve” problems that already are in decline. Broad scale indicators showed that the severity of the U.S. drug problem declined throughout the 1980s, leading Baumgartner and Jones to note that “While President Bush [I] made his war on drugs a high priority and convinced a majority of Americans that it was the most serious problem facing the nation, virtually every indicator of drug abuse showed that the severity of the problem was declining” (1993: 158). Similarly politicians made violent crime a major issue long after crime rates started to plummet. 9 Kingdon (1995, p. 169) argued that this is not relevant to the coalition of groups interested in healthcare. Opposition comes from outside of that coalition, not inside of it.

414

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

close seem to be the blocking strategies of interest group organizations (Cobb & Ross, 1997), the lack of viable solutions to the problem, or, conversely, the resolution of the problem. Interest groups play two primary roles in policymaking. On the one hand, they are part of the hidden cluster that exploits opportune political moments (Olson, 1965). The federal program supporting kidney dialysis emerged from just this kind of interest group advocacy. Enacted with little analysis of its potential costs, the program became very expensive but has never been seriously challenged (Marmor, 2000). The cadre of conservatives who tout medical savings accounts as a solution to virtually any healthcare problem form another such group; liberals who repeatedly advocate national health insurance form still another (Kingdon, 1995). However, the most important function of interest groups is to block proposals from being enacted. Although interest groups always would like to see certain policy changes enacted, they typically prefer to maintain the status quo. During periods of policy quiescence, they learn how to benefit from exiting structures while fostering favorable incremental changes. Virtually any new policy threatens some valued prerogatives and thus will face intense opposition (Kingdon, 1995). Interest groups have a number of blocking strategies readily available. One is to manipulate the structure of government policymaking—to foster and/or encourage turf battles among various committees, between the houses of Congress, between the executive and legislative branches, and/or between the federal and state governments. If an issue has a great deal of popular support, interest groups face a significant challenge. But if the public is apathetic, confused, or ambivalent (or can be made to feel apathetic, confused, or ambivalent), turf battles are easier to facilitate. For example, the popularity of national health insurance in 1979 overwhelmed a long-standing turf battle between Senators Kennedy and Long, allowing the Carter administration’s proposals to move along more rapidly than they otherwise would have (Kingdon, 1995, pp. 157–158). Conversely, growing confusion over the Clinton health plan, stimulated by public appeals by interest groups, doomed it to fail. As well as influencing the definition of conditions as “problems,” interest groups also may be able to define “solutions” in negative ways. If two groups can publicize contradictory proposals, they may well be able to close the policy window altogether. At worst, they can delay final action until popular excitement over the topic wanes (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993, p. xiv). Another negative strategy is to undermine or split the coalition advocating change. Through the mid-1970s, the strongest advocates of national health insurance insisted on a comprehensive, universal program. With the election of a Democratic Congress and a supportive administration, the late 1970s seemed to be a historically opportune moment for the enactment of some type of program. But opponents were able to magnify splits within the Carter administration and exploit tensions between the administration and the congressional leadership over the scope of coverage. Their tactics delayed the presentation of the administration’s proposal and created openings that other opposition groups were able to exploit successfully (Light, 1982). By the time a proposal reached Congress, public pressure for the measure had eroded, and questions raised about the viability of any financing mechanism allowed interest groups to defeat the proposal. Interest groups also can go directly to the public, and increasingly did so during the 1990s. The Coalition for Healthcare Choices’ famous “Harry and Louise” television ads successfully preyed on public fear of “big government” to define the Clinton plan as excessively complex, expensive, and intrusive (Aaron, 1996; Hacker, 1996; Skocpol, 1996). Of course, the larger, more sweeping, and more complex a proposal is, the more vulnerable it

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

415

is to attack. And because large, sweeping bills are most likely to upset the political system that supports interest groups’ prerogatives, defeating them is in the interest groups’ best interests.10 Policy windows also close because some problems simply do not have politically viable solutions. Long-term care may be such a problem. The need is clear (and increasing as the baby boomers age), and the political stream is in place as a result of the power of the “gray lobby.” But no policies have been developed that would simultaneously control costs and ensure adequate access or that would deal effectively with the logistical problems involved in matching patients to the appropriate facilities or types of care (Kingdon, 1995, p. 178). In fact, for reasons that we explain later, finding solutions to health-related policy issues may be inherently problematic (Navarro, 1994; Peterson, 1998). Proposals of limited scope may be financially viable but are unlikely to have sufficiently widespread effects to garner significant public support. Conversely, comprehensive proposals are vulnerable to blocking strategies by concentrated interest groups and to the vagaries of public attention, even if favored by a large (but differentiated) group of citizens. The intense desire to act soon gives way to the recognition of the high financial and social costs that are involved (Downs, 1972). Attention to the issue dissolves or is focused on making minor, inexpensive changes (e.g., the enactment of medical savings accounts and health insurance portability after the demise of the Clinton health plan). New healthcare proposals may shock the system for a time, may even generate incremental changes, and may reduce the power of opposing interest groups. But it is more likely that proposals will mobilize opponents and return the system to an equilibrium in which the various interest groups retain their essential power relationships. Finally, windows close because problems are “resolved.” Sometimes, problems are actually solved. Proponents mobilize popular enthusiasm that is sufficiently strong and long-lasting to undermine entrenched political subsystems and substitute new institutional structures (Schattschneider, 1960). For example, although pockets of need still exist— geographic, economic, and disease-specific—childhood immunization rates in the United States have improved markedly during recent decades as the result of successful policy initiatives. In fact, a great deal of progress has been made in children’s health for the simple reason that it is easy to develop public pressure in favor of children’s programs and relatively easy to devise concrete steps to take on their behalf. In addition, it is difficult to mobilize opposition to such programs. As stated by a federal health policymaker, “Kids are cheap. You can do what you have to do with kids in the medical area without spending a lot of money because, basically, kids are well. So, if you’re looking for something to do in health and you don’t want to cost a lot, do kids” (quoted in Kingdon, 1995, p. 108). At other times, problems are so intractable that advocates simply give up in defeat. Failure removes a topic from the policy agenda by exhausting its advocates and persuading policymakers to distance themselves from the issue. Mobilizing advocates to try again is difficult, and persuading politicians to take political risks in favor of what seems to be a 10

Our comments on the range of blocking strategies available to interest groups are not intended to suggest that the groups are omnipotent. The power of the AMA and NHA was reduced with the passage of Medicare and subsequent regulatory programs. And the passage of incremental legislation creates inertia in new directions and may have unintended consequences that undermine or alter dominant interest group coalitions. Patients and providers quickly adapted to Medicare, and the specter of “socialized medicine,” at least for selected populations, became less foreboding (Kingdon, 1995; Marmor, 2000; Moon, 1996). The rapid growth of HMOs during the 1990s magnified tensions between specialists and family physicians within the AMA and further weakened the AMA’s stranglehold on policymaking. At the same time, incremental changes lead to the development of new interest groups and interest group coalitions as well as new strategies for blocking policy initiatives.

416

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

lost cause is virtually impossible (Price, 1978). This is especially true when a proposal meets a highly public demise, like the Clinton Health Security Act. RHETORIC AND HEALTHCARE POLICYMAKING

As if policymaking in general was not sufficiently complex and convoluted, healthcare policymaking is bedeviled by its own complications. One complication stems from a fundamental debate over societal definitions of what healthcare is, a right or a commodity; another is grounded in the multiple, incongruent goals that characterize healthcare policymaking (Marmor, 1994; Reagan, 1999; Stone, 1988). Healthcare: Commodity or Right?

The dominant ideology articulated in contemporary healthcare policymaking treats healthcare as a commodity and assumes that the optimal system for delivering it is the “free market.” Indeed, in the U.S. body politic, the one premise that is beyond critique is the inherent superiority of capitalist systems (Stone, 1988; Weiss, 1997). As we have suggested throughout this chapter, a number of factors have influenced U.S. healthcare policy, from the fragmented structure of the U.S. government (Grogan, 1994; Kronenfeld, 1997) to the changing interests of key economic actors (Marmor, 1994). But the ideology of “free market romanticism” has long played a central role.11 Michael Reagan (1999) concluded that “to understand the nature of American healthcare . . . requires that we take a side trip into the basic language of . . . laissez-faire ideology” (pp. 3–4; also see Blank, 1988; Marmor & Hamburger, 1994; Kronenfeld, 1997; Marmor, 2000; Starr, 1982, 1994). Laissez-faire capitalism is based on the assumption that a free-market economic system includes sufficient checks and balances to ensure that the legitimate interests of all members of the society will be met. Government should have only a very limited role in the economy. It sometimes may need to ensure that economic markets remain competitive (e.g., through anti-monopoly laws) or that property rights are protected (Reagan, 1999), but with these few exceptions government is best when it does the least. This view of government’s role in the economy is grounded in three assumptions. First, what might be called the futility thesis holds that any government is incapable of effectively directing a society or economy. The presumed miracle of the free market is that its processes work “invisibly.” It does not have to be understood and cannot consciously be managed. When a government acts, it inevitably bases its policies on an incomplete understanding of social and economic processes and is often biased by nonmarket values. In very rare instances, the government may actually do what the market needs to have done at a particular moment, but these instances are purely accidental. Second, government activities inevitably produce serious, perverse, unintended, and unanticipated consequences (the perversity thesis). Third, as a result, whenever the government acts, it is likely to jeopardize the virtues of the capitalist system and the economic gains that have been achieved through the free market (the jeopardy thesis) (Aune, 2001; Hirschman, 1991).12 11 The term is borrowed from Morone and Goggin (1995). George Soros (1998, 2000) uses the more pejorative term “market fundamentalist,” but both phrases are intended to suggest that free marketeers’ commitments to the ideology are both absolute and grounded in faith more than science. We prefer the milder term because it better represents the orientation of the key actors in the case that we will analyze. 12 Professional economists’ adherence to laissez-faire theory waxed and waned throughout the 20th century (Irwin, 1996). But its availability as a rhetorical resource, as well as its use by conservative politicians, was constant.

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

417

When applied to healthcare, free market romanticism assumes that increased reliance on market competition will result in a more efficient allocation of resources and a higher level of distributive justice than any form of government involvement (Conrad & Millay, 2001; Patel & Rushefsky, 1995, p. 11). It appeals to the traditional individualism of U.S. society (Beauchamp, 1996, pp. 81–111; Daniels, Light, & Kaplan, 1996: chap. 2; Weiss, 1997) and deeply held suspicions about government interference in the economic system (Patel & Rushefsky, 1995; Skocpol, 1994). It matters little that the basic notion of a “market” in healthcare is ill defined or that the “corrective mechanisms” of that market are only vaguely understood.13 Nor is it important that a great deal of empirical evidence demonstrates that free market theories do not apply to this sector of the economy (Blank, 1988; Conrad & Millay, 2001; Kingdon, 1995; Kleinke, 1998; Marmor, 1990, 1994; Roemer, 1994; Rosenthal, 1980; Weiss, 1997). Increasing the supply of healthcare services often does nothing to reduce their costs. Healthcare consumers lack the information, expertise, and mobility that is required for them to make economically rational choices (Blank, 1988; Enthoven, 1979; Roseneau, 1994). The healthcare market neither controls nor eliminates “externalities” wherein the decisions of one consumer influence the choices available to other consumers. But the empirical realities of the healthcare marketplace are of secondary importance. What does matter is the widespread acceptance of at least some of the elements of free market romanticism—the “reflexive piety of Americans before our idols of ‘the marketplace’ and ‘free choice’” (Marmor, 1994, p. 149). However, the alternative, treating health or healthcare as a right, also is problematic (Bracci, 2001; Reagan, 1999). It requires policymakers to either stipulate limits or to advocate universal coverage and virtually unlimited care, both of which have proven to not be politically viable. Determining which providers, industries, and sectors of the health economy (e.g., mental health, chiropractic care, generic drugs) public policy should encourage and which it should limit is both ethically problematic and guaranteed to stimulate the strongest possible opposition from interest groups. Attempting to develop policies that define some categories of patients as deserving government assistance and/or some providers or procedures as warranting government control has been more acceptable but still raises serious ethical questions, particularly among those who advocate treating healthcare as a right. It makes little economic sense to prohibit poor women from receiving contraceptives or abortions or to encourage government financing of care for high-expense groups (e.g., the elderly) while allowing large numbers of children or working parents to be uninsured. However, once healthcare is treated as a right, then a plethora of social values become relevant to policymaking, and rhetorical processes quickly begin to dominate economic considerations (Banks, 1989–90; Bayer, 1995; Scott, 2001; Treichler, 1988). The Healthcare “Trilemma”

The second complication inherent in healthcare policymaking involves goals. Americans long have agreed that they want unlimited access to high-quality healthcare (at least for themselves) and at low cost. The problem is that it may not be possible to achieve these three goals simultaneously (Marmor, 1994; Reagan, 1999). Historically, proposals for government action have sought to address one of the trilemma issues (cost, access, or quality) at a time and in doing so, sacrifice the other two. Consequently, opponents can always argue that the effort is futile. In addition, it is easy to marshal arguments that the 13

The first eight chapters of Healthy Markets (Peterson, 1998) deal with this issue.

418

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

proposal will have perverse effects on the other criteria and will jeopardize the capacity of the U.S. system to meet the other goals (Reagan, 1999; Roemer, 1994). Attempting to deal with this trilemma is complicated further by the activities of powerful interest groups with conflicting preferences and agendas. As a result, policymaking is piecemeal, oscillating from one goal to another (Marmor, 2000). Since the public policymaking process in general also encourages fragmented policies, the health trilemma has led to what even the staunchest defenders of “the world’s best medical care system” admit is a uniquely complex, convoluted, and problematic mosaic of policies and systems (Aaron, 1996; Kleinke, 1998; Leyerle, 1994). Conversely, if a government proposal attempts to address all three issues simultaneously, as the Clinton plan did, it raises the specter of “socialized medicine” and “runaway government bureaucracies” (Shelton, 2000; Skocpol, 1996). The sheer complexity of a comprehensive proposal, combined with inevitable tensions and contradictions among its components, make it easy to assert its futility, perversity, and potential jeopardy, a message that is especially powerful for an audience that values individual choice and is deeply suspicious of government intervention in the free market (Patel & Rushefsky, 1985). The adverse effects of past partial reforms of the U.S. system (e.g., the unanticipated consequences of Medicare DRGs, which even proponents of national health insurance admit have been self-defeating or dangerous) can be used to apply the futility thesis to new proposals (Weiss, 1997). Thus, the combination of the trilemma inherent in health policy and the ideology of the healthcare free market allows the development of a dominant romantic narrative and creates an almost insurmountable rhetorical problem for advocates of reform. Only at very special moments do policy windows open sufficiently to allow change to occur, and those windows rarely stay open long enough for systematic policies to emerge. HEALTHCARE POLICYMAKING IN ACTION: THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD TO MEDICARE

In many ways, the enactment of Medicare provides a paradigm of the policymaking processes that we have described in this chapter.14 As a prominent proponent of Medicare during the 1960s told Kingdon (1995), it was hardly the result of rational processes: It was a crazy way to go about it, from a rational point of view. Here we took the one group in the population, the elderly, that was the most expensive, needed the most healthcare, for whom medical care would do the least amount of good, for whom there was the least payoff from a societal point of view. But we did it because that’s politically what we could run with at the time. (p. 167)

In most of the industrialized world, national health insurance moved in the opposite direction, beginning with poor adults, then expanding to their dependents, and then moving up the income ladder. But in the United States, policy windows open first for groups who are perceived to be both needy and “deserving”—children and the aged (Marmor, 2000). Health coverage for the aged was first seriously considered during the waning years of the Eisenhower administration. The hidden cluster of institutional actors had continued to 14 Of course, space limitations preclude our providing an extensive summary. For more detailed analyses, see the three works that have served as the primary sources for this section: Feder, 1977; Marmor, 2000; Moon, 1996.

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

419

quietly advocate for change since the defeat of the Truman administration’s national health insurance proposals. In 1956, advocates were successful in adding disability insurance to the Social Security program, but they made little headway afterwards. In some ways, little had changed since Theodore Roosevelt’s consideration of national health insurance. During the almost 100 years of debate over healthcare in the United States, neither the actors nor the arguments have changed. Regardless of the specific proposal being considered, support typically comes from labor, nurses, social workers, lobbyists for the public health community, and groups that will benefit directly from the proposal; opposition comes from the insurance industry, medical lobbyists (primarily the AMA and the American Hospital Association), business lobbyists, and various conservative or libertarian groups. Proponents appeal to the topoi of citizen rights, social responsibility, and compassion; opponents tout the virtues of the free market, raise the specter of socialism, exalt the sanctity of the provider-patient relationship, and decry constraints on patient choice (Lowi, 1964). Marmor (2000) concluded that, from the Truman administration on, policymakers have found that “the federal government’s role in the financing of personal health services is one of the small class of public issues that can be counted on to activate deep, emotional, and bitter cleavages between what public commentators call liberal and conservative pressure groups” (p. 17). Advocates during the Eisenhower years had anticipated these complaints and revised their proposal accordingly. They carefully linked their “Medicare” proposal to Social Security and suggested that it be funded through a regressive tax system in order to define it as an earned benefit, not a “welfare” program. They excluded coverage for physicians, as the AMA demanded, instead focusing on hospitalization. They also provided the states with a great deal of discretion in determining benefits and administering the program. In spite of their moderation, the opposition to their proposal was predictable, hostile, and successful. In 1960, John F. Kennedy, with strong labor support, made a program of compulsory health insurance for aged Social Security beneficiaries a major campaign theme. But even Kennedy recognized the political minefield that his proposal would have to traverse: “The program . . . is not socialized medicine . . . [but] is a program of prepayment for healthcare costs with absolute freedom of choice guaranteed. Every person will be able to choose his own doctor and hospital” (interview with the New York Times, February 10, 1961, cited in Marmor, 2000, p. 31). Public opinion seemed to be with him: Two thirds of the people interviewed in a Gallup poll favored increasing the Social Security tax to pay for old-age medical insurance (New York Herald Tribune, June 9, 1961). But Medicare illustrates how unstable public opinion is when health policy issues are involved: Once opposition groups begin to attack individual programs, support plummets (Key, 1961). Kennedy, aware that his opponents in Congress felt politically secure and that a protracted fight over Medicare would threaten the rest of his agenda, quickly relegated the bill to a lower priority. Eventually he decided to accept defeat on the bill in 1961 but to use Congressional hearings to garner public pressure for a second try later. In the interim, the AMA mobilized its own constituents through “Operation Hometown,” a program that reproduced and distributed anti-Medicare rhetoric in virtually every form imaginable, including a kit for high school debaters, to oppose “‘Fedicare’—a costly concoction of bureaucracy, bad medicine, and an unbalanced budget” (AMA, 1961, p. 1). The opposition was sufficiently successful that the administration decided not to risk a vote on the measure, fearing that too large a defeat would undermine efforts to reintroduce the measure in future sessions. Medicare would have to wait until the Democratic landslide in 1964 momentarily opened a favorable policy window.

420

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

The 1964 elections gave the United States a president committed to a Great Society in which the elderly possessed healthcare insurance as well as a Democratic coalition in Congress that did not have to rely on support from conservative Southerners. As important, it led to changes in congressional rules and structures that made it more difficult for even well-organized opponents to block legislation. Faced with the almost certain passage of some kind of bill, Medicare’s opponents shifted their strategies. The AMA and its Republican allies advocated limiting the scope of Medicare’s coverage to poor seniors, hoping to reduce support for the measure among politically powerful middle- and upperclass citizens (Moon, 1996). In response, proponents opposed any kind of means test in order to broaden support for the bill. Opponents also wanted to increase the range of services covered by the program, including medical care provided by physicians (a reversal of their position during the previous debates), and they produced public opinion polls showing popular support for that step. Their goal was to add so many debatable provisions that the process would become stalemated until popular support waned. Almost every interest group with a stake in the bill embarked on a media campaign to create public pressure on members of the House Ways and Means Committee. Conspicuously absent from the media war was the elder lobby, which kept a very low profile during the debate over the bill (Moon, 1996). Led by Chairman Wilbur Mills, a long-time opponent of federal health initiatives, the committee negotiated around a complex set of specific issues. Proponents were willing to sacrifice prescription drug and nursing home coverage in order to speed up the process. They also assumed that those provisions could be added incrementally over time (Marmor, 2000, esp. chap. 9). Chairman Mills and other opponents were convinced that Medicare would be so expensive that future expansion would be impossible. As a result, they were willing to compromise in order to “build a fence around Medicare” and forestall the demands for liberalization that they knew eventually would come. Mills’ proposal to divide Medicare into two parts, a hospitalization part funded by mandatory payroll taxes and a voluntary “Part B” covering other forms of care, effectively ended the debate. The sudden support for Medicare from long-term opponents seemed to befuddle the administration. But it reflected the congressional opponents’ reading of the changed climate in Washington and allowed them to emerge from the battle as architects of Medicare instead of just adding their names to the list of its defeated opponents (Marmor, 2000). When the bill reached the Senate floor, an amendment regarding the procedures for billing medical specialists in hospitals that infuriated the AMA passed by a substantial margin in spite of the organization’s strongest opposition, signaling just how much had changed as a result of Johnson’s landslide. The policy monopoly of the “medical-industrial complex” had started to weaken. As soon as the bill passed, a number of provider groups, notably the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, called on physicians to boycott Medicare. No noticeable boycott ensued, and within a year 17.6 million seniors had enrolled in Plan B out of the19 million who were eligible. Ironically, the greatest financial beneficiaries of Medicare’s passage were the people who opposed it most vehemently. The bill’s proponents had adopted Medicare’s insurancelike billing and payment structure in order to minimize physician opposition and chose not to attempt to control physician costs until 1984 for the same reason. As a result, between 1965 and 1970, physician fees rose 5% to 8% a year, and physician incomes rose 11% a year (roughly twice the overall cost-of-living increase) and continued to increase for the next decade and a half. The power of the healthcare industry increased, as stable Medicare payments provided giants like Baxter-Travenol and American Hospital Supply the financial resources to grow.

18. ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC

421

Just as ironic were the unintended or unanticipated consequences of Medicare’s enactment. The most important was an almost immediate shift in concern toward cost containment and away from access to healthcare. Cost increases were immediate and significant, although they were not the result of increased utilization. Instead, they stemmed from higher costs per treatment event, a factor that is closely related to the use of new technologies (Marmor, 2000: 108; Moon, 1996). By the early 1970s, steps were taken to control costs, from PSROs to HMOs to DRGs to benefit reductions. Each of these efforts led to changes in practice (e.g., shifting care to nonhospital sites), some of which had adverse consequences for the healthcare system as a whole (e.g., hospital cost-shifting strategies, early discharge, and “DRG creep” by both physicians and hospitals). They had a mixed effect on costs, however. By the mid-1980s, the reforms, especially by the Reagan administration in 1982, created a situation in which “the nation’s senior citizens were spending the same proportion of their incomes on medical care as they had before Medicare’s enactment” (Schlesinger & Drumheller, 1988, p. 106). Although some expansion of the program did occur, most notably the 1972 addition of nonelderly disabled citizens, cost concerns now guarantee that every effort to change the program, no matter how minor, will be the subject of spirited lobbying and highly public (and rancorous) debate. As Chairman Mills predicted, rising costs built a “fence” around Medicare. Similarly, access to healthcare started to decline, especially for the poor, as hospitals reduced their pro bono and reduced cost activities. Support among seniors for expansion of the program also declined as wealthier retirees opted for “Medigap” policies, which exacerbated problems of both access and cost (Chulis et al., 1993). The final irony may be that both the administrative problems of the Medicare system (Morone, 1994) and cost increases had come under control by the end of the 1980s. Per enrollee Medicare expenditures eventually stabilized, as did overall expenditures for the program (Moon & Zuckerman, 1995; Reinhart, 1997). It is a tribute to the rhetoric of Medicare’s opponents that neither of these facts is widely understood or believed. CONCLUSION

Healthcare policymaking has long been characterized by intractable conflicts, and every citizen and every U.S. organization will continue to be influenced by the policymaking process and its outcomes. Relatively few citizens pay close attention to health policy debates, although almost all become intensely emotionally energized when they perceive that policy initiatives threaten to change their personal healthcare system. Instead, they leave healthcare politics to professional associations and organizational rhetors. As a result, more so than with other public policy issues, messages and arguments that attack healthrelated policy proposals are overwhelmingly powerful (Cobb & Kuklinski, 1997). People tend to be risk averse, especially regarding topics that have a direct impact on their lives (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982), and negative appeals tend to stand out more and be more memorable, especially for a populace whose attention to public policy debates is fleeting (Lau, 1985). If the populace also has come to distrust government, the power of negative appeals is magnified, especially when initiatives are complex and future consequences are unpredictable. As Cobb and Kuklinski (1997) concluded, “Under these circumstances, one argument against a proposal will speak more loudly than several in support” (p. 91). Compounding the situation further, “easy” arguments—arguments that are short, simple, and symbolic and conjure up readily accessible images—influence popular perceptions about health policy more than “hard” arguments, which are long, are complex, and focus

422

CONRAD AND McINTUSH

on problems rather than outcomes. As a result, the dynamics of health policy discourse make it is easy for interest groups to rapidly turn public opinion against proposals for change, particularly if the proposals are comprehensive. Major reforms are by definition hard to understand, and every detail opens the entire proposal up to easy attacks. As a result, policy elites are able to mobilize public opinion against change, just as they are able to manipulate the policymaking process in ways that favor stability or incrementalism. Of course, health policy windows do open, and significant change is possible. But the nature of public policymaking and the nature health policy discourse combine to make those openings rare and to rapidly close the windows whenever they appear. REFERENCES Biersack, R., Hernson, P., & Wilcox, C. (1999). After the revolution: PACS, lobbies, and the Republican Congress. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Cobb, R., & Ross, M. (1997). Cultural strategies of agenda denial. Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press. Goldstein, K. (1999). Interest groups, lobbying and participation in America. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Grossman, G., & Helpman, E. (2001). Special interest politics. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

19 Working Well: Communicating Individual and Collective Wellness Initiatives Patricia Geist-Martin San Diego State University

Kim Horsley Independent Consultant

Angele Farrell Remedy Intelligent Staffing

Health is intimately connected with the places and times we inhabit. Thomas McKewon (1988) studied the history of illness and disease and concluded that in all historical eras the most common causes of sickness and death were “the prevailing conditions of life” (p. 91). Today, as we begin the new millennium, the conditions of our lives continue to significantly impact the diseases we experience. Anorexia nervosa, depression, AIDS, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, hypertension, and stroke are all easily recognizable, devastating diseases that plague today’s life experience. Yet, none of these diseases was significant or even recognized just 100 years ago. With most Americans spending almost 50% of their lives at work, undoubtedly organizations play a large role in constructing the conditions of a person’s life and, consequently his or her experiences of health and disease. Often this role is central to a person’s experience of health and illness, shown by the fact that 78% of people claim that work is their biggest source of stress (Quick, Quick, Nelson, & Hurrell, 1997). The effects of stress, such as poor mental and physical health, cause more employees to take sick days and put in claims for workers’ compensation—indicators that the workplace is frequently an unhealthy environment. As a result, companies are developing wellness campaigns to combat the problems arising from stress. From large corporations to small nonprofit organizations, employers in a broad spectrum of industries are implementing initiatives to make employees more comfortable at work and to positively affect the bottom line (Chenoweth, 1994; Harris, 1994). These initiatives include but are not limited to fitness and nutrition classes, smoking cessation campaigns,

423

424

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

intramural sports programs, counseling, personal time off, flex-time programs, and programs in which employees earn extra vacation time in exchange for working overtime hours. However, employees do not always participate in company-sponsored wellness initiatives designed to help them. For example, owing to feelings of embarrassment, employees may not admit that they could benefit from wellness programs and may therefore limit their involvement (Schott, 1999). Employees may avoid participation because they feel uneasy about the employer’s involvement in their personal affairs or do not trust counselors to keep their health problems confidential (Murphy, Hurrell, & Quick, 1992; Stainbrook & Green, 1989). Furthermore, considering the diversity of the U.S. workforce, differences in how health is defined and treated across cultures affect individual participation. What may be considered a health concern in one culture may not be a concern in another. Similarly, an appropriate course of prevention or treatment in one culture may be stigmatized in another (Cline & McKenzie, 1998; Kreps & Thomton, 1992). Communication is central to the social environment created at work. It influences interactions among coworkers, the relationship between what people do and who they are, the ways in which people’s work time interfaces with their personal lives, and people’s overall experience of wellness and disease at work and at home. If organizations are going to promote employees’ health and create healthy workplaces, then the responsibility for change must not be placed completely on the individual. Actions need to focus on communication and the organization of work practices (Mattson, Clair, Sanger, & Kunkel, 2000). This means fostering the social and environmental conditions that promote a less stressful, healthier lifestyle and enhancing the well-being of the whole person in the context of his or her social environment (Ahmed, Kolker, & Coelho, 1979). But what does it mean to communicate in ways that promote well-being in the context of today’s organizations? If preventive models of health, including wellness models are to be effective, they must take into account individual and cultural conceptualizations of well-being. To be successful, messages must evolve from both a transmission mode of communication and a constitutive one (Craig, 1999). In the transmission view, communication is used as an instrument for achieving a desired end. Individuals’ talk at work, for instance, might be guided by their desire to be remain healthy and work productively, and an organization’s messages might be guided by its desire to educate employees and persuade them to participate in activities that promote their health and well-being. However, this transmission model of communication is limited and must be joined with a constitutive model. A constitutive model of communication is concerned not only with the act of imparting information but with the sharing and negotiating of the meanings of wellness or illness among members of an organization (Craig, 1999). Using this model, we may better understand how forms of talk at work about health, illness or anything that is of concern may or may not be possible, adequate, appropriate, comfortable, or beneficial for employees. The changing nature of work presents employees in contemporary organizations with unique health challenges, such as burnout, workaholism, stress, and the emotions that surround these issues. This chapter explores communication in the workplace as it relates to wellness and preventive health care. By examining the communication surrounding health and wellness programs and responses to such programs, we may be able to better understand what it means to work well in today’s organizations. First, we consider what it means to not be working well and the factors that contribute to making the workforce unhealthy. Next, we discuss the ways in which organizations have attempted to present health promotion messages. Finally, we describe some of the limitations of these messages by reconsidering the communication of wellness initiatives.

19. WORKING WELL

425

NOT WORKING WELL IN ORGANIZATIONS

Working well in organizations has become very different than it once was. The workplace has become a source of stress for employees, not only because of the advent of technology, the threat of a dwindling economy, and layoffs, but also because of increased demands for efficiency and productivity. Furthermore, the stress caused by their work demands can have a significant impact on employees’ health and well-being (Santa-Barbara & Coshan, 1988). Stress is a word used to describe a vague set of physiological, medical, behavioral, and psychological health states related to an individual’s adjustment to the environment, external performance demands, and physical well-being (Quick et al., 1997). The prevalence of stress has reached epidemic proportions, and its byproducts are among the leading causes of death in the United States. Stress is on the rise in the workplace partly because of the increased incidence of role overload, role conflict, and role ambiguity (Miller, Ellis, Zook, & Lyles, 1990). Reflective of its growth are the jumps in workers’ compensation awards for stress experienced at work. In California, for example, claims centering on stress-related states and illnesses rose 531% in a 6 year period (Quick et al., 1997). Overall, stress accounts for 20% of the direct costs associated with high job turnover, work stoppages and strikes, and absenteeism within organizations (Stress Management Services, 1999). Referred to as occupational or organizational stress, stress caused by work is ubiquitous across industries and generations. In 1948 Hans Selye (1956), coined the word stress as another name for “general adaptation syndrome,” or the body’s nonspecific response to any demand made on it. Selye identified two types of stress: eustress, a positive stress that promotes high performance, and distress, a negative stress that weakens a person’s abilities to cope with the challenges of life and work. Concerned about the implications of distress, scholars from the disciplines of mental health, public health, medicine, organizational psychology, and labor economics have researched negative stress in the workplace—how it occurs, how to recognize it, how to prevent it and how to overcome it (Cooper, Dewe, & O’Driscoll, 2001; Kuhn & Wooding, 1997; Levenstein & Tuminaro, 1997; McGehee, 1987; Morgan & Goldston, 1987; Scott & Jaffe, 1994). Many related factors have been shown to contribute to occupational stress, and these can be grouped into five useful categories: increasing reliance on technology, escalating demands on professional and personal time, the changing relationship between self and work, and ongoing traditional workplace problems. Whatever the cause, workplace stress continues to have a strong economic impact on individuals and organizations. Increasing Reliance on Technology

Living and working in a technologically advanced era has created a double bind in the workplace. Technological high-tech tools such as the computer, e-mail, voice mail, the fax machine, and the copier have indeed made many tasks easier and improved productivity. However, these and other technological advancements have decreased the need for personal contact and have contributed to personal isolation. There has been a breakdown in the workplace relationships that provided many people with a sense of fulfillment and continuity. As employees check mail privately at their desks instead of in the mailroom over coffee, employers use computer surveillance to achieve what was once accomplished by a manager’s watchful eye. By increasingly relying on the advancements of technology, we wind up communicating one on one with each other much less, both at work and in our personal lives.

426

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

Technological advancements, have greatly impacted the experience of work (Maslack & Leiter, 1997) and have replaced a new set of traditional work-related health problems with stress-caused ailments. First, the heavy use of computers and video display terminals (VDTs) has been reported to be stressful to employees (Quick et al., 1997), causing eye problems, frequent headaches, and carpal tunnel syndrome. Second, the automation and technological support processes used today create jobs that are understimulating and may negatively impact health as a consequence (Decker & Borgen, 1993; Levi, 1981; Thompson, 1967). Third, where there were once overcrowded factories, there are now sick buildings. Sick building syndrome (SBS), a condition defined only recently, is diagnosed when ambiguous work-related symptoms occur at higher levels in one building than in others (Bain & Baldry, 1995). SBS symptoms include eye, throat, and skin irritation; headaches; and extreme fatigue (Hedge, Erickson, & Rubin, 1992). The symptoms are caused by contemporary environmental factors such as minimized fresh air and increased airborne pollutants that build up in heating and cooling systems (Minicucci, 1988). In sum, participation in organizations today may produce practical paradoxes— that is, the pursuit of a goal actually undermines achievement of the desired outcome. For example, as Stohl and Cheney (2001) stated, “the introduction of new technologies designed to save time often result in the acceleration of the pace of life” (p. 354). In trying to improve organizational life in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, we can produce workplaces that are detrimental to the mental, physical, and emotional health of workers. Escalating Demands on Professional and Personal Time

Occupational stress is also caused by the escalation and nature of professional demands, including pressure to complete work more rapidly, the constant need to learn how to use the latest technological equipment, decreased person-to-person interaction, and employees’ awareness of being electronically monitored (Aiello & Kolb, 1995; Cartwright, Cooper, & Murphy, 1995; Cooper et al., 2001; Schaufeli, Keijsers, & Miranda, 1995; Schleifer, Galinski, & Pan, 1995). Further, when employees have been identified as lacking skills pertinent to job demands or their skills have simply become obsolete, they face job insecurity, and decreased self-esteem and tend to feelings of stress (Howe, Caplan, Foster, Lockshin, & McGrath, 1995; Kuhnert & Vance, 1992; Maysent & Spera, 1995). Moreover, when companies experience financial hardship, industry competition, or mergers, employees are often laid off, and the remaining staff become responsible for maintaining productivity despite the decrease in human resources. Demands for these employees to work longer hours or assume multiple roles are common consequences of downsizing. Therefore, even for those employees who do not lose their jobs, the heightened intensity of responsibility, or role overload, brings about occupational stress (Cooper et al., 2001; Jones, Flynn, & Kelloway, 1995; Ross & Altmaier, 1994). The perception of some managers that employees can only be productive if they work long hours and take minimal breaks also causes stress for employees. As Autry (1991) explained, employees feel the stress of conforming to certain unhealthy work habits that are not necessarily required for maximum productivity. In Autry’s words: I am not impressed by the worker who consistently puts in night and weekend hours to get the job done. I immediately think something’s wrong, either with the way the job is structured or the way it’s being done. Some managers enjoy the comfort of concentrating on work habits rather than the work itself, because it is much easier than real management—but I don’t. (p. 56)

19. WORKING WELL

427

Sometimes, overwhelming work demands originate internally. Workaholism, a term modeled on alcoholism, refers to the “disease” of being addicted to work. Behaviorally, workaholism manifests itself in an unnatural preoccupation with the process of work (Eisenberg & Goodall, 2001); a desire to work harder, longer hours than the expectations of the job prescribe (Machlowitz, 1980); and an inflexible interdependence between work satisfaction and life satisfaction. This disease has been recognized as a symptom of the power that organizations have over our well-being and our sense of self (Deetz, 1991; Karasek, 1979). Workaholics exhibit an unhealthy dependency on an external role and an inability to detach from work or feel fulfilled in other aspects of their lives. Changing Relationship Between Self and Work

At the same time that work has changed and new stressors have been introduced, the relationship between our work and our definitions of who we are has evolved. “Our work is more than our job. It is our soul’s expression in this life,” said Robert Gass, an author, musical director, and consultant to major corporations (Murray, 2000, p. 26E). Most of us, in every generation, are uncomfortable with the powerful influence organizations have over our definitions of who we are, the breakdown in boundaries between our work and personal lives, the difficulties we face in balancing work and family on a day-to-day basis, and the stressors we face in trying to accomplish it all. A critical component of our health therefore is the balance between different demands and rewards in our lives. When work becomes less fulfilling and more demanding, there is a disruption in the life-work balance that often results in burnout. When employees reach the stage of burnout, they decrease their productivity or leave the organization, in either case causing a reduction in profits. Burnout comes about as a result of ongoing job stress (Ross & Altmaier, 1994). “Burnout is the index of the dislocation between what people are and what they have to do” (Maslach & Leiter, 1997, p. 17). It is the stage at which an employee feels physically, emotionally, and mentally worn out or exhausted. The employee may become cynical about work, lack physical and mental energy, and experience a growing sense of inadequacy in all areas of his or her life. Burnout also encompasses a loss of creativity, a loss of commitment, or a loss of motivation for the job (Cooper et al., 2001; Maslach & Leiter, 1997). The employee may display weakness or fatigue leading to decreased productivity. Furthermore, employees decide to depart the organization, and the average cost to replace a single employee is approximately 50% to 150% of a job’s annual salary (Institute of Office Management, 2001). This equates to hefty monetary losses due to voluntary turnover. Along with burnout, occupational stress can have detrimental effects on both individual and organizational wellness. Although the causes of occupational stress are varied and complex, its results are well documented. Occupational stress has been shown to jeopardize employees’ mental well-being by causing psychological strain. Studies reveal that work-related stress can lead to lower self-esteem, decreased job satisfaction, anxiety, and depression (Cooper et al., 2001; Pelletier, 1984; Tattersall & Farmer, 1995). As Ross and Altmaier (1994) illustrated, workers who find themselves increasingly frustrated by job conditions may become depressed and withdrawn and therefore may be less able to cope with job problems in ways that would improve work conditions or mental outlook. Other common indicators of stress include bouts of crying, hostile words or actions, and complaints of boredom and isolation (Kahn & Byosiere, 1992). In some cases, these indicators appear not only in the workplace but also in the home.

428

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

Occupational stress has been found to negatively affect work relationships, marital relationships, and parent-child relationships (Ross & Altmaier, 1994; Wallace, Levens, & Singer, 1988). Occupational stress has also been found to affect an employee’s physical well-being. This form of stress can have a negative physical impact because employees may adopt maladaptive coping strategies to deal with the stress. Examples include, but are not limited to, smoking and alcohol abuse (Cooper & Davidson, 1982; Wallace et al., 1988). This is a key finding, in that programs intended to help people quit smoking and end their alcohol abuse may be addressing symptoms and not the root causes. Stress can have a negative impact on the body apart from these coping habits, however. It is difficult to substantiate a clear causal relation between stress and diseases of the internal organs, because, unlike physical or chemical hazards, stress is an intangible hazard. However, studies do exist that provide evidence of an association between occupational stress and heart disease and hypertension (House & Jackman, 1979; Landisberg et al., 1997; Maslach & Leiter, 1997). Ongoing Traditional Workplace Problems

Although the nature of work is changing and creating new workplace diseases, traditional workplace problems are still prevalent and pose a significant risk to employee health. First, worker injury, primarily caused by the physical structure of the work environment, has been and continues to be a salient threat. In 1970, the Occupational Safety and Hazards Administration (OSHA) was created. OSHA is an agency of the Department of Labor, and its mandate is to regulate the safety of work environments. Unfortunately, OSHA has been the subject of attack for unstable leadership and feeble enforcement of its standards (Noble, 1997; Robbins, 1992; Weil, 1997). Therefore, it is not surprising that illness and injury remain common in the workplace today. According to a survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2001), in 2000 a total of 5.3 million private-sector workplace injuries and illnesses in the private sector required recuperation away from work beyond the day of the incident. The year 2000 also brought 5,915 recorded fatal injuries (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2001) which means that on average 17 workers die on the job each day in the United States (Hasek, 1998). The employees suffering from injury are not limited to individuals in one particular type of occupation. Blue-collar laborers who perform jobs that require lifting, operating machinery, or driving or who work in toxic environments are obviously susceptible to injury and illness (Silbergeld, Landrigan, Froines, & Pfeffer, 1997; Swartz & Clapp, 1997; Weeks, 1997). White-collar workers are also at risk. For example, work-related musculoskeletal disorders occur when there is a disparity between the physical capacity of a worker and the demands of the job (Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA], 2001) Constantly twisting the wrist when using a mouse device can cause carpal tunnel syndrome and prolonged sitting can cause lower back pain (OSHA, 2001). Regardless of the position an employee holds, the physical environment can negatively affect his or her physical health (Shostak, 1987; Skillen, 1996). Continuing Economic Impact of Not Working Well

The financial costs of work-related stress are substantial. Organizations’ bottom lines are negatively impacted by employee absenteeism, workers’ compensation claims, turnover, and decreased efficiency and productivity. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (2001), workers who must take time off work because

19. WORKING WELL

429

of stress, anxiety, or a related disorder will be off the job for an average of 20 days. The average number of days any employee is absent is between 4 and 10 days per year. Consequently, the financial impact of absenteeism, on U.S. industries is estimated at $30 billion per year (Baun, 1995). The economic impact of mental and physical stress can also be seen in the rising cost of workers’ compensation claims. The National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) (2001), a nonprofit and nonpartisan group known for providing the most comprehensive workers’ compensation data available, reported that in 1999, workers’ compensation benefit payments totaled $43.4 billion, up from $42.3 billion in 1998. Similarly, the total workers’ compensation cost to employers in 1999 was $54.6 billion, up from $52.8 billion in 1998. Employers watching their bottom lines pay close attention to workers’ compensation costs, as they have some control over these costs. In particular, they can devote more resources to health and safety in the workplace and thereby reduce injuries and illness, causing, workers’ compensation costs to fall. Conversely, if employers ignore the role that stress plays in mental and physical health, they could experience substantial financial losses. HEALTH-MINDED ORGANIZATIONAL PROGRAMS AND POLICIES

In response to sizable health and financial stress-related costs, companies are offering improved health and vacation benefits, as well as implementing wellness programs to avoid some of the negative consequences stress. Workplace health promotion programs tend to improve health, decrease health care costs, and increase worker productivity (Alexy, 1991; Dainas & Marks, 2000; Haynes & Dunnagan, 1999; Sorensen & Stoddard, 1996). For example, based on findings that show a positive relationship between job performance and adherence to exercise (Collingwood, 1994; Derr, 1987), corporate fitness programs offer exercise opportunities such as aerobics classes, access to gyms and weight rooms, and intramural sports. Health education programs, on the other hand, emphasize the treatment of health issues such as smoking, alcoholism, obesity, and hypertension in addition to poor fitness and nutrition (Derr, 1987). The cutting-edge health initiatives, however, have moved to a vision of overall wellness. Wellness programs, also known as health promotion programs and job stress interventions, emphasize the importance of both mental and physical well-being (Derr, 1987; Jensen, 1987). Coupled with the physical fitness and health education opportunities, a corporate wellness program may incorporate components such as employee assistance programs (EAPs) offering confidential counseling, stress management or reduction programs, and other programs designed to address employees’ needs. The popularity of wellness programs is evidenced by the abundance of literature offering recommendations for the design of these programs. Whether the audience consists of thirdparty program vendors, in-house wellness specialists, or trained volunteer employees committed to wellness, there is no lack of information on how to create and implement a wellness program (Association for Fitness, 1992; Jensen, 1987; O’Donnell & Harris, 1994; Pritcher & Potter, 1990; Ross & Altmaier, 1994). The design of a wellness program is a complex communicative process, as it involves appointing a qualified person to be in charge, establishing a multidepartmental task force to support and give feedback about the program, writing company policies, creating action plans, assessing the availability of multiple channels for information dissemination, tracking the illness and injury costs prior to implementation of program, analyzing employees attitudes to determine their needs, and assessing the rhyme and reason of employee participation rates.

430

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

Companies of all kinds have implemented some type of wellness program. The companies range from well-established corporations in the Fortune 1000 to small and mid-size companies. They are found in every industry, including telecommunications, information technology, banking and insurance, automotive manufacturing, transportation, utilities, oil, health, convenience foods, and apparel manufacturing (Pritcher & Potter, 1990). In a 2000 study, 92% of the 1,020 U.S. employers surveyed were found to offer some kind of health promotion program (Hewitt Associates, 2001). In fact, according to a recent press release by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (2001), employee wellness programs may pick up as employers once again face medical cost inflation. The press release indicates that the Bush administration supports wellness programs, stating that, “Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, said that the Bush administration would lead an initiative on preventive medicine to promote healthy lifestyles and reduce health care costs” (p. 1). As the press release suggests, government support for wellness promotion may increase the development of and/or enrollment in corporate wellness programs nationwide. However, securing full employee participation may take some work. The view that organizations need to play only a minimal or passive role in the maintenance and promotion of their employees’ health is beginning to evolve. As more studies and successful programs highlight the economic benefits of health and wellness promotion in the workplace, organizations are developing a health-minded philosophy, offering health promotion benefits and communicating in ways that promote health: “Work-site health promotion programs offer many benefits for employee and employer alike. For employees, such activities are often convenient to attend and less expensive than seeking the same activities outside of the workplace. Co-workers are available to provide social support and for continuing activities” (Beresford et al., 2001, p. 236).

Progressive companies have started supporting this philosophy through communication designed to reduce health risks, educate employees about health, and elicit participation in EAPs. Health Risk Reduction

Preventing illness by changing individuals’ unhealthy habits is a primary goal of many organizations’ wellness initiatives. Tobacco use, excessive alcohol consumption, and poor nutrition are among the causes of the most common preventable accidents and illnesses that plague Americans today. For example, in the civilian California work force, there are approximately 660 job-related deaths from injury, 1,645 million nonfatal injuries, 7,079 deaths from disease, and 133,000 illnesses annually (Leigh et al., 2001). The cost of these occupational injuries and illnesses are estimated to be $20.7 billion. Not surprisingly, organizations are focusing their efforts on reducing the occurrence of these types of behaviors. The programs are based on the philosophy that “changing workers’ bad habits saves money” (Manning, 1999, p. 2)—and in many cases it does. For example, Eder Inc. a 300-person custom electronics manufacturing company, saves an average of $100,000 a year by providing a health promotion program that addresses smoking, weight loss, blood pressure, and stress (Manning, 1999). San Bernardino County, California, offers their 3,300 employees free influenza vaccines, reducing the amount of sick leave per person by two days and monetary savings of between $700,000 and $1.4 million annually (Szalai, 1998). Across industries, organizations report savings of as much as five dollars for every dollar invested in health risk reduction programs (Manning, 1999).

19. WORKING WELL

431

Education

The goal of many health education efforts is to create employees who are more health knowledgeable than the average citizen, with the hope that with increased awareness comes healthier behavior. One example of a simple program designed to educate and encourage people at work to eat more fruits and vegetables is the Seattle “5 a Day” worksite program (Beresford et al., 2001). Twenty-eight worksites with food-serving cafeterias became the focus of this educational campaign designed to change employees’ fruit and vegetable consumption. Other educational activities include taking group trips to grocery stores to demonstrate how to select low-fat foods, demonstrations on proper hand washing (Manning, 1999), and brown bag lunch discussions on healthy eating. Health screenings are used in many organizations to measure cholesterol, blood pressure, body fat, and liver functions and make employees aware of their lifestyle wellness. Awareness is believed to be the first step to good health. Employee Assistance Programs

Most health promotion and assistance programs offered by organizations to their employees fall under the heading of employee assistance programs (EAPs). EAPs are “jobbased programs operating within a work organization for purposes of identifying troubled workers, motivating them to resolve their troubles, and providing access to counseling or treatment for these employees who need these services” (Sonnenstuhl & Trice, 1986, p. 1). Although in 1950 there were fewer than 100 EAPs in the United States, by 1987 their number had increased to over 10,000 (Balgopal, 1989). EAPs began with a focus on alcoholism. Occupational alcoholism programs were intended to “rehabilitate” skilled employees and increase production and profits. (Balgopal, 1989; Coshan, 1991). Broadening of alcoholism programs to reach families of alcoholic workers and persons with other “problems of living” eventually led to the EAPs of today (Balgopal, 1989; Dickman, 1985). Historically, then EAPs targeted the most extreme and expensive health issues, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and high stress (Pelletier, 1984). EAPs have expanded to include counseling on depression, marital problems, financial difficulties, eldercare, divorce, grief, gambling, obesity, emotions and crying in the workplace, AIDS, sexual promiscuity and dysfunction, PMS, personal fitness and health, and eating disorders, among other topics (Lubin, Shanklin, & Sailors, 1992; May, 1998, 1999). Although all programs share the original goals of EAPs, such as improving job performance, family life, and health (Shain & Groenveld, 1980), EAPs no longer just treat existing problems but also aim at promoting health, wellness, and quality of work life (Balgopal, 1989; Conrad, 1987; Coshan, 1991; Googins & Davidson, 1993). Over 80% of the Fortune 1000 companies today offer EAPS to their full-time workers as part of their health benefits package (Blum & Roman, 1985). Participation in an EAP is almost always voluntary, although recommendations and referrals from managers, peers, and human resource representatives often act as catalysts for employees whose poor health may be affecting their job performance. In many cases, EAPs identify and treat health problems that are suspected to lie at the root of performance or personal problems. If the treatment is successful, the company benefits through increased employee productivity and decreased health care costs (Sonnenstuhl, 1988; Sonnenstuhl & Trice, 1986). No matter how well intended, health programs and policies remain simply “a good idea” without attention to the complexities of the communication process. Communication

432

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

related to innovative programs plays a major role in the employees’ acceptance of and participation in such programs (Lewis & Seibold, 1993, 1996; Corman & Poole, 2000; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990). LIMITATION OF THE EFFORTS TO ENHANCE HEALTH AND WELLNESS

In his 1994 book, The Age of Paradox, Charles Handy suggested that many of our good intentions have unintended consequences that result in difficult contradictions or paradoxes. These paradoxes, however, can foster creativity, innovation, and excitement. On the one hand, more and more organizations are spending considerable time and money developing and communicating programs for improving the health status of their workers. On the other hand, although some employees truly benefit from such programs, others may not hear about the programs, may not see the programs as relevant to their lives, may not see the programs as addressing their specific needs, or simply may not want to spend their time attending such programs. Still others may believe that the organizations are violating their privacy and that the boundaries between their personal and professional lives should not be crossed. Adding to their reluctance to use these programs is the stigma often attached to asking for help or using counseling (Rosen & Lee, 1987), not to mention concerns regarding confidentiality. In some cases, an employee may feel pressured by programs, policies, and wellness philosophies to be molded into the kind of employee the organization desires. Extant data about employee participation in wellness programs provide us with statistics but do little to explain what forms of communication influence individuals decision about whether or not to utilize health benefits and services offered by the company. In addition, the measurement of participation varies across studies. The measures investigate who signs up for a program or who actually accesses services once or 50% of the time. However, not much is actually known about the reasons employees give for choosing to participate or not to participate. Previous research has measured frequency of intent to participate or frequency of participation but has failed to investigate the political complexities of communication in worksite contexts that might facilitate or restrict employees’ participation in programs designed to help them sustain or improve their health (Glasgow & McCaul, 1993; Hutter, 2001; Skillen, 1996). More research is needed to follow up on communication issues surrounding participation. Why are some individuals unaware of wellness centers and benefits? Why do people choose not to participate even if they are aware of the benefits? Why do people participate once or twice but not consistently? For example, Glasgow and McCaul (1993) claimed that men and blue-collar employees are less likely to participate in wellness programs, yet there is no apparent reason why this is the case. By seeking out the voices of employees who participate in wellness programs and those who do not, we may be better able to understand how employees are encouraged or discouraged to participate and the reasons they give regarding participation. We may learn that although organizations are imparting valuable information about worksite health promotion, they may not be communicating it in ways that represent the diversity of beliefs employees hold regarding health and illness. Messages designed using a top-down model may not reflect what makes employees feel comfortable in talking about illness or wellness or what draws them together in fellowship and commonality (Carey, 1989). Sustaining viable worksite health promotion may be deeply dependent on matching the complexity of communication with the complexity of the particular work force. We clearly need to understand what forms of talk about health and illness may be adequate, appropriate, comfortable, or beneficial for specific employees.

19. WORKING WELL

433

RECONSIDERING THE COMMUNICATION OF WELLNESS INITIATIVES

Working well in organizations today and participating in worksite health promotion programs is complicated by the cultural diversity of the work force, the increasing numbers of temporary workers, and the occupational stress that has come from all directions, including demands for technological proficiency; downsizing and rightsizing; the struggle to balance work and life; and employees’ quest for meaningful, healthy, well-balanced, and spiritual lives. Clearly, what all of this reveals is the need to reconsider worksite health promotion in a way that recognizes the significant role that communication plays in creating and sustaining a healthy workplace. In the following sections we discuss some of the areas that need reconsideration. Reconsidering the Medicalization of Work

The rising cost of employee health benefits has led to the medicalization of work and to corporations’ paying closer attention to their employees’ health inside and outside of the workplace (May, 1998). Concerns are being raised about the ethical and legal implications of this increased focus on health and wellness in the workplace. Specifically, managers are transformed from being supervisors to being lay doctors. They become responsible for identifying troubled workers, referring them to appropriate EAPs, and taking disciplinary action if they do not comply with EAP treatments or fail to improve their performance. May describes six other concerns regarding the medicalization of work and the pathologizing of worker productivity:

r r

r r r r

Employee assistance programs expand the problems that require medical attention and redefine organizational life through a disease metaphor. Managerial control surrounding EAPs mandates that workers speak more openly about their problems in the context of work in order to be “cured.” Not confessing or refusing to speak about their troubles means employees are sick and/or in denial or not willing to put in the effort to become a productive employee. EAPs locate the worker as the focus of intervention, rather than environmental conditions in the workplace that may contribute to worker stress, psychological maladjustment, or substance abuse. EAPs create labeling processes wherein a worker is rarely able to escape the label, the accompanying continual observation, or the ability to define him or herself as well, rather than in denial. Medicalization of the workplace increases the number of health-related personnel whose livelihood depends upon the proliferation of EAPs. EAPs have rewritten the employer-employee contract so that the boundaries between public and private, work and family, labor and leisure, medical and nonmedical are blurred. (pp. 18–19).

In addition, EAPs may violate the workers’ fundamental rights as American citizens. Medical information obtained by employers may be used against workers rather than to help them, creating problems of discrimination, confidentiality, and privacy. Reconsidering the medicalization of work does not mean forgoing EAPs or eliminating worksite health promotion. Instead, it raises issues that must be addressed and can be addressed through reconsidering the process of communicating about health in the workplace.

434

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

Reconsidering the Definition of Health Communication

Much of the work in the area of worksite health promotion focuses on health communication from either a biological or psychological perspective—communicating to change unhealthy behaviors to healthy behaviors or counseling to help employees cope with or resolve psychological trauma associated with difficult professional and personal life events. Although biology and psychology are essential components of our health, we must embrace a definition of health communication that balances concern for biological survival with a concern for personal, social, societal, and spiritual well-being. By using a definition of health communication as “the symbolic processes by which people, individually and collectively, understand, shape, and accommodate to health and illness” (Geist-Martin, Ray, & Sharf, 2003), we can expand our understanding of worksite health promotion. This definition of health communication implies that we need to pay attention to an individual’s biography, including disruptions in the workplace or at home that could disintegrate or throw out of balance any part of the individual’s biological, psychological, social, or spiritual health (Gonzalez, 1994; Zook, 1994). An injury, death of a loved one, a family crisis, or a new assignment, all fall within this category. For example, differences in the ways that employees of various cultures define and treat health affects the appeal of wellness initiatives. What may be considered a health concern in one culture may not be considered a concern in another (Heath & Gay, 1997). Similarly, an appropriate course of prevention or treatment in one culture may be stigmatized in another (Cline & McKenzie, 1998; Purnell & Paulanka, 1998). Clearly, wellness programs need to carefully target their messages in ways that recognize the differences in employee perceptions associated with differences in gender, social class, and risk characteristics (Hope, Kelleher, & O’Connor, 1999; Lewis, Huebner, & Yarborough, 1995; Sorensen, Stoddard, Ockene, Hunt, & Youngstrom, 1996). Due to feelings of stigma or embarrassment, employees may refuse to admit that they could benefit from wellness programs and therefore limit their involvement in such programs (Schott, 1999). For example, mental illness is highly stigmatized among the Chinese. It is believed to be hereditary, so even marrying someone with a mental illness is frowned upon (Kleinman, 1979). Therefore, some individuals suffering from mood or anxiety disorders may not seek the professional help of an employee assistance program because their culture tells them it is humiliating or unnecessary to do so. In addition, in a culturally diverse setting, health information, may be unclear if transmitted only in English, especially if medical terminology is used (Cline & McKenzie, 1998). Communicating in a person’s native language allows for better explanation of health concerns and treatments and better understanding and greater recall of information (Seijo, Gomez, & Friedenburg, 1995; Shapiro & Saltzer, 1981). When employees have the opportunity to talk with coworkers and supervisors about unhealthy work or home-life situations, they are not just telling someone about their disease, they are asking others to dialogue and to construct new ways of interpreting and coping with these situations. Further, in the process of communicating with one another, a number of things can occur that reinforce participation in worksite health promotion: first, the employees learn something from each other’s perspective (e.g., perceived benefits, selfefficacy) (Alexy, 1991); second, they may provide support to one another for continuing participation (Alexy, 1991; Bungum, Orsak, & Chng, 1997). Finally, the disclosure of discomfort or traumatic events is physically beneficial— communicating actually improves our immune system (Pennebaker, 1990, 1995; Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, Kecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988).

19. WORKING WELL

435

Reconsidering the Focus on Individuals

Although the costs of illness are clear for both the individual and the organization, accountability for the causes and treatments of illness is not equally spread. According to conventional wisdom, health promotion should focus on individuals, with the idea that unhealthy behaviors are primarily the individuals’ responsibility. As a result, many studies report the demographics of the people who chose to participate, as in this example: “Greater age, female gender, and higher education are associated with eating patterns closest to the dietary recommendations to increase fiber and reduce fat” (Hunt et al., 1997, p. 8). Unhealthy behaviors are often viewed as personal inabilities to cope with the stress and demands of life and are thus treated in isolated and private ways. The organization has been seen as basically helpless—a concerned onlooker who may be able to lend a supportive ear or point out causes of the individual’s situation but is basically separate from the individual’s experience. In essence, companies are working at cross-purposes when they offer programs to enhance the health of employees and reduce the number of health insurance claims but do nothing to change working conditions that are inherently stressful. For example, responsibility for eliminating stress in the workplace is often placed on the individual rather than on those who have the authority to revise work practices (Mattson et al., 2000). Research has demonstrated the need to identify and use aspects of the organizational climate that faciliate participation in worksite health promotion programs (Glasgow & McCaul, 1993). In contrast, some companies are developing change initiatives, that may improve employee health by altering organizational roles and structure. Brazil-based Semco gives power and training to every employee: “The workers decide their own hours, pay levels, and travel budgets, and they have the power to evaluate, and if necessary, fire their bosses (Kiernan, 1996, p. 133). Another company, Gore and Associates, manufacturers of outdoor and adventure clothing goes to great lengths to ensure its employees develop collaborative learning relationships for its employees through mentoring, coaching, and team-based performance review (Barrett, 1995). Both of these examples involve organizational practices that provide employees with what has been termed “social capital” (Putnam, 2000). Social capital arises from connections between individuals—social networks and their norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness. Much of our socializing has been transferred from the front porch to the water cooler (Wolfe, 1998). In fact, for many people, 90% of their social connections occur in the workplace. They make their friends at work, they do their community service through work, and the workplace increasingly serves as a sanctuary from the stresses of marriage, children, and housework (Hochschild, 1997, Putnam, 2000). According to Putnam (2000), our workplace agenda should include finding new means of creating social capital on the job because social capital contributes to our health and happiness and because over the years it has become weakened and fragmented outside of the workplace. Some firms have put such ideas into practice by forming teams and quality circles and by redesigning the workplace to create designated spaces for socializing, sometimes referred to as “watering holes,” “conversation pits,” or “campfires” (Hochschild, 1997; Putnam, 2000; Whitney, 1996). And because of the changing world of work, we will need to be more creative in meeting the social connectivity needs of temps, part-timers, and independent contractors (Putnam, 2000) A caring organization promotes change and develops policies that enhance employees’ participation. For example, the well-known retailer Wal-Mart, owns a satellite communications system that connects the company to every one of its suppliers and to every point

436

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

of sale in its stores. With this system in place, store employees have immediate access to financial data for decision making, and suppliers have point-of-sale data for cost-effective ordering and inventory control (Gephart, Marsick, Van Buren, & Spiro, 1996). Another organization, W. Gore and Associates, structured their organization in the form of a lattice, with no departments, managers, or formal titles. They are committed to empowering their associates to utilize their freedom to grow (Graham, Osgood, & Karren, 1998). Reconsidering Wellness Accountability

More often than not, health promotion programs are the designated responsibility of the human resource department rather than the responsibility of any other member of the organization. Human resources personnel are responsible for designing and implementing programs and policies, but their efforts are often brief and involve little or no monitoring and follow-up. By failing to involve employees in the development and communication of the initiatives, not tracking results systematically, or not creating an environment supportive of healthy behaviors and behavior change, companies doom their wellness initiatives to a short, unhappy life (Hunnicut, 2000). On the other hand, if employees are given a voice in shaping initiatives to fit the company culture, the level of employee participation is likely to be high (Hunt, Lederman, Potter, Stoddard, & Sorensen, 2000). In turn, a high level of employee participation increases the chance that positive health behavior change will occur (Glasgow, McCaul, & Fisher, 1991; Minkler & Wallerstein, 1997; Sorensen, Emmons, Hunt, & Johnston, 1998). WELLNESS AT WORK

Building healthy workplaces necessitates creating alternative forms of organizing and constructing different ways of relating. We need to offer individuals in organizations opportunities to move through difficult transitions or ruptures in meaningful ways and thus maintain healthy relationships. As our consciousness about ourselves, our work, and our lives changes, so too must our conceptions of health. Healthy interaction in organizations would necessarily include engaging in dialogue, embracing a concern for community, and fostering a spirituality that encompasses caring for ourselves and our coworkers. If companies rely only on a transmission model of communication and ignore the constitutive role of communication in the wellness process, employees will continue their marginal participation in health initiatives. Organizations can greatly benefit from adopting a constitutive model of communication that reinforces linkages between personnel, programs, and job responsibilities and allows employees to communicate in ways that promote communication about wellness in the workplace, whether onsite, offsite, or via the internet. To address unique health challenges of burnout, workaholism, and stress employees need to have opportunities to participate and make decisions about the form communication takes to ensure their own and others’ abilities to work well. Vision, empowerment, harmony, balance, creativity, learning, and spirituality are all words used to describe an emerging organizational culture that values working as a community to transform organizational dialogues, relations, structures, and paradoxes. More employees than ever before genuinely want to be a part of any transformation effort. And, without a doubt, changing the workplace to make it healthier for employees clearly depends on the ability of organizations and individuals to communicate effectively about health and its relationship to evolving organizational practices.

19. WORKING WELL

437

REFERENCES Ahmed, P. I., Kolker, A., & Coelho, G. V. (1979). Toward a new definition of health: An overview. In P. I. Ahmed & G. V. Coelho (Eds.), Toward a new definition of health: Psychosocial dimensions (pp. 7–22). New York: Plenum. Aiello, J. R., & Kolb, K. J. (1995). Electronic performance monitoring: A risk factor for workplace stress. In S. L. Sauter & L. R. Murphy (Eds.), Organizational risk factors for job stress (pp. 163–179). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Alexy, B. B. (1991). Factors associated with participation or nonparticipation in a workplace wellness center. Research in Nursing and Health, 14, 33–40. Association for Fitness in Business (1992). Guidelines for employee health promotion programs. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Autry, J. A. (1991). Love and profit: The art of caring leadership. New York: William Morrow. Axley, S. (1984). Managerial and organizational communication in terms of the conduit metaphor. Academy of Management Review, 9, 428–437. Bain, P., & Baldry, C. (1995). Sickness and control in the office: The sick building syndrome. New Technology, Work, and Employment, 10, 19–31. Balgopal, P. R. (1989). Establishing employee assistance programs: A cross-cultural perspective. Employee Assistance Quarterly, 5, 1–20. Barrett, F. J. (1995). Creating appreciative learning cultures. Organizational Dynamics, 24(2), 36–49. Baun, W. B. (1995). The impact of worksite health promotion programs on absenteeism. In R. L. Kaman (Ed.), Worksite health promotion economics: Consensus and analysis (pp. 10–12). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Beresford, S. A. A., Thompson, B., Feng, Z., Christianson, A., McLerran, D., & Patrick, D. L. (2001). Seattle 5 a Day worksite program to increase fruit and vegetable consumption. Preventive Medicine, 32, 230–238. Blum, T. C., & Roman, P. (1985). The social transformation of an alcoholism intervention: Comparison of job attitudes and performance of recovered alcoholics and non-alcoholics. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 26, 365–378. Bungum, T. J., Orsak, K. C., & Chng, C. L. (1997). Factors affecting exercise adherence at a worksite wellness program. American Journal of Health Behavior, 21, 59–66. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2001, March 28). Lost-worktime injuries and illnesses: Characteristics and resulting time away from work, 1999 [News Release]. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor. Retrieved September 8, 2001, from ftp://146.142.4.23/pub/news.release/osh2.txt Carey, J. W. (1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Cartwright, S., Cooper, C. L., & Murphy, L. R. (1995). Diagnosing a healthy organization: A proactive approach to stress in the workplace. In L. R. Murphy, J. J. Hurrell, Jr., S. L. Sauter, & G. P. Keita (Eds.), Job stress interventions (pp. 217–234). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Chenoweth, D. (1994). Positioning health to make an economic impact. In J. P. Opatz (Ed.), Economic impact of worksite health promotion (pp. 33–49). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Cline, R. J., & McKenzie, N. J. (1998). The many cultures of health care: Difference, dominance, and distance in physician-patient communication. In L. D. Jackson & B. K. Duffy (Eds.), Health communication research: A guide to developments and directions (pp. 57– 74). Westport, CT: Greenwood.

438

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

Collingwood, T. R. (1994). Fitness programs. In M. P. O’Donnell & J. S. Harris (Eds.), Health promotion in the workplace (2nd ed., pp. 240–270). Albany, NY: Delmar. Conrad, P. (1987). Wellness in the workplace. Milbank Quarterly, 65, 255–275. Cooper, C. L., & Davidson, M. J. (1982 Spring). The high cost of stress on women managers. Organizational Dynamics, pp. 44–53. Cooper, C. L., Dewe, P. J., & O’Driscoll, M. P. (2001). Organizational stress: A review and critique of theory, research, and applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Corman, S. R., & Poole, M. S. (Eds.). (2000). Perspectives on organizational communication: Finding common ground. New York: Guilford. Coshan, M. (1991). Enlarging the concept of employee assistance. Employee Assistance Quarterly, 7, 25–44. Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9, 119–161. Dainas, C., & Marks, D. (2000). Evidence of an EAP cost offset. Behavioral Health Management, 20, 34–39. Decker, P. J., & Borgen, F. H. (1993). Dimensions of work appraisal: Stress, strain, coping, job satisfaction, and negative affectivity. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 40, 470–478. Deetz, S. (1991). Democracy in an age of corporate colonization. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Deetz, S. (1995). Character, corporate responsibility and the dialogic in the postmodern context: A commentary on Mangham. Organization, 2, 217–225). Derr, W. D. (1987). The difference between health education, fitness, and wellness programs and the importance of communicating these differences. In S. H. Klarreich (Ed.), Health and fitness in the workplace: Health education in business organizations (pp. 305–318). New York: Praeger. Dickman, F. J. (1985). Employee assistance programs: History and philosophy. In F. J. Dickman, W. G. Emener, Jr., & W. S. Hutchinson, Jr. (Eds.), Counseling the troubled person in industry (pp. 7–12). Springfield IL: Charles C. Thomas. Eisenberg, E. M., & Goodall, H. L. (2001). Organizations as dialogue: Balancing creativity and constraint through communication (3rd ed.). New York: St. Martin’s. Employee Benefit Research Institute. (2001). Employment-based health promotion programs set to expand [Press release]. Washington, DC: D. Devine & R. Christiansen. Retrieved September 29, 2001 from http://www.ebri.org/prrel/pr570.htm Geist-Martin, P., Ray, E. B. & Sharf, B. F. (2003). Communicating health: Personal, cultural, and political complexities. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Gephart, M. A., Marsick, V. J., Van Buren, M. E., & Spiro, M. S. (1996). Learning organizations come alive. Training and Development, 50(12), 35–45. Glasgow, R. E., & McCaul, K. D. (1993), Participation in worksite health promotion: A critique of the literature and recommendations for future practice. Health Education Quarterly, 20, 391–409. Gonzalez, M. C. (1994). An invitation to leap from a trinitarian ontology in health communication research to a spiritually inclusive quatrain. In S. A. Deetz (Ed.), Communication yearbook 17 (pp. 378–387). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Googins, B., & Davidson, B. N. (1993). The organization as client: Broadening the concept of employee assistance programs. Social Work, 38, 477–484. Graham, W., Osgood, D., & Karren, J. (1998). A real-life community of practice. Training and Development, 52(5), 35–38. Handy, C. (1994). The age of paradox. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Harris, J. S. (1994). The health benefits of health promotion. In M. P. O’Donnell & J. S. Harris (Eds.), Health promotion in the workplace (2nd ed., pp. 3–40). Albany, NY: Delmar.

19. WORKING WELL

439

Hasek, G. (1998, November 2). U.S. workplace fatality rate remains steady. Industry Week, 247(20), 14–16. Haynes, G. W., & Dunnagan, T. (1999). Employee wellness program impact on health care costs: Do participation and intensity of participation matter? Consumer Interests Annual, 45, 83–88. Heath, R. L., & Gay, D. D. (1997). Risk communication: Involvement, uncertainty, and control’s effect on information scanning and monitoring by expert stakeholders. Management Communication Quarterly, 10, 342–372. Hedge, A., Erickson, W. A., & Rubin, G. (1992). Effects of personal and occupational factors on sick building syndrome reports in air-conditioned offices. In J. C. Quick, L. R. Murphy, & J. J. Hurrell, Jr. (Eds.), Stress and well-being at work (pp. 286–298). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Hewitt Associates, LLC. (2001, July 24). Employers continue offering programs to promote health and productivity [Press release]. Lincolnshire, IL: K. Zitlow. Retrieved September 29, 2001 from http://was.hewitt.com/hewitt/resource/newsroom/pressrel/2001/07-24-01.htm Hochschild, A. R. (1997, April 20). There’s no place like work. New York Times Magazine, p. 53. Hope, A., Kelleher, C., & O’Connor, M. (1999). Lifestyle and cancer: The relative effects of a workplace health promotion program across gender and class. American Journal of Health Promotion, 13, 315–318. House, J. S., & Jackman, M. F. (1979). Occupational stress and health. In P. I. Ahmed & G. V. Coelho (Eds.), Toward a new definition of health: Psychosocial dimensions (pp. 135–158). New York: Plenum. Howe, G. W., Caplan, R. D., Foster, D., Lockshin, M., & McGrath, C. (1995). When couples cope with job loss: A strategy for developing and testing preventive interventions. In L. R. Murphy, J. J. Hurrell, Jr., S. L., Sauter, & G. P. Keita (Eds.), Job stress interventions (pp. 139–157). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Hunt, M. K., Lederman, R., Potter, S., Stoddard, A., & Sorensen, G. (2000). Results of employee involvement in planning and implementing the Treatwell 5-a-Day work-site study. Health Education and Behavior, 27, 223–231. Hunt, M. K., Stoddard, A. M., Glanz, K., Hebert, J. R., Probart, C., Sorensen, G., Thomson, S., Hixson, M. L., Linnan, L., & Palombo, R. (1997). Measures of food choice behavior related to intervention messages in worksite health promotion. Journal of Nutrition Education, 28, 3–11. Hutter, B. M. (2001). Regulation and risk: Occupational health and safety on the railways. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Institute of Office Management and Administration. (2001, May 9). Turnover rates [1,292 words]. The Controller’s Report Online [On-line serial]. Available: ISSN 0895–2787. Jensen, D. W. (1987). Worksite wellness: A new and practical approach to reducing health care costs. Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall Information Services. Jones, B., Flynn, D. B., & Kelloway, E. K. (1995). Perception of support from the organization in relation to work, stress, satisfaction, and commitment. In S. L. Sauter & L. R. Murphy (Eds.), Organizational risk factors for job stress (pp. 41–52). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Kahn, R. L., & Byosiere, P. (1992). Stress in organizations. In M. D. Dunnette (Ed.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 571–648). Chicago: Rand McNally. Karasek, R. (1979). Job demands, job decisions, latitude and mental strain: Implications for job redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, 285–308.

440

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

Kiernan, J. K. (1996) The eleven commandments of 21st century management. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kleinman, A. (1979). Sickness and cultural semantics: Issues for an anthropological medicine and psychiatry. In P. I. Ahmed & G. V. Coelho (Eds.), Toward a new definition of health: Psychosocial dimensions (pp. 53–65). New York: Plenum. Kreps, G. L., & Thornton, B. C. (1992). Health communication: Theory and practice (2nd ed.). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Kuhn, S., & Wooding, J. (1997). The changing structure of work in the United States: Part 2. The implications for health and welfare. In C. Levenstein & J. Wooding (Eds.), Work, health, and environment: Old problems, new solutions (pp. 41–52). New York: Guilford. Kuhnert, K. W., & Vance, R. J. (1992). Job insecurity and moderators of the relation between job insecurity and employee adjustment. In J. C. Quick, L. R. Murphy, & J. J. Hurrell, Jr. (Eds.), Stress and well-being at work: Assessments and interventions for occupational mental health (pp. 48–63). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Landisberg, P. A., Schurman, S. J., Israel, B. A., Schnall, P. L., Hugentobler, M. K., Cahill, J., & Baker, D. (1997). Job stress and heart disease. In C. Levenstein & J. Wooding (Eds.), Work, health, and environment: Old problems, new solutions (pp. 171–197). New York: Guilford. Leigh, J. P., Cone, J. E., & Harrison, R. (2001). Costs of occupational injuries and illnesses in California. Preventive Medicine, 32, 393–406. Levenstein, C. & Tuminaro, D. J. (1997). The political economy of occupational disease. In C. Levenstein & J. Wooding (Eds.), Work, health, and environment: Old problems, new solutions (pp. 3–18). New York: Guilford. Levi, L. (1981). Preventing work stress. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Lewis, L. K., & Seibold, D. R. (1993). Innovation modification during intraorganizational adoption. Academy of Management Review, 18, 322–354. Lewis, L. K., & Seibold, D. R. (1993). Communication during intraorganizational innovation adoptions: Predicting users’ behavioral coping responses to innovations in organizations. Communication Monographs, 63, 131–157. Lewis, R. J., Huebner, W. W., & Yarborough, C. M., III (1995). Characteristics of participants and nonparticipants in worksite health promotion. American Journal of Health Promotion, 11, 99–106. Lubin, B., Shanklin, H. D., & Sailors, J. R. (1992). The EAP literature: Articles and dissertations. Employee Assistance Quarterly, 8, 47–90. Machlowitz, M. (1980). Workaholics: Living with them, working with them. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Manning, J. (1999, December 26). Wellness plans cut firms’ health costs: A class a day helps keep doctors away. Sentinel, p. 1. Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). The truth about burmout. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Mattson, M., Clair, R. P., Sanger, P. A. C., & Kunkel, A. D. (2000). A feminist reframing of stress. In P. M. Buzzanell (Ed.), Rethinking organizational and managerial communication from feminist perspectives (pp. 157–174). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. May, S. K. (1998). Health care and the medicalization of work: Policy implications. In Marriner S. Eccles policy yearbook (pp. 6–35). Salt Lake City: University of Utah. May, S. K. (1999, May-June). Therapy at work. At Work, pp. 12–14. Maysent, M., & Spera, S. (1995). Coping with job loss and career stress: Effectiveness of stress management training with outplaced employees. In L. R. Murphy, J. J. Hurrell, Jr., S. L. Sauter, & G. P. Keita (Eds.), Job stress interventions (pp. 159–170). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

19. WORKING WELL

441

McGehee, L. J. (1987). Stress management in the workplace. In S. H. Klarreich (Ed.), Health and fitness in the workplace: Health education in business organizations (pp. 172–182). New York: Praeger. McKewon, T. (1988). The origins of human disease. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Miller, K. I., Ellis, B. H., Zook, E. G., & Lyles, J. S. (1990). An integrated model of communication, stress, and burnout in the workplace. Communication Research, 17, 300–326. Minicucci, R. (1988). Is your office hazardous to your health? Today’s Office, 22, 38–45. Minkler, M., & Wallerstein, N. (1997). Improving health community organization and community building. In F. M. Lewis, K. Glanz, B. K. Rimer (Eds.), Health behavior and health education: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 241–269). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Morgan, W. P., & Goldston, W. P. (1987). Exercise and mental health. Washington, DC: Hemisphere. Murphy, L. R., Hurrell, J. J., & Quick, J. C. (1992). Work and well-being: Where do we go from here? In J. C. Quick, L. R. Murphy, & J. J. Hurrell, Jr. (Eds.), Stress and well-being at work: Assessments and interventions for occupational mental health (pp. 331–347). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Murray, A. W. (2000, May 16). Lesley hosting mind, body, spirit conference. Patriot Ledger, p. 26E. National Academy of Social Insurance. (2001, May 22). Workers’ compensation benefits decline as a percent of wages for seven years in a row [News release]. Washington, DC: J. Braunstein. Retrieved September 20, 2001, from http://www.nasi.org/publications2763/ publications show.htm?doc id=57955 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. (2001). Stress at work (DHHS publication No. 99-101). Cincinnati, OH: Government Printing Office. Retrieved September 8, 2001 from http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/stress99.html Noble, C. (1997). OSHA at 20: Regulatory strategy and institutional structure in the work environment. In C. Levenstein & J. Wooding (Eds.), Work, health, and environment: Old problems, new solutions (pp. 80–92). New York: Guilford. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). (2001, June 25). Ergonomic solutions: Computer workstations. Retrieved September 8, 2001 from http://www.oshaslc.gov/SLTC/computerworkstations ecat/index.html O’Donnell, M. P., & Harris, J. S. (1994). Health promotion in the workplace (2nd ed.). Albany, NY: Delmar. Pelletier, K. R. (1984). Healthy people in unhealthy places: Stress and fitness at work. New York: Merloyd Lawrence. Pennebaker, J. W. (1990). Opening up: The healing power of confiding in others. New York: William Morrow. Pennebaker, J. W. (Ed.). (1995). Emotion, disclosure, and health. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95, 274–281. Pennebaker, J. W., Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., & Glaser, R. (1988). Disclosure of traumas and immune function: Health implications for psychotherapy. Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 56, 239–245. Poole, M. S., & DeSanctis, G. (1990). Understanding the use of group decision support systems: The theory of adaptive structuration. In J. Fulk & C. Steinfield (Eds.), Organizations and communication technology (pp. 173–193). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Pritcher, R. E., & Potter, G. C. (1990). Fitness Inc.: A guide to corporate health and wellness programs. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin.

442

GEIST-MARTIN, HORSLEY, FARRELL

Purnell, L. D., & Paulanka, B. J. (1998). Transcultural health care: A culturally competent approach. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Quick, J. C., Quick, J. D., Nelson, D. L., & Hurrell., J. J., Jr. (1997). Preventive stress management in organizations. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Robbins, L. (1992). Health and safety committees as a means of relieving psychological stress. In J. C. Quick, L. R. Murphy, & J. J. Hurrell, Jr. (Eds.), Stress and well-being at work: Assessments and interventions for occupational mental health (pp. 193–206). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Rosen, R., & Lee, F. (1987). Occupational mental health: A continuum of care. In A. Riley (Ed.), Occupational stress and organizational effectiveness (pp. 245–267). New York: Praeger. Ross, R. R., & Altmaier, E. M. (1994). Intervention in occupational stress. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Santa-Barbara, J., & Coshan, M. (1988, March-April). When the workplace is the cause of stress. EAP Digest, pp. 39–41. Schaufeli, W. B., Keijsers, G. J., & Miranda, D. R. (1995). Burnout, technology use, and ICU performance. In S. L. Sauter & L. R. Murphy (Eds.), Organizational risk factors for job stress (pp. 259–271). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Schleifer, L. M., Galinski, T. L., & Pan. C. S. (1995). Mood disturbance and musculoskeletal discomfort effects of electronic performance monitoring in a VDT data-entry task. In S. L. Sauter & L. R. Murphy (Eds.), Organizational risk factors for job stress (pp. 195–203). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Schott, R. L. (1999). Managers and mental health: Mental illness and the workplace. Public Personnel Management, 28, 161–183. Scott, C. D., & Jaffe, D. T. (1994). Stress and stress management in the workplace. In M. P. O’Donnell & J. S. Harris (Eds.), Health promotion in the workplace (2nd ed., pp. 41–68). Albany, NY: Delmar. Seijo, R., Gomez, H., & Freidenberg, J. (1995). Language as a communication barrier in medical care for Hispanic patients. In A. M. Padilla (Ed.), Hispanic psychology: Critical issues in theory and research (pp. 169–181). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Selye, H. (1956). The stress of life. New York: McGraw-Hill. Shain, M., & Groenveld, J. (1980). Employee-assistance programs: Philosophy, theory, and practice. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Shapiro, J., & Saltzer, E. (1981, December). Cross-cultural aspects of physician-patient communication patterns. Urban Health, pp. 10–15. Shostak, A. B. (1987). How to manage blue-collar stress. In L. Slote (Ed.), Handbook of occupational and health and safety (pp. 24–36). New York: Wiley. Silbergeld, E. K., Landrigan, P. J., Froines, J. R., & Pfeffer, R. M. (1997). The occupational lead standard. In C. Levenstein & J. Wooding (Eds.), Work, health, and environment: Old problems, new solutions (pp. 131–148). New York: Guilford. Skillen, D. L. (1996). Toward a social structural understanding of occupational hazards in public health. International Journal of Health Services, 26, 111–146. Sonnenstuhl, W. J. (1988). Contrasting employee assistance, health promotion, and quality of work life programs and their effects on alcohol abuse and dependence. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 24, 347–363. Sonnenstuhl, W. J., & Trice, H. M. (1986). Strategies for employee assistance programs: The crucial balance. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Sorensen, G., Emmons, K., Hunt, M., & Johnston, D. (1998). Implications of the results of community intervention trials. Annual Review of Public Health, 19, 379–416.

19. WORKING WELL

443

Sorensen, G., Himmelstein, J. S., Hunt, M. K., Youngstrom, R., Hebert, J. R., Hammond, S. K., Palombo, R., Stoddard, A., & Ockene, J. K. (1995). A model for worksite cancer prevention: Integration of health protection and health promotion in the Wellworks project. American Journal of Health Promotion, 10, 55–62. Sorensen, G., & Stoddard, A. (1996). Worker participation in an integrated health promotion/health projection program. Health Education Quarterly, 23, 191–204. Sorensen, G., Stoddard, A., Hunt, M. K., & Youngstrom, R. (1996). Worker participation in an integrated health promotion/health protection program: Results from the Wellworks project. Health Education Quarterly, 23, 191–203. Stainbrook, G. L., & Green, L. W. (1989). Measurement and evaluation methods for worksite stress-management programs. In L. R. Murphy & T. F. Schonfeld (Eds.), Stress management in work settings (pp. 101–134). New York. Praeger. Stress Management Services. (1999). Medical and healthcare marketplace guide. Stohl, C., & Cheney, G. (2001). Participatory processes/paradoxical practices: Communication and the dilemmas of organizational democracy. Management Communication Quarterly, 14, 349–407. Swartz, J., & Clapp, R. (1997). New cancer theories: Policy implications for cancer prevention. In C. Levenstein & J. Wooding (Eds.), Work, health, and environment: Old problems, new solutions (pp. 163–170). New York: Guilford. Szalai, G. (1998, July 13). Pilot program to boost wellness and productivity of employees of San Bernardino County, CA. Business Insurance. Tattersall, A. J., & Farmer, E. W. (1995). The regulation of work demands and strain. In S. L. Sauter & L. R. Murphy (Eds.), Organizational risk factors for job stress (pp. 139–156). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Thompson, J. D. (1967). Organizations in action. New York: McGraw-Hill. Wallace, M., Levens, M., & Singer, G. (1988). Blue collar stress. In C. L. Cooper & R. Payne (Eds.), Causes, coping and consequences of stress at work (pp. 53–76). New York: Wiley. Weeks, J. L. (1997). Undermining the protections for coal miners. In C. Levenstein & J. Wooding (Eds.), Work, health, and environment: Old problems, new solutions (pp. 80–92). New York: Guilford. Weil, D. (1997). Reforming OSHA: Modest proposals for major change. In C. Levenstein & J. Wooding (Eds.), Work, health, and environment: Old problems, new solutions (pp. 407–425). New York: Guilford. Whitney, D. (1996). Postmodern principles and practices for large scale organization change and global cooperation. Organization Development Journal, 14, 53–68. Wolfe, A. (1998). Developing civil society: Can the workplace replace bowling? The Responsive Community, 8, 41–47. Zook, E. G. (1994). Embodied health and constitutive communication: Toward and authentic conceptualization of health communication. In S. A. Deetz (Ed.), Communication yearbook 17 (pp. 344–377). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

V Media Issues Roxanne Parrott

Media messages about health are ubiquitous in the 21st century, and health communicators face both opportunities and challenges associated with this reality. Perhaps the foremost theme reflected in the chapters in this section is the media’s role as a specter of influence in health communication. As Korsch and Harding (1997) asserted, “The physician is no longer the only interpreter of medical knowledge” (p. 95). Furthermore, media messages about health sometimes contradict the information that physicians and health care organizations put forward. Korsch and Harding (1997) observed that the erosion of the physician’s status as sole expert began in the 1960s, when physicians ceased writing prescriptions in Latin. Contributing to this process has been the introduction of package inserts in medicines, the publication of countless health books, the broadcasting of health-related TV programs and documentaries, and the advent of the World Wide Web. As a result, health communicators must consider the different contexts for publizing health information, the likely impact of inconsistent advice, and the potential that now exists for reinforcing messages about health using a variety of media. Salmon and Atkin introduce this section with a review of health campaigns as health promotion tools, emphasizing the long history of media use in these strategic health efforts. Their review provides a framework for understanding how to develop campaign objectives based on careful formative research. The characteristics of campaign audiences guide message, source, and channel selection, all within the scope of a campaigner’s purview. Perhaps not too surprisingly, theories that address the components of campaigns are common, but theoretical frameworks to integrate these perspectives are not so readily available. In Chapter 21, Murray-Johnson and Witte extend the discussion of strategic health message design. They describe how macro principles evolving from the health campaign literature are combined with micro principles associated with the selection of specific appeals and words to guide media message development. The latter, again, depends upon

445

446

PART V: MEDIA ISSUES

carefully designed formative research. Social psychologists have long used a number of constructs as variables to predict and explain outcomes associated with health behaviors. Such research predicts, for example, that perceptions of self-efficacy will enhance feelings of control over one’s ability to engage in a healthy practice. Far less effort has been concentrated on identifying what constitutes a self-efficacy message. Murray-Johnson and Witte review the research in this area, illustrating the use of design principles in actual applications from the field. The first two chapters in this section emphasize the important relationship between audience segmentation principles and message design in order to predict and explain influence outcomes. The chapter by Rimal and Adkins completes this discussion of strategic health message design and the correspondence between specificity and outcomes. As the authors note, computer technology has contributed greatly to the ability of message designers to tailor health messages to the needs of an individual. In Chapter 23, Turner introduces telemedicine as a means of reducing barriers to health care access and demonstrating efficiency in closed systems such as health maintenance organizations, prisons, VA hospitals, and military settings. The next chapter, by Springston and Lariscy, is concerned with public relations. The authors acknowledge and define the growing need for health care organizations to develop a planned strategy for communicating with varied publics. Kline’s chapter is about the many unintended and unplanned media health messages that contribute to individual awareness of health consequences. Whether these messages occur in a newspaper health column or front page headline, a magazine article or a regularly televised sitcom, health communicators should recognize the opportunities and challenges associated with exposure to them. Finally, the closing chapter of this section, by Bernhardt and Cameron, points to both the ultimate goal and the fundamental foundation of media messages and other forms of health information—audience understanding, application, and use. A second theme that recurs in these chapters is the importance of access to health information and health care. The media can function as a great leveler by placing laypersons on virtually an equal footing with scientific and technical experts. If we want specific information about a health topic, we can access the Internet in our homes or public libraries. Increasingly, rural and underserved areas in this nation are obtaining health care through telemedicine. Further, the volume of media messages has grown exponentially, keeping pace with scientific discoveries and corresponding political and commercial efforts to use these discoveries to benefit citizens. Yet, even though we have easy access to health information via the media, health communicators need to turn their attention to improving health literacy, including reading literacy, numeracy, and media literacy, if health communication is to reach its full potential. A third theme of this section is the broad range of levels of cognitive and behavioral involvement that characterizes responses to media messages about health. Exposure to some if not most of these messages occurs without any active effort on the receiver’s part. Of course, health campaigners intend to involve audiences actively with message content and expend enormous resources toward that end, but the reality remains that no one-to-one correspondence between exposure and message processing should be assumed. In fact, as Salmon and Atkin assert, an important objective of health campaigns is getting audiences to seek information, for this indicates that they found campaign content personally relevant enough to take active steps to obtain additional information. Despite careful formative research and audience analysis, health campaigners of the 21st century still will often

PART V: MEDIA ISSUES

447

be better able to predict reach and exposure than active processing or behavior change associated with health campaigns and messages. The use of computer technology to disseminate health information, of course, often requires an individual to seek exposure to the information, as does the use of telemedicine. Both indicate a level of active involvement beyond what exposure to campaign messages usually requires. Both often demand answers to questions that will contribute to the construction of a message tailored to the individual. Rimal and Adkins review both the promises and the pitfalls associated with the Internet as a medium for health information. Turner does the same for the topic of health communication and telemedicine. One of the challenges presented by the Internet relates to the fact that physicians and other health professionals may not be aware of specific information that a patient has gathered from a health-related Web site. The provider’s lack of awareness may lead the patient to decide that the provider lacks competence. On the other hand, providers sometimes have good reason, based on their expertise, to disagree with information garnered from the Internet. As for telemedicine, physicians face the difficulty of dealing with guidelines and policies that pertain to treating patients across state lines. Thus, although health campaigners may succeed in getting audiences to seek health information, their very success can lead to conflicts in other health care contexts. The problems associated with Internet use and telemedicine should not, however, overshadow the countless times when a patient’s informed status contributes to shared decision-making and improved outcomes. With the increasing complexity of organized health care in the United States, health communicators should not find it surprising that public relations has become a crucial function of media messages about health. The goals associated with these messages differ. Some aim merely to foster a positive impression, in which case increases in the lay public’s knowledge or healthy behaviors occur simply as a byproduct. With care and planning, public relations experts may shape the construction of newspaper stories about health research, pharmaceuticals, and health care organizations, as Springston and Lariscy reveal in their discussion of public relations and its emergence in health communicators’ strategic efforts. Advertisers, health policy makers, and consumers all become critical audiences in the design of these particular messages. In an era when public health has merged with concerns about bioterrorism and public safety, crisis management plans also become significant lynchpins in the health communication endeavors of public relations experts. The latter will likely evoke more active audience attention than the efforts to project positive corporate images. The popular media provide yet another venue for exposure to health information that requires little active cognitive or behavioral involvement. Little intention to gain health information is likely to be associated with exposure to prime-time television, movies, magazines, and other media, as Kline observes. This suggests that these messages are at the far end of the motivation-to-process-information continuum. Nonetheless, the health effects have proven to be important enough to warrant the evolution of an edutainment strategy designed to harness the outcomes and direct them toward social goals. This latter fact suggests a final theme: the hierarchy of outcomes associated with mediabased health communication, ranging from increased awareness of health issues by individuals, communities, and policymakers to their increased ability to make informed decisions about health and health care. In clinics and hospitals, doctors and nurses depend on posters, informed consent documents, and print brochures to instruct, explain, and/or reinforce the content of conversations. Pharmacists depend on patient package inserts and computerized and individually tailored printed messages to instruct prescription

448

PART V: MEDIA ISSUES

users about medication side effects and interactions. In short, the media are increasingly providing the means to extend patient education. The seven chapters in this section represent different approaches to the exploration of media-based health communication. The 21st century is an exciting time for health communicators who seek to use the media in promoting citizens’ health. The expanding possibilities leave the door wide open for health communicators to be both traditional and innovative. REFERENCE Korsch, B. M., & Harding, C. (1997). The intelligent patient’s guide to the doctor-patient relationship: Learning how to talk so your doctor will listen. New York: Oxford University Press.

20 Using Media Campaigns for Health Promotion Charles T. Salmon Michigan State University

Charles Atkin Michigan State University

DEFINITION OF A CAMPAIGN

Given its historical origins and colloquial usage, the term campaign is in some ways a curious moniker for describing the activities of the contemporary health-communications practitioner. The Latin word campus and the Late Latin word campania both meant “flat country” and these were the antecedents of the Old Northern French word campagne and the English word campaign (Partridge, 1966). Why flat country? Because that was the typical setting in which battles were fought. In the days of antiquity, a campaign was a specific military intervention defined in both topography and time. More than a battle but less than a war, a campaign would endure for a period of one or two years, during which time troops commonly would remain in flat country, sometimes a single field, to fight toward some objective—a river, a walled city, perhaps a port—whose capture was deemed of particular strategic importance for the larger war effort (Scott, 1864). With success, an especially harsh winter, or the end of their term of active service, troops would return to quarters, an event signaling the end of the campaign. Although the original usage of the term may no longer hold currency, its military connotations are indisputable and easily spotted in numerous contemporary references to the campaign process. Consider the many aggressive images evoked when using the term campaign in the context of public health, a helping profession: “Armies” of public health professionals (or health “crusaders,” as they are sometimes called) design “surveillance systems,” actively “gather intelligence” through formative research, set “objectives,” engage in “strategies” and “tactics” involving “scattershot” messages or highly “targeted” “magic bullets,” “mobilize and deploy” resources, and attempt to “trigger” change, “overcome resistance” and “neutralize the defenses” of “target audiences.” In special cases in the

449

450

SALMON AND ATKIN

United States, “czars,” appointed by the president, who also serves as commander in chief, move beyond the campaign to “declare war” on certain social problems, such as AIDS or drugs, that are considered particularly egregious either epidemiologically or politically. This is not to say that designers of health campaigns are particularly combative or belligerent folks or that they consciously invoke militaristic metaphors in their otherwise altruistic efforts to help individuals at risk. Indeed, the campaign has a long, well-established and respected heritage as an instrument for achieving peaceful, evolutionary social change as well as an apparatus for promoting public health and welfare. In the United States, the use of campaigns is coterminous with the earliest efforts to promote liberty and other manifestations of the public good (Paisley, 2001) and is commonplace in the public and private sectors. At an abstract level, there appears considerable agreement about the essential nature of campaigns. Rogers and Storey’s (1987) comprehensive review of communication campaigns yielded 11 definitions, all emphasizing fairly similar points. From these definitions four essential elements were extracted: (a) a campaign is intended to generate specific outcomes or effects (b) in a relatively large number of individuals, (c) usually within a specified period of time and (d) through an organized set of communication activities. At a more concrete level, the level of agreement is far less. Paralleling the argument that Herbert Blumer (1948) articulated in his critique of the polling industry a half century ago, health communication as a discipline has yet to define communication campaigns in terms that are sufficient for the development of a system of formal propositions or theory. That is, we cannot say with any kind of precision that one intervention constitutes a media campaign but a second does not. This is in sharp contrast to situations in the natural sciences, for example, where a scientist can state with definitude that a given animal is or is not an amphibian or that a particular rock is or is not sedimentary. The implication of this conceptual shortcoming is that it is difficult to say with any kind of validity that a campaign, as a general set of activities, is likely to produce or capable of producing a specific degree of effectiveness. Consider, for a moment, two interventions that contain the four essential elements of a campaign described above and that are considered main stays in the literature of campaign effectiveness: VD Blues (Greenberg & Gantz, 2001) and the Stanford Three Community Study (Flora, 2001). Although both interventions are commonly referred to as campaigns in standard literature reviews, they are hardly equivalent as scientific phenomena (see Salmon, 1989, 1992). First, they differ in the dose of information disseminated: The first disseminated information through a single television program, whereas the second immersed community residents in a deluge of information from a variety of mutually reinforcing sources. Second, they differ in duration: One lasted for 60 minutes, the other for more than a year. Third, they differ in degree of media richness: One relied on television alone, the other incorporated multiple media, print as well as broadcast. Fourth, they differ in degree of vertical integration of communication channels: One relied on mass media only, the other incorporated interpersonal and organizational communication. Fifth, they differ in degree of horizontal integration of approaches to social change: One relied on education (in the form of televised spots), the other incorporated elements of engineering and enforcement (through innovative delivery systems and construction of social normative influences). Sixth, they differ in level of analysis: One focused on individual effects, the other examined change processes at the community level. Given the tremendous variance in two examples treated as essentially equivalent in the literature on campaigns, it is easy to see why standard inventories of generalizations about campaigns tend to be rather tentative and vague and resort to the usual cliche of predicting “moderate” levels of effects.

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

451

APPROACHING CAMPAIGN DESIGN

Nevertheless the campaign process itself is fairly universal across topics and venues. As Rogers and Storey (1987) noted, the essence of the campaign involves a systematic approach to attaining some specified outcome within a large population. In designing and implementing successful health campaigns, this systematic approach requires that campaign planners perform a thorough situational analysis, develop a pragmatic strategic plan, and create and place messages in accordance with principles of effective media campaign practices. It is usually advantageous to rely on research inputs at each phase in the process. The starting point in campaign design is a conceptual analysis of the situation comprising several forms of assessment. The initial step is to analyze the behavioral aspects of the health problem to determine which actions should be performed by which people in order to improve health status. The design team needs to specify focal segments of the population whose health-related practices are to be changed and the bottom-line focal behaviors that the campaign ultimately seeks to influence. The next step is to trace backwards from the focal behaviors to identify the proximate and distal determinants and then create models of the pathways of influence via attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, social influences, and environmental forces. In most cases, the model will differ for each health topic, and it varies according to focal behaviors and population segments. The next step is to assess the model from a communication perspective, specifying intended audiences and intended responses that can be directly influenced by campaign messages. The communication campaign can then be designed to impact the most promising pathways. This requires a comprehensive plan for combining the myriad strategic components subject to manipulation by the campaigner. In formulating the plan, the campaign strategist is faced with basic decisions about allocating resources among the prospective pathways, focal behaviors, types of messages, channels, and dissemination options. Should the campaign seek to change fundamental behaviors or chip away at more readily altered peripheral behaviors? Should the most resistant or most receptive segments be the focus of campaign efforts? What proportion of the resources should be devoted to direct pathways of influence on the focal segment and what proportion to indirect pathways (e.g., stimulating interpersonal influencers and leveraging or combating environmental determinants)? Which influencers should be targeted? What is the optimum combination of awareness messages, instructional messages, and persuasive messages? How many messages should attack the competition (the unhealthy behavior) and how many promote the healthy alternative? Is it more effective to disseminate the messages via expensive TV channels or primarily utilize mini-media? Should the campaign messages be scheduled in concentrated bursts or spread out over a lengthy period of time? Strategists must anticipate the array of likely audience reactions to campaign messages. In responding to media stimuli, individuals proceed through the basic stages of exposure and processing before effects can be achieved at the learning, yielding, and action levels. Exposure includes both the initial reception and degree of attention to the campaign messages (it may be amplified by subsequent campaign-instigated seeking of further information or sensitization to other relevant media messages that are encountered). Processing encompasses mental comprehension, interpretive perceptions, pro and con arguments, and cognitive connections and emotional reactions produced by the campaign message (along with subsequent interpretation of other relevant stimuli, particularly the development of resistance to countermessages). Audience predispositions play a crucial role in determining these responses.

452

SALMON AND ATKIN

In media-based campaigns, strategy development entails sensitive application of mass communication theories and best practices campaign principles. The strategic guidelines presented in this chapter draw upon models, processes, generalizations, and recommendations in the voluminous research literature on media health campaigns, particularly theoretical perspectives and reviews by Ajzen and Fishbein (1980), Atkin (1981, 1994, 2001), Atkin and Wallack (1990), Backer and Rogers (1993), Backer et al. (1992), Bandura (1986), Burgoon and Miller (1985), DeJong and Winston (1990), Donohew, Sypher, and Bukoski (1991), Hale and Dillard (1995), Janz and Becker (1984), Maibach and Parrott (1995), McGuire (1994), Petty, Baker, and Gleicher (1991), Prochaska and DiClemente (1983), Rogers (1983), Rosenstock (1990), Singhal and Rogers (1999), Slater (1999), and Snyder (2001). The applicability of the general principles depends on the specific context (especially the types of audiences to be influenced and the type of product being promoted), so effective campaign design usually requires extensive formative evaluation inputs (Atkin & Freimuth, 2001). In the early stages of campaign development, designers should collect background information about the focal segments and interpersonal influencers, using statistical databases and custom surveys to learn about audience predispositions (e.g., what they already know about the topic, what values and attitudes they hold, what health behaviors they are currently practicing), channel usage patterns, stylistic preferences, and evaluations of prospective messengers and appeals. Several commercial research programs have developed standard inventories of demographic and psychographic variables for use in campaign development, most notably VALS and American Healthstyles (Maibach, Maxfield, Radin, & Slater, 1996; Slater, 1996). These programs help campaign designers segment their audiences in terms of such variables as health-related behaviors, tolerance for risk, and susceptibility to social pressure. Designers of community-based campaigns, the approach used in the Minnesota Heart Health Program (Mittlemark et al., 1986), the Stanford Disease Prevention Project (Farquhar et al., 1985), and North Karelia (Puska, Tuomilehto, & Salonen, 1981), must conduct specialized formative research. Specifically, this approach requires an extensive analysis of community networks; the power structure; patterns of opinion leadership; relationships among businesses, government, and public health agencies; and potential for resistance to change efforts (Finnegan, Bracht, & Viswanath, 1989). As message concepts are being refined and rough executions are created, qualitative reactions should be obtained in focus group discussion sessions, and supplemental quantitative ratings can be measured in message-testing labs. Pretesting feedback prior to final production and dissemination is particularly helpful in assessing whether the audience regards the content and style as informative, believable, motivating, convincing, useful, on-target, and enjoyable . . . and not too preachy, disturbing, confusing, irritating, or dull. This approach was used extensively by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its “America Responds to AIDS” campaigns of the early 1990s. Focus group sites were set up at shopping malls around the country and used for various types of campaign-related research, in particular, to generate concepts and offer reactions to storyboards and potential campaign themes (Salmon & Jason, 1992; Salmon & Kroger, 1992). Perhaps the most interesting use of this approach occurred when health officials sought to gain understanding of the public’s concern about the Kimberly Bergalis case, in which a young woman allegedly contracted AIDS from visiting a dentist. Focus group participants talked about their fears and the cues that they used to assess their risk when visiting a doctor’s or dentist’s office, one of which was the absence or presence of a wedding ring on the finger of their primary care physician. Although this particular finding did not become

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

453

the focus of a campaign, it did create an impetus for new campaigns to counter stereotypes and misconceptions about the disease. Research is crucial in resolving disputes between sponsoring organization officials, health experts, communication strategists, and creative professionals. The feedback from the audience can reveal whether the tone is too righteous (admonishing unhealthy people about their incorrect behavior), the recommendations too extremist (rigidly advocating unpalatable ideals of healthy behavior), the execution too politically correct (staying within tightly prescribed boundaries of propriety to avoid offending overly sensitive authorities and interest groups), and the execution too self-indulgent (letting creativity and style overwhelm substantive content). In particular, research helps bridge the gap between health specialists who differ substantially from their target audiences in knowledge, values, priorities, and level of involvement. Intended Audiences

A typical health campaign might subdivide the population on a dozen dimensions (e.g., age, sex, ethnicity, stage of change, susceptibility, self-efficacy, values, personality characteristics, and social context), each with multiple levels. Combining these dimensions divides the population into thousands of potential subgroups that might be specially targeted. There are two major strategic advantages of segmentation. First, message efficiency can be maximized if subsets of the audience are ordered according to importance (Who is most in need of change?) and receptivity (Who is most likely to be influenced?). Second, effectiveness can be increased if message content, form, and style are tailored to the predispositions and abilities of the distinct subgroups (Atkin & Freimuth, 2001; Dervin & Frenette, 2001). Three basic types of audiences can be targeted in media health campaigns. First, messages may be aimed directly to the focal segments whose behavior is to be changed. Second, the campaign might utilize the two-step flow by targeting influentials who are in a position to influence the focal individuals. The third approach is to alter the environment by aiming at policymakers responsible for devising constraints and creating opportunities that shape individuals’ health decisions. The nature of the health problem dictates the broad parameters of the focal audience to be influenced (e.g., adolescents in a drug campaign, middle-aged females in a breast cancer campaign). Because audience receptivity is often a more central determinant of campaign effectiveness than the potency of the campaign stimuli, there will be differential success depending on which particular segment is targeted. To achieve the maximum degree of communication effects, campaign designers often pick off the easier targets. A fundamental factor is stage of readiness to perform the practice (Proschaska & DiClemente, 1983). Campaigns tend to achieve the strongest impact with triggering or reinforcing messages designed to promote healthy practices among those who are already favorably predisposed (e.g., adoption of five a day fruit and vegetable consumption by persons inclined to eat a nutritional diet, maintenance of nonsmoking behavior by former smokers). A more important but somewhat less receptive target is composed of people who have not yet tried the unhealthy behavior but whose background characteristics suggest they are “at risk” in the near future (e.g., preventing drug use by rebellious, sensationseeking boys whose peers are experimenting with drugs). On the other hand, those committed to unhealthy practices are not readily influenced by directly targeted campaigns, so a heavy investment of resources to induce immediate discontinuation is likely to yield a marginal payoff.

454

SALMON AND ATKIN

Campaigners also need to consider other demographic, social, and psychological-based subgroups such as high- and low-income groups or sensation-seekers and non-sensationseekers (see Palmgreen, Donohew, & Harrington, 2001). Influencing these varied population segments requires a complex mix of narrowly customized messages and broadly applicable, multitargeted messages that use diverse appeals and optimally ambiguous recommended actions. Intended Responses

In the health arena, the focal behavior is usually a specific behavioral practice or discrete action. The two fundamental approaches are to promote healthy behavior (e.g., enjoy a drug-free lifestyle) or reduce or prevent unhealthy behavior (e.g., don’t use drugs). The promotion of desirable practices works better for certain topic areas (e.g., it is easier to promote the “designated driver” arrangement for a safe ride home than to glamorize nonuse of drugs), and the negatively oriented prevention approach is more potent for topics where harmful outcomes are genuinely threatening. Prevention campaign messages focus primarily on the harmful consequences of the unhealthy practice rather than promoting a positive alternative to compete with it. This is especially the case for substances such as drugs and tobacco, where the positive product lacks inherently appealing features. Health campaigners typically attack the competition by threatening dire consequences for performing the proscribed behavior. Although threats can be effective if handled skillfully, the heavy reliance on negatively attacking the competition tends to restrict the strategic arsenal to a narrow array of options. A softer tactic is to discount the perceived benefits of the unhealthy practice, such as assertions that smoking doesn’t really impress peers. In campaign messages that promote a positive product directly to a focal segment, there is a continuum of prospective target responses that can be explicitly recommended for adoption. These actions can vary in their acceptability to the audience, based primarily on the effort and sacrifice required to perform the behavior and the monetary expense. This barrier can be overcome with smaller or softer products that demand lower investment and generate fewer drawbacks. The campaign can create a “product line” of various behaviors featuring audience-appropriate forms of packaging. In creating this menu, the designer should take into account the receptivity versus resistance of the audience and the potency of the incentives associated with each product. With resistant audiences, it may be fruitless to advocate a sizable degree of change that is beyond the recipients’ latitude of acceptability; for many health behaviors, the initial product representation should reflect the incremental “foot in the door” strategy. The array of products can be packaged in a manner to make the recommended actions more appealing. This is a major challenge in prevention campaigns in which the positive product is essentially “nothing.” Indeed, creative labeling and packaging is needed to sell nonuse. Terminology and imagery such as “drug-free lifestyle” and “abstinence” have not been overwhelmingly effective in the alcohol, tobacco, and drug domains. Some messages might instead promote modestly demanding products such as pre-behaviors (e.g., sign pledge card, state intentions publicly, wear red ribbon) or limited forms of abstaining (e.g., keep drug free for a week, delay use until later). In addition, there are numerous intermediate responses that might be targeted, such as awareness, knowledge, images, salience priorities, beliefs, expectancies, values, and attitudes; campaigns may seek to change key variables along the pathways leading to the focal behavior. Other types of target responses come into play when campaigns are aiming at influencers and social policy makers.

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

455

Awareness, Instruction, and Persuasion Messages

Depending on the most promising mechanisms of influence, campaigns utilize three basic communication processes to move the target audience toward the desired response: awareness, instruction, and persuasion. Awareness messages inform people what to do, specify who should do it, and provide cues about when and where it should be done. The instruction messages present “how to do it” information. The campaign also needs to present messages featuring persuasive reasons why the audience should adopt the advocated action or avoid the proscribed behavior. The classic case involves attitude creation or change, usually via knowledge gain and belief formation. For audiences that are favorably inclined, the campaign has the easier persuasive task of attaining reinforcement of predispositions: strengthening a positive attitude, promoting postbehavior consolidation, and motivating behavioral maintenance over time. The relative emphasis on the three types of messages will vary at different points of the campaign and for different target audiences because the pathways to impact depend on the existing pattern of knowledge and attitudes of the audience. DEVELOPING PERSUASIVE MESSAGE STRATEGIES

The central element of the overall campaign is the content, form, and style of individual messages. Sophisticated message design includes strategic selection of substantive material, mechanical construction of message components, and creative execution of stylistic features. Chapter 21 provides an extensive framework for designing and evaluating health messages. Our discussion here begins with incentives, which are central to persuasive messages. For most of the pathways of influence, there are several additional message qualities that increase effectiveness. Credibility is the extent to which the message content is believed to be accurate and valid. Credibility is primarily conveyed by the trustworthiness and competence of the source and the provision of convincing evidence. The style and ideas should be engaging. They can be made engaging by using stylistic features that are superficially attractive and entertaining (and less pleasing features that are nevertheless arresting or refreshing) and substantive content that is interesting, mentally stimulating, or emotionally arousing. To influence behavior, the presentation must be personally involving and relevant so that the receivers regard the recommendation as applicable to their situation and needs. Finally, the understandability of the message contributes to recipient processing and learning. In other words, the message’s presentation should be simple, explicit, sufficiently detailed, comprehensive, and comprehensible. Diverse Incentive Appeals

The promoting and attacking approaches used in persuasive campaign messages are generally accompanied by corresponding positive or negative incentive appeals. Messages for high-involvement health practices tend to emphasize substantive incentives, presenting persuasive arguments supported by credible messengers or evidence to move the audience through a lengthy hierarchy of output steps such as attention, attitude change, and action (McGuire, 1994). The most widely used frameworks (theory of reasoned action, protection motivation theory, and health belief model) employ a basic expectancy-value mechanism. This means that the messages are primarily directed toward influencing an array of beliefs regarding the subjective likelihood of each outcome occurring; attitudinal and behavioral responses are contingent upon each individual’s valuation of these outcomes.

456

SALMON AND ATKIN

Rather than simply exhorting individuals to act in a specified way, it is preferable to present message content that links the desired health behavior to valued attributes or consequences that serve as positive incentives (or to present content that links the unhealthy behavior to negative incentives). The classic incentive strategy in health messages is to offer a series of substantive arguments for or against a particular behavior, buttressed by credible evidence or source assertions. The incentive appeals for complying with a recommendation should build on the existing values of the target audience. The basic dimensions of incentives include physical health, time/effort, economic, psychological/aspirational, and social, each with possible positive and negative value predispositions. The most frequently used dimension in the health domain is physical health; negatively valued unhealthy outcomes (death, illness, and injury) tend to be featured more often than positive reinforcers. Clearly, there is a need to diversify the negative incentive strategies to include appeals not directly related to physical health per se (e.g., psychological regret, social rejection) and to give greater emphasis to reward-oriented incentives (e.g., valued states or consequences such as well-being, altruism, and attractiveness). Appeals can emphasize either of the two basic components in the expectancy-value formulation: the subjective probability of a consequence’s occurring or the degree of positive or negative valence of that outcome. For unhealthy behaviors, the operational formula is vulnerability × severity, based on the premise that the audience will be maximally motivated by a high likelihood of suffering a very painful consequence. The prime communication strategy is to change beliefs regarding the probability component. If there is a discrepancy between the audience’s expectancy estimate and the actual likelihood, the message should stress the higher-than-expected probability (especially if the gap exists at the high end of the certainty scale). A second communication strategy is to intensify the valence by emphasizing the severity of negative consequences (or the positivity of benefits) or to raise the salience of those components of the expectancy-value equation that the audience already regards as advantageous (e.g., positively valued and likely consequences of a recommended practice) so that each of these components is weighted more heavily in the audience’s decision making. Negative Appeals. A pervasive approach in health campaigns is to motivate behavior change by threatening the audience with harmful outcomes from initiating or continuing an unhealthy practice. The subject of fear-arousing messages is discussed in Chapter 21. Strong negative incentives should play an important but limited role in campaigns. The design team should brainstorm softer reasons why the audience should perform the healthy practice. The diversified approach is to combine messages featuring strong negative incentives, threats of a less severe nature, negative incentives beyond the physical health domain, and positive incentives. When the designer is unable to offer any incentives that genuinely link strong valence with high probability, the next best approach seems to be to select a mildly valenced incentive that is highly probable rather than one that is strongly valenced but improbable. In the case of drug campaigns, minor negative physical incentives might be loss of stamina, weight gain, and physiological addiction. Beyond the realm of physical health, there are dozens of potential motivational appeals along other dimensions. In the social incentive category, drug campaigns can present negative appeals about looking uncool, alienating friends, incurring peer disapproval, losing the trust of parents, or deviating from social norms. The constellation of psychological incentives might include reduced ability to concentrate; low grades; feeling lazy and

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

457

unmotivated; losing control; making bad decisions; and anxiety about getting caught or experiencing harm, guilt, and loss of self-respect. Among the economic incentives related to drugs are diminished job prospects, fines, the cumulative cost of purchasing drugs, and inability to spend money on other needs and desires. Messages can also highlight penalties for violating laws and policies, such as incarceration, loss of driver’s license, or suspension from school. Positive Appeals. Campaigns should diversify by presenting a high proportion of positive incentives. For each of the negative consequences of performing the proscribed practice, there is usually a mirror-image positive outcome that can be promised for performing the healthy alternative (e.g., avoiding drugs or enjoying a drug-free lifestyle). In the physical health dimension, messages can offer prospects ranging from a longer lifespan to enhanced athletic performance. Positive social incentives include being cool, gaining approval and respect, forming deeper friendships, building trust with parents, and being a good role model. In the psychological dimension, messages might promise such outcomes as gaining control over one’s life, achieving a positive self-image, attaining one’s goals, feeling secure, or acting intelligently. Exaggerated rewards may work well as motivators even though their likelihood is small. Just as negative strategies frequently use long-shot prospects of severe harm, positive approaches could promise lottery-type payoffs that are more believable to optimisits. On occasion, the soft-sell approach attempts to associate the desired behavior with positive images. Multiple Appeals. There are dozens of persuasive appeals that are potentially effective, and the degree of potency is roughly equivalent in many cases. Rather than relying on a handful of incentives, it is advantageous to use multiple appeals across a series of messages in a campaign to influence different segments of the target audience (especially in media channels where precise targeting is difficult) and to provide several reasons for the individual to comply. In selecting incentives, the key criteria are the salience of the promised or threatened consequences, the malleability of beliefs about the likelihood of experiencing these outcomes, and the potential persuasiveness of the arguments that can be advanced (see Cappella, Fishbein, Hornik, Ahern, & Sayeed, 2001). The designer should consider the absolute potency of each incentive and the relative contribution vis-`a-vis other concurrent appeals and the influence that has already been achieved in the past. For messages about familiar health subjects, it is important to include some new appeals to complement the standard arguments. Preproduction research can test basic concepts to determine the effectiveness of each one and to examine optimum combinations, and pretesting research can compare the relative influence of executions of various appeals. Evidence

In conveying an incentive appeal, it is often necessary to provide evidence supporting claims made in the message. This is most important when belief formation is a central mechanism and when the source or sponsor is not highly credible. The type of evidence featured varies according to each audience. Sophisticated and highly involved individuals are more influenced by messages that cite statistics, provide documentation, and include quotations from experts, whereas those who are less involved are more influenced by dramatized case examples and testimonials by respected sources. The message should demonstrate how the evidence is relevant to the situation experienced by the target audience in order to forestall denial of applicability.

458

SALMON AND ATKIN

In offering evidence, special care should be taken with the presentation of extreme claims (rare cases, implausible statistics, overly dramatic depictions of consequences), highly biased marshaling of supportive facts, and misleading information. These elements may strain credulity and trigger counterarguing among audience members and may be challenged by critics in rebuttal messages. One-Sided versus Two-Sided Content

For most health-related target responses, behavioral compliance is impeded by a variety of disadvantages perceived by the audience, such as obstacles, drawbacks, and forsaken alternatives. The strategist is faced with the question of how to handle these disadvantages. A one-sided message strategy presents only the case favoring the desired behavior or against the competition and ignores the drawbacks. In a two-sided message, the elements of the opposing case are strategically raised and discounted in order to counteract current and future challenges. The three basic techniques for addressing drawbacks are refutation, diminution, and tactical concession. First, supposed advantages of the unhealthy behavior or disadvantages of the promoted behavior can be directly refuted by contrary evidence or emotional attacks. Messages can acknowledge that the competition has certain attractive aspects and then argue that each seemingly positive consequence is either unlikely to be experienced, not so positive after all, or relatively unimportant. Second, salient and substantive drawbacks of the focal behavior (and attractive features of alternative) can be mentioned and then downplayed by arguing that these factors are relatively unimportant compared with the beneficial features. Third, minor disadvantages can simply be conceded as a tactic for enhancing credibility and thus increasing the believability of other arguments in the message. The research evidence indicates that the two-sided message is more persuasive if the audience is sophisticated and knowledgeable about the topic, predisposed against the position being advanced, wary of a manipulative intent, and already aware of the pro arguments or likely to be exposed to them in the future. The main weakness of a twosided presentation is that it may heighten the salience of certain drawbacks that audience members may not have been considering as they weighed their decisions. Formative research is useful in determining which of these factors are predominant in a particular health campaign situation. AUGMENTING PERSUASION WITH INSTRUCTION AND AWARENESS

In addition to the motivational appeals, campaigns typically provide informational content that highlights the health problem and solutions, triggers appropriate behaviors, and teaches coping skills. Awareness Messages

These messages may be designed to create recognition of the topic or practice for a large portion of the public, to trigger activation among favorably predisposed audiences, to use interpersonal influences or environmental forces as motives for compliance, to encourage further information-seeking about the topic, and to sensitize individuals to subsequently encountered messages.

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

459

Information-seeking is a crucial function because campaign messages that have the broadest reach can deliver only a superficial amount of informational and persuasive content—content that is seldom customized to the individual recipient. In order to convey multiple appeals, elaborate evidence, and detailed instruction, media campaigns can stimulate the audience to seek out additional material from specialized sources. A key role of awareness messages is to arouse interest or concern and to motivate further exploration of the subject. In particular, messages should include elements designed to prompt active seeking from elaborated information sources such as Web sites, hotline operators, books, counselors, parents, and opinion leaders. The sensitization strategy leverages the rich array of pertinent but unrecognized influences present in the everyday environment experienced by focal individuals. In the mass media, there are numerous news stories, advertisements, entertainment portrayals, and other public service campaigns that may present content consistent with campaign goals. Similarly, individuals may not be conscious of certain social norms, interpersonal influences, behavioral models, or societal conditions that might contribute to performance of the focal behavior. Thus, some campaign messages can serve a priming function to cue the audience to available pro campaign stimuli. Instruction Messages

In many campaigns, there is a need to provide information that produces knowledge gain and skills acquisition. If the behavioral components are elaborate or complex, messages can educate the audience by providing a detailed blueprint. If certain individuals lack the confidence to carry out the behavior, messages can provide encouragement or training to enhance personal efficacy. If the focal segment is subject to peer pressure or exposed to unhealthy media portrayals, instruction messages can teach peer resistance and media literacy skills. Given the potentially detrimental health effects of commercial advertising, entertainment media portrayals, and certain Web sites, it may be wise to devote a modest proportion of campaign messages to inoculating viewers and listeners against influences that might undermine the campaign. PRESENTING INFLUENTIAL SOURCE MESSENGERS

The messenger is the model appearing in the message who delivers information, demonstrates behavior, or provides a testimonial (this presenter is distinct from the institutional sponsor and the message creator). Atkin (1994) provides an elaborate discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of various types of messengers. Health messengers serve a variety of functions. One important role is to enhance, by being engaging, credible, and relevant, several qualitative factors that convey the incentives in campaign messages. A source messenger can increase exposure to message content (by attracting attention to him- or herself), facilitate comprehension (by personalizing message concepts and by modeling acts or consequences), elicit positive cognitive responses (by causing the receiver to evaluate the messenger or arguments supporting the messenger’s position positively and to feel a personal connection to the messenger), heighten emotional arousal (by causing the receiver to identify with the messenger or transfer affect from the messenger to the message content or advocated behavior), and increase retention (by being memorable to the receiver). In selecting sources to appear in messages, five key dimensions can be considered: expertise and trustworthiness (which are the primary components of messenger credibility)

460

SALMON AND ATKIN

and familiarity, likability, and similarity to the target audience (which are facets of attractiveness). The messenger power dimension (control over rewards and punishments) that is central to interpersonal persuasion is not directly pertinent to the mass media situation. Expertise (topical knowledgeability based on training, experience, or intelligence) makes a surprisingly small contribution to the persuasive impact of the message. It is more effective to use a trustworthy communicator who the audience regards as motivated to tell the truth (based on character, apparent sincerity, or lack of self-interest). Trust is important for low-involvement target audiences; they tend to rely on this “credibility heuristic” in judging the validity of message claims and recommendations without investing elaborate effort to process content. Messenger attractiveness produces greater message influence because the audience wants to imitate or adopt the positions of messengers whom they admire or identify with. Attractive messengers tend to be engaging and appealing, and they may convey an implicit incentive or serve as a peripheral persuasive cue for those who are low in involvement. Strategists attempt to maximize messenger-audience similarity, especially when the messenger will be required to model the recommended acts or demonstrate the consequences that may be experienced. Similarity is typically based on demographic characteristics (race, age, gender, socioeconomic status), expression of attitudinally shared ideas, and portrayal of common experiences. Peer models are most important for nonmainstream target audiences (e.g., youths, minorities), as they may not trust conventional sources. Likability seems to be an influential factor when the arguments are weak or the target response is regarded as unappealing. There are several pitfalls associated with presentation of certain messengers. A compelling figure may become a distraction who overwhelms the substantive content of the message. An individual who is controversial or biased may trigger source derogation, counterarguing, and rejection of advocated or modeled behavior. Typically, messengers of eight kinds are featured in health messages: celebrities (e.g., a famous athlete or entertainer), public officials (a government leader or agency director), expert specialists (e.g., a doctor or researcher), organization leaders (e.g., a hospital administrator or corporate executive), professional performers (a standard spokesperson, attractive model, or character actor), average people (e.g., a blue-collar man or a middle-class woman), specially experienced people (e.g., a victim, survivor, or successful role model), or unique characters (e.g., an animated, anthropomorphic, or costumed character). The type of messenger to be featured depends on the predispositions of the target audience and the persuasion mechanism underlying the strategy (particularly the nature of the incentive). It may be necessary to demonstrate the messenger’s relevance to the topic area (based on his or her experiences, interests, or demographic characteristics). Selection of the messenger also depends on the type of message: Awareness messages tend to present celebrities, characters, and public officials; instruction messages rely on experts; and persuasion messages are more likely to feature ordinary people and organization leaders. Professional performers appear in all types of messages. Formative evaluation research is very helpful in providing background information and testing reactions to specific source figures. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of two conventional sources for health messages. A medical authority such as a physician, researcher, or government health official will strengthen the expertise dimension (and trustworthiness to a lesser extent) but tends to be less engaging due to the dull style and complex information typically featured in authoritybased messages. This source is primarily important for belief-oriented messages focusing

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

461

on the likelihood of consequences and for endorsement of a recommended behavior for which motivating arguments or understandable evidence cannot be readily articulated. Messages featuring well-known personalities from the entertainment or sports world are advantageous in attracting attention to dull or distressing health topics. Moreover, when the celebrities have special competence or relevant experience as victims or survivors of the health problem (e.g., basketball star Magic Johnson on AIDS or singer Barbara Mandrell on safe driving), the expertise may enhance the believability of the message. Highly respected celebrities are often regarded by their fans as trustworthy on a broad array of topics, which contributes to the acceptance of recommended responses. However, audiences may be skeptical of the pro health motives of certain celebrities (suspicious that they are merely trying to enhance their image or make money by appearing in health messages), a compelling celebrity may distract from the substance of the message, some celebrities may be perceived as unhealthy role models because they have practiced risky behavior, some segments of the audience may dislike the famous person, and athletes or entertainers may quickly lose their luster owing to a drop in popularity or adverse publicity (e.g., performing the behavior they are warning against). Despite certain drawbacks, the personalized, credible, and engaging qualities of a source figure offer clear advantages over presenting message material without a manifest messenger or only with attribution to an impersonal organization. Institutions tend to be less trusted and less attractive than individual spokespersons. There are multiple dimensions of source credibility and attractiveness, and each type of messenger has variable potency in moving the audience through response stages. Whether a given messenger is appropriate depends crucially on which component of the influence model needs a boost. For example, celebrities help draw attention to a dull topic, experts enhance response efficacy, ordinary people heighten self-efficacy, victims convey the severity of harmful outcomes, and victims who share characteristics with the audience can enhance susceptibility claims. The use of multiple messengers can increase the odds of success in some cases (for the same reasons that multiple appeals are effective), but this tactic may risk information overload and undermine continuity across message executions. When these added messengers are included in a message, it is best to place them in complementary or secondary roles (e.g., interacting with the primary source, appearing as background figures, or being cited in brief quotations). SELECTING APPROPRIATE CHANNELS AND FORMATS

In disseminating messages, media campaigner designers most commonly rely on television, radio, newspapers, and printed materials, especially broadcast spots, press releases, and pamphlets. This narrow array of conventional choices has not consistently produced impressive results, and it may be worth exploring a more diverse variety of channels and vehicles, including secondary mini-media (e.g., billboards, posters, theater slides), entertainment-education materials (e.g., songs, program inserts, comics; Singhal & Rogers, 1999), and interactive media (e.g., Web sites, CD-ROM disks, computer games). In assessing each option for channeling campaign messages, the designers can consider myriad advantages and disadvantages along a number of communicative dimensions. Atkin (1994) discusses channel differences in terms of reach (proportion of community exposed to the message), specialization (targetability for reaching specific subgroups), intrusiveness (ability to overcome selectivity and command attention), safeness

462

SALMON AND ATKIN

(avoidance of risk of boomerang or irritation), participation (active receiver involvement while processing stimuli), meaning modalities (array of senses employed in conveying meaning), personalization (human relational nature of source-receiver interaction), decodability (mental effort required for processing stimuli), depth (channel capacity for conveying detailed and complex content), credibility (believability of material conveyed), agenda-setting (potency of channel for raising salience priority of issues), accessibility (ease of placing messages in channel), economy (low cost for producing and disseminating stimuli), and efficiency (simplicity of arranging for production and dissemination). Table 20.1 displays key strengths and weaknesses of 25 channels and modes of disseminating messages. For example, TV PSAs rate high in the dimensions of reach, intrusiveness, and decodability but are weak when it comes to accessibility, safeness, depth, and participation. Among the strengths of newspaper articles are accessibility, reach, depth, credibility, agenda-setting power, economy, and efficiency; major weaknesses occur in the TABLE 20.1

Features of Media Channels and Modes for Disseminating Health Messages Channel & Mode TV PSA spots Paid ads News coverage Feature stories Public service shows Talk/magazine shows Entertainment inserts Radio PSAs Paid spots News coverage Talk/call in Newspaper Ads News coverage Feature stories Editorial comment Letters to editor Magazine ads/stories Internet Web pages Billboards/posters Theater shorts/slides Film, tape, and slide shows Pamphlets/booklets Direct mail materials

Accessa

Reachb

Target c

Depthd

Credibilitye

Agenda-Settingf

0 ++ + + ++ 0 0

++ ++ + + 0 ++ ++

+ + + + ++ + +

+ + + ++ ++ ++ +

+ + ++ ++ ++ + +

+ + ++ + 0 + +

+ ++ + ++

++ ++ + +

++ ++ ++ ++

0 0 0 ++

+ + + +

+ + + +

0 ++ + + ++ + ++ + + ++ + +

++ ++ ++ + + + + ++ + 0 0 +

+ + + ++ + ++ ++ ++ ++ ++ + ++

++ ++ ++ ++ + ++ ++ 0 + ++ ++ ++

+ ++ + + + + + 0 0 + + +

+ ++ + + 0 + 0 0 0 0 0 0

Note. ++ = high; + = medium; 0 = low. a Degree of campaign’s accessibility to channel distribution. b Proportion of general public exposed to message in channel. c Reaching of specialized target audience segments via channel. d Channel capacity for conveying detailed and complex content. e Believability of message content carried in the channel. f Channel potency for raising perceived significance of topic.

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

463

areas of decodability and personalization. As for pamphlets, they score high in the dimensions of depth and participation but exhibit poor reach, decodability, and personalization. Although these conventional channels are effective, a more diverse variety of channels, modes, and vehicles may produce impressive results. Conceptually, channel selection is dictated by the usage patterns of the target receivers and the nature of the message. Pragmatically, the limited resources of the campaigner also play a role. It is usually more feasible to stage a pseudo-event that generates news coverage than acquire time or space in the ideal media vehicle, it is more feasible to achieve a minor product placement in an entertainment program than to capture the whole plotline, and it is more feasible to place a PSA on a low-rated mature adult radio station than a hot teen station. The most promising low-cost approach to placing messages is creative publicity. Health campaigners have traditionally underutilized public relations techniques for generating news and feature story coverage in the mass media. With recent trends making health topics increasingly attractive to newspapers, news magazines, and television newscasts (and maintaining the long-standing interest of specialty magazines, cable channels, and daytime TV talk shows in these topics), campaigns should take greater advantage of these opportunities for message dissemination. Springston and Lariscy extend the logic behind this strategy in Chapter 24. Public relations in the health domain has moved beyond the traditional distribution of press releases to aggressively place guests on talk shows, regularly feed feature writers with compelling story ideas, and creatively stage pseudo-events to attract journalistic attention (including the dramatization of health-related statistics using “creative epidemiology” techniques). The source of public relations messages is especially important, as these messages tend to attain greater media acceptance when sponsored by high-profile and widely respected organizations that feature distinctive or compelling messengers (e.g., celebrity spokespersons, government officials, charismatic experts who have gained prominence, and victims and survivors, who provide a human interest angle). As regards achieving an impact on the audience, there are several advantages of public relations messages over prepackaged stimuli such as PSAs, pamphlets, and Web pages. Messages appearing in the informational media tend to have greater credibility than packaged messages that utilize an advertising format, and their credibility facilitates the formation of beliefs regarding health consequences and the acceptance of recommended behaviors. Messages placed in the mainstream media can attract the attention of key informal influencers, who can exert an indirect influence on the focal individuals. Health issues gaining visibility in the news media can benefit from the agenda-setting effect, whereby problems and solutions are perceived as more urgent and significant. This is particularly important in media advocacy strategies targeted at opinion leaders and policymakers. Entertainment-education is the practice of embedding health-related material in entertainment programming (or creating entertainment programming as a vehicle for health education). Because the interesting and enjoyable style of presentation attracts large audiences and conveys information in a relevant and credible manner, this approach has proved to be quite successful in promoting health in Africa, Asia, and South America (Singhal & Rogers, 1999). Entertainment-education has been used sparingly in the United States, with narrow applications in efforts to promote safety belts, use of designated drivers, safe sex, and drug abstinence as well as deal with child-oriented topics such as alcohol, occupational roles, and conflict resolution. Despite reticence on the part of the domestic entertainment industry (and recent controversy in the case of drug-related themes in TV shows), this approach has considerable promise for U.S. health campaigns (Greenberg et al., in press). Kline, in Chapter 25, considers this strategy in more depth.

464

SALMON AND ATKIN

There are thousands of Web sites and CD-ROMs offering a wide variety of health materials, and many campaigns are utilizing these channels. In addition to providing prepackaged pages and streaming video, these technologies have an interactive capacity that gives them an advantage over standard media. Screening questionnaires can assess each individual’s capabilities, stage of readiness, stylistic taste, knowledge level, and current beliefs (addressing the key health literacy issues that Bernhardt and Cameron consider in Chapter 26), and then direct the individual to narrowly targeted customized messages that are precisely designed to address his or her needs and predispositions. Not only does this approach increase the likelihood of learning and persuasion, but it decreases the possibility of boomerang effects. Furthermore, entertaining interactive formats such as games are particularly well suited to youthful focal segments (Leiberman, 2001). INFLUENCING THE INFLUENCERS AND ALTERING THE ENVIRONMENT

It is often valuable for campaigners to supplement the direct approach (educating and persuading the focal segment) by influencing other target audiences who can exert interpersonal influence or help reform environmental conditions that shape the behaviors of the focal segment. Mass media campaigns have considerable potential for producing effects on institutions and groups at the national and community level as well as motivating personal influencers in close contact with individuals in the focal segment. These audiences are usually more receptive to media messages, and their indirectly stimulated activities are more likely to be effective than campaign messages directly targeted to the focal segment. These influencers can provide positive and negative reinforcement, exercise control (by making rules, monitoring behavior, and enforcing consequences), shape opportunities, facilitate behavior with reminders at opportune moments, and serve as role models. Furthermore, influencers can customize their messages to the unique needs and values of the individual. Interpersonal Influencers

An important goal of the campaign is to stimulate interpersonal influence attempts by inspiring, prompting, and empowering influencers, especially those who are hesitant to wield their authority. For example, there are a variety of peer and authority figures in a position to personally educate, persuade, or control adolescents: parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, bosses, teachers, club leaders, coaches, medical personnel, police officers, and store clerks. These influencers are likely to be responsive to negative appeals that arouse concern about harmful consequences to those they are trying to help behave appropriately. Thus, some campaign messages should be designed to motivate facilitators and enforcers to take action. Social Policy Makers

Individuals’ decisions about health practices are strongly shaped by the constraints and opportunities in their social environment, such as monetary expenses, laws, entertainment role models, commercial messages, social forces, and community services. Through the interventions of government, business, educational, medical, media, religious, and community organizations, many of these influential factors can be engineered to increase the

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

465

likelihood of healthy choices or discourage unhealthy practices. These initiatives include direct service delivery, restrictions on advertising and marketing practices, and the imposition of taxes. More fundamental long-range approaches might seek to restructure basic socioeconomic conditions by reducing poverty, improving schools, broadening access to the health care system, and enhancing employment opportunities. Reformers have refined techniques that combine community organizing and media publicity to advance healthy public policies through media advocacy (see Wallack & Dorfman, 2001). News coverage of health can shape the public agenda and the policy agenda pertaining to new initiatives, rules, and laws. An important element is changing the public’s beliefs about the effectiveness of policies and interventions that are advanced, which leads to supportive public opinion (and direct pressure) that can help convince institutional leaders to formulate and implement societal constraints and opportunities. MAXIMIZING QUANTITY OF DISSEMINATION

Strategic dissemination considerations encompass the volume of messages, the amount of repetition, the prominence of placement, and the scheduling of message presentation. A substantial volume of stimuli is needed to attain adequate reach and frequency of exposure, along with comprehension, recognition, and image formation. Moreover, maximum saturation conveys the significance of the problem and thus facilitates agenda-setting. Moderate repetition of specific executions may be needed to force low-involvement receivers to attend to and process the message, but high repetition leads to wearout and diminishing returns. Prominent placement of messages in conspicuous positions within media vehicles (e.g., prime time, back page) serves to enhance both exposure levels and perceived significance. To provide a common thread unifying the varied messages, the campaign should feature continuity devices (e.g., logo, slogan, jingle, messenger). These devices increase memorability and enable the audience to cumulatively integrate material across multiple exposures. Another quantitative consideration is the scheduling of a fixed number of presentations. Depending on the situation, campaign messages may be most effectively concentrated over a short duration, dispersed thinly over a lengthy period, or distributed in intermittent bursts of “flighting” or “pulsing.” To maximize quantity, campaigners need to diligently seek funding from government, industry, and nonprofit sources to be able to purchase paid placements and leveraged media slots, aggressively lobby for free public service time or space, skillfully employ public relations techniques for generating entertainment and journalistic coverage, and utilize the low-cost Internet channel of communication. Moreover, pseudo-quantity can be boosted by sensitizing audiences to appropriate content already available in the media and by stimulating the pursuit of information from specialty sources. The length of the campaign is a final consideration. The realities of health promotion and prevention often require exceptional persistence of effort over long periods of time. Perpetual campaigning is often necessary because focal segments of the population are in constant need of influence. There are always newcomers who are moving into the “at risk” stage of vulnerability, backsliders who are reverting to prior misbehavior, evolvers who are gradually adopting the recommended practice at a slow pace, waverers who are needing regular doses reinforcement to stay the course, and latecomers who are finally seeing the light after years of unhealthy habits.

466

SALMON AND ATKIN

DETERMINING CAMPAIGN EFFECTIVENESS

Researchers have assessed the impact of media-based health campaigns using survey and experimental designs over the past several decades. The findings from many recent studies have been summarized in literature reviews by Atkin (1981, 2001), Backer, Rogers, and Sopory (1992), and DeJong and Winston (1990) and in a meta-analysis by Snyder (2001). The preponderance of the evidence shows that conventional campaigns typically have limited direct effects on most health behaviors. Snyder’s meta-analytic overview, encompassing 48 media health campaigns, indicated that behavior change typically occurs in 7 to 10% more of the people in the campaign sites than those in control communities. The effects are stronger for adoption of a new behavior (an average of 12% adopt practices such as exercise, condom use, and dental care) than for cessation of current habits (an average of 5% cease practices such as smoking, binge drinking, and risky sex). Campaigns promoting health services achieve a modest impact (an average of 7% use services such as cancer screening or hypertension treatment). Depending upon the intentions of the sponsoring organization, campaigns can seek to influence outcomes at different levels, ranging from the individual to the societal. Campaigns that seek to influence individual-level outcomes focus on knowledge (awareness, consciousness raising, familiarity, recognition, recall), attitudes (affect, disposition, inclination, opinion) and/or behavior (behavioral decision, trial behavior, repeat behavior). (Knowledge, attitudes, and behavior form the K-A-B hierarchy.) The preponderance of evaluation data suggest that campaigns are capable of exerting moderate to powerful influence on cognitive outcomes, less influence on attitudinal outcomes, and still less influence on behavioral outcomes. Further, the conventional wisdom is that behavioral outcomes are more likely to occur in proportion to such factors as dose of information, duration of campaign activities, integration of mass and interpersonal communication systems, and integration of social-change strategies (enforcement, education, engineering). There are a number of reasons why a campaign may not have a strong impact. Audience resistance barriers arise at each stage of response, from exposure to behavioral implementation. Perhaps the most elemental problem is reaching the audience and gaining their attention. Other key barriers include misperception of susceptibility to negative outcomes, deflection of persuasive appeals, denial of applicability to self, rejection of unappealing recommendations, and inertial lethargy. Owing to the wide variety of pitfalls, audience members are lost at each stage of message response. The messages may be regarded as offensive, disturbing, boring, stale, preachy, confusing, irritating, misleading, irrelevant, uninformative, useless, unbelievable, or unmotivating. Moreover, insufficient quantitative dissemination may render some of the campaign messages just plain invisible. As McGuire (1994) observed, effectiveness in increasing knowledge and changing attitudes and behavior should be regarded as a series of conditional probabilities: Behavioral change is conditional upon behavioral intention, which is conditional upon attitudes, which are conditional upon awareness, which is conditional upon exposure to a message. Given the many links in the effects chain necessary to lead an individual from initial exposure to sustained behavioral change, it is small wonder that expectations regarding campaign effectiveness have become modest. In addition to conventional K-A-B outcomes of individual-level campaigns, societallevel outcomes are possible as well, often motivated by a desire to not “blame the victim” but rather change environment factors as a means of promoting public health. Thus campaigns have been waged to prohibit the production and sale of alcohol, reclassify tobacco as a drug to be regulated by the FDA, gain governmental approval of needle-exchange

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

467

programs, or shame municipal governments into enhancing shelters for the homeless. Campaigns of these types tend to be evaluated in terms of specific policy outcomes rather than individual-level K-A-B effects. In addition to achieving outcomes that are considered desirable and expected by the sponsoring organizations, campaigns also are capable of producing outcomes that are either undesirable or serendipitous or both. These outcomes are not necessarily indicators of campaign effectiveness but may actually run contrary to the goals of the campaign (Salmon & Murray-Johnson, 2001). For example boomerang effects occur when a message elicits the opposite reaction intended by the campaign. Some scholars have argued, for example, that anti-drug messages can heighten rather than discourage interest in illegal drugs (Reinerman & Levine, 1989). This would seem to be a particularly likely outcome if the receivers of these messages are sensation seekers, people for whom risk is something to be sought rather than avoided (Donohew, 1990). Similarly, a critic of governmental AIDSawareness campaigns contends that messages emphasizing “Talk to Your Partner” may have indeed spurred conversation but that the interchanges were not necessarily about sex and were likely not to be about condom use (Cline, Johnson, & Freeman, 1992). Ironically, therefore, the “safe sex” campaigns may have lulled audience members into a false sense of security and actually heightened their risk of contracting AIDS. Another researcher found that the impact of health messages could differ greatly according to an audience member’s proclivity to change (Cho, 1999). That is, a message received by someone contemplating change might have one impact, whereas the same message received by someone in the precontemplation stage might have quite another impact, perhaps a boomerang effect. Although the obvious remedy would seem to be to engage in more extensive pretesting, unintended effects are simply unavoidable. Mass audiences are by their very nature heterogeneous and thus comprise sensation seekers and risk avoiders, precontemplators and contemplators, health zealots and health resisters. This fact greatly increases the difficulty of the campaigner’s task. Rather than being defined in absolute terms, campaign effectiveness typically is defined relatively. If a campaign meets the objectives set by its planners, then it is labeled “effective,” and if it does not, then it is labeled “ineffective.” It is little wonder, therefore, that prescriptions for improving campaign effectiveness frequently have suggested that campaign planners set readily attained goals and objectives. Lowering the bar does not improve campaign performance per se, but it lowers expectations and thereby increases the odds that the campaign will be viewed as a success. For instance, two campaigns could induce the same level of behavioral change, but one might be judged effective and the other ineffective on the basis of the idiosyncratic goals and objectives that were set for each (see Salmon & Murray-Johnson, 2001; Weiss, 1997). Most of the published evaluations of campaign effects provide little useful information about which components of the campaign contributed to the effect that was measured. For example, a typical field experiment simply compares treatment communities that receive a full multifaceted campaign intervention and control communities that receive no intervention. This design does not permit examination and isolation of “what works.” Future research is needed to answer the following questions pertaining to campaign design and resource allocation. What is the impact of various quantities of campaign messages? Research should examine (a) the minimum volume of stimuli needed to achieve meaningful effects on key outcomes and (b) the quantitative point of diminishing returns from larger volumes. With respect to repetition, it would be helpful to know at what point wearout occurs for a particular message execution.

468

SALMON AND ATKIN

What is the optimum mix of message incentives? Most campaigns use multiple persuasive appeals, but little is known about the most effective combination of positive versus negative messages and of fear appeals versus other negative appeals. What is the best ratio of direct to indirect messages? Campaigns are increasingly relying on messages targeted at interpersonal influencers and on media advocacy approaches aimed at the general public and policymakers, but the optimum balance among these approaches has not been identified. What is the relative impact of various channels and modes of disseminating messages? Specifically, researchers need to assess and compare the cost-effectiveness of (a) paid advertisements and public service messages; (b) prepared messages, news publicity, and entertainment inserts; (c) TV, radio, print, Web sites, and secondary media; and (d) mass communication and personal outreach. Finally, the recent proliferation of new communication technologies (e.g., the Internet, virtual reality) has the potential to revolutionize health campaigns. From a global perspective, however, many of these technologies are still in the gestation phase, and the digital divide remains a formidable barrier to their widespread use in campaigns. Even in highly developed nations, the use of these technologies is evolving so rapidly that generalizations are quickly rendered obsolete. One study, for example, indicated that Internet users ignore much of the potential richness of the medium: “Only 15 of the thousands of sites that provide health information attract enough traffic for Jupiter [Media Metrix, a research firm] to rank them, and last month 43 percent of the visitors to those went to the top three” (Harmon, 2001). Clearly, ongoing research is needed to keep up with the rapidly changing technological landscape and to assess the ever changing potential of new technologies to be applied to health campaigns. CONCLUSION

To date, the preponderance of scholarly effort exerted on this topic has focused on developing theory “for” campaigns, i.e., new psychological and sociological theory that administrative researchers can use to guide the design of interventions in hopes of improving effectiveness (Salmon, 1992). Drawing on this substantial body of scholarship, we know that many health campaigns have attained a rather modest impact because of meager resources, poor conceptualization, and narrow strategic approaches. The limited potency of the media has several implications for campaigners. It is advisable to have realistic expectations, especially when attempting to influence fundamental behaviors in the short run. Campaigners should be prepared for the long haul, because many campaigns will take years to achieve a significant impact. More emphasis should be given to relatively attainable effects by aiming at more receptive focal segments and by creating or promoting more palatable positive products with a favorable cost-benefit ratio. Campaign designers should play to the strengths of the mass media by imparting new knowledge (e.g., a TV spot informing people about the nutritional value of soy), enhancing salience (e.g., news publicity stressing the importance of reducing drunk driving), providing instruction (e.g., a pamphlet describing protective sexual behaviors), triggering action (e.g., a radio announcement reminding drivers to buckle up during a snowstorm), and stimulating information-seeking (e.g., a radio ad prompting listeners to call a hotline or consult a physician). The relatively small set of packaged campaign stimuli can be augmented by stimulating sensitization to existing media content and by generating

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

469

publicity. The quantity of messages can be increased by pursuing monetary resources to enable paid placements and by utilizing creative and political resources to generate free publicity and engineer health entertainment portrayals. Media messages should be augmented by supplementary education, persuasion and control (e.g., classroom instruction, physician advice, social influence, and environmental constraints), using the media campaign to shape and energize these forces. Through the use of these approaches, campaign effectiveness is likely to be enhanced. But the legacy of our field’s overwhelmingly narrow, administrative focus on the tactical and strategic dimensions of campaigns should not deter health communication researchers from simultaneously developing theory “of” campaigns, i.e., to more systematically define and specify parameters of campaigns and to understand them as social constructions (Salmon, 1992). Campaigns are frequently the tool of choice preferred by social engineers, even when they are not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Why, and for what political and ideological motives, are they used with such frequency? Which segments of society benefit from the use of this particular approach to social change, and which suffer? What are the ethical consequences of continuing to use a strategy of social change that is known to be only modestly effective? The answers to these questions can only enhance our understanding of campaigns and, more importantly, our ability to effect positive and significant changes in the health of communities that we serve. REFERENCES Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1980). Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Atkin, C. (1981). Mass media information campaign effectiveness. In R. Rice & W. Paisley (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (pp. 265–280). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Atkin, C. (1994). Designing persuasive health messages. In L. Sechrest, T. Backer, E. Rogers, T. Campbell, & M. Grady (Eds.), Effective dissemination of clinical health information (AHCPR Publication No. 95-0015, pp. 99–110). Rockville, MD: Public Health Service, Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. Atkin, C. (2001). Impact of public service advertising: Research evidence and effective strategies (Report to Kaiser Family Foundation). Available at www.kff.org Atkin, C., & Freimuth, V. (2001). Formative evaluation research in campaign design. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 125–145). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Atkin, C., & Wallack, L. (1990). Mass communication and public health: Complexities and conflicts. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Backer, T., & Rogers, E. (1993). Organizational aspects of health communication campaigns: What works? Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Backer, T., Rogers, E., & Sopory, P. (1992). Designing health communication campaigns: What works? Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Blumer, H. (1948). Public opinion and public opinion polling. American Sociological Review, 13, 542–554. Burgoon, M., & Miller, G. (1985). An expectancy interpretation of language and persuasion. In H. Giles & R. St. Clair (Eds.), Recent advances in language, communication, and social psychology (pp. 199–229). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

470

SALMON AND ATKIN

Cappella, J., Fishbein, M., Hornik, R., Ahern, R. K., & Sayeed, S. (2001). Using theory to select messages in anti-drug media campaigns: Reasoned action and media priming. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 214–230). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cho, H. (1999). Unintended effects of fear appeals: The role of stages of change, threat, and efficacy. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University, East Lansing. Cline, R., Johnson, S., & Freeman, K. (1992). Talk among sexual partners about AIDS: Interpersonal communication for risk reduction or risk enhancement? Health Communication, 4, 39–56. DeJong, W., & Winston, J. (1990). The use of mass media in substance abuse prevention. Health Affairs, 2, 30–46. Dervin, B., & Frenette, M. (2001). Applying sense-making methodology: Communicating communicatively with audiences as listeners, learners, teachers, confidantes. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 69–87). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Donohew, L. (1990). Public health campaigns: Individual message strategies. In E. Berlin Ray & L. Donohew (Eds.), Communication and health: Systems and applications. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Donohew, L., Sypher, H., & Bukoski, W. (1991). Persuasive communication and drug abuse prevention. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Farquhar, J., Fortmann, S., Maccoby, N., Haskell, W., Williams, P., Flora, J., Taylor, C., Brown, B., Solomon, D., & Hulley, S. (1985). The Stanford five-city project: Design and methods. American Journal of Epidemiology, 122, 323–334. Finnegan, J., Bracht, N., & Viswanath, K. (1989). Community power and leadership analysis in lifestyle campaigns. In C. Salmon (Ed.), Information campaigns: Balancing social values and social change (pp. 54–83). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Flora, J. (2001). The Stanford community studies: Campaigns to reduce cardiovascular disease. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 193–213). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Greenberg, B., & Gantz, W. (2001). Singing the (VD) blues. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 269–272). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Greenberg, B., Salmon, C., Patel, D., Beck, V., & Cole, G. (in press). “The Evolution of an EE Research Agenda.” In M. Cody, M. Sabido, A. Singhal, & E. Rogers (Eds.), Entertainment Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hale, J., & Dillard, J. (1995). Fear appeals in health promotion: Too much, too little or just right? In E. Maibach & R. Parrott (Eds.), Designing health messages: Approaches from communication theory and public health practice (pp. 65–80). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Harmon, A. (2001, August 27). Web clickers stick to the tried and true. International Herald Tribune (Frankfurt ed.), p. 1. Janz, N. K., & Becker, M. H. (1984). The health belief model: A decade later. Health Education Quarterly, 11, 1–47. Lieberman, D. (2001). Using interactive media in communication campaigns for children and adolescents. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 373–388). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Maibach, E., Maxfield, A., Radin, K., & Slater, M. (1996). Translating health psychology into effective health communication: The American Healthstyles audience segmentation project. Journal of Health Psychology, 1, 261–277. Maibach, E., & Parrott, R. (1995). Designing health messages: Approaches from communication theory and public health practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

20. USING MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

471

McGuire, W. (1994). Using mass media communication to enhance public health. In L. Sechrest, T. Backer, E. Rogers, T. Campbell, & M. Grady (Eds.), Effective dissemination of clinical health information (AHCPR Publication No. 95-0015, pp. 125–151). Rockville, MD: Public Health Service, Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. Mittlemark, M., Luepker, R., Jacobs, D., Bracht, N., Carlaw, R., Crow, R., Finnegan, J., Grimm, R., Jeffery, R., Kline, F. G., Mullis, R., Murray, D., Pechacek, T., Perry, C., Pirie, P., & Blackburn, H. (1986). Community-wide prevention of cardiovascular disease: Education strategies of the Minnesota heart health program. Preventive Medicine, 15, 1–17. Paisley, W. J. (2001). Public communication campaigns: The American experience. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 3–21). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Palmgreen, P., Donohew, L., & Harrington, N. (2001). Sensation seeking in anti-drug campaign and message design. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 300–304). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Partridge, E. (1966). Origins: A short etymological dictionary of modern English. New York: Macmillan. Petty, R., Baker, S., & Gleicher, F. (1991). Attitudes and drug abuse prevention: Implications of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. In L. Donohew, H. Sypher, & W. Bukoski (Eds.), Persuasive communication and drug abuse prevention (pp. 71–90). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Prochaska, J., & DiClemente, C. (1983). Stages and processes of self change of smoking: Toward an integrative model. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51, 390–395. Puska, P., Tuomilehto, J., & Salonen, J. (1981) The North Karelia Project: Evaluation of a comprehensive programme for control of cardiovascular diseases in 1972–1977 in North Karelia (World Health Organization Monograph Series). Copenhagen: World Health Organization. Reinerman, C., & Levine, H. (1989). The crack attack: Politics and media in America’s latest drug scare. In J. Best (Ed.), Images of issues. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Rogers, R. (1983). Cognitive and physiological processes in fear appeals and attitude change: A revised theory of protection motivation. In J. Cacioppo & R. Petty (Eds.), Social psychophysiology (pp. 153–176). New York: Guilford Press. Rogers, E., & Storey, D. (1987). Communication campaigns. In C. Berger & S. Chaffee (Eds.), Handbook of communication science (pp. 817–846). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Rosenstock, I. (1990). The health belief model: Explaining health behavior through expectancies. In K. Glanz, F. Lewis, & B. Rimer (Eds.), Health behavior and health education: Theory research and practice (pp. 39–62). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Salmon, C. (1989). Campaigns for social “improvement”: An overview of values, rationales and impacts. In C. Salmon (Ed.), Information campaigns: Balancing social values and social change. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Salmon, C. (1992). Building theory “of” and “for” communication campaigns: An essay on ideology and public policy. In (Ed.), Communication yearbook 15 (pp. 312–345). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Salmon, C., & Jason, J. (1992). A system for evaluating the use of media in CDC’s National AIDS Information and Education Program. Public Health Reports, 106, 639–645. Salmon, C., & Kroger, F. (1992). A systems approach to AIDS communication: The example of the National AIDS Information and Education Program. In T. Edgar, M. A. Fitzpatrick, & V. S. Freimuth (Eds.), AIDS: A communication perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Salmon, C., & Murray-Johnson, L. (2001). Communication campaign effectiveness. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 168–180). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

472

SALMON AND ATKIN

Scott, H. L. (1864). Military dictionary. New York: D. Van Nostrand. Singhal, A., & Rogers, E. (1999). Entertainment-education: A communication strategy for social change. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Slater, M. (1996). Theory and method in health audience segmentation. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 267–283. Slater, M. (1999). Integrating application of media effects, persuasion, and behavior change theories to communication campaigns: A stages-of-change framework. Health Communication, 11, 335–354. Snyder, L. (2001). How effective are mediated health campaigns? In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 181–190). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wallack, L. (1989). Mass communication and health promotion: A critical perspective. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (2nd ed., pp. 353–368). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Wallack, L., & Dorfman, L. (2001). Putting policy into health communication: The role of media advocacy. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 389–401). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Weiss, C. (1997). Theory-based evaluation: Past, present and future. In D. Rog & D. Fournier (Eds.), Progress and future directions in evaluation: Perspectives on theory, practice and methods (pp. 41–57). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

21 Looking Toward the Future: Health Message Design Strategies Lisa Murray-Johnson The Ohio State University

Kim Witte Michigan State University

Thompson (1984) once noted that “too many researchers start from scratch rather than investigating variables that may moderate processes uncovered in earlier research” (p. 149). Heeding her wisdom, this chapter identifies and delineates the overlapping variables important in several mainstream health communication theories and models and places them within a message design framework. Some of the most commonly used theories that define how to create messages to motivate health-related behavior changes include the Health Belief Model (Janz & Becker, 1984; Rosenstock, 1974a, 1974b), the Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975; 1981), Social Cognitive Theory (also known as Social Learning Theory) (Bandura, 1977), the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), and the Extended Parallel Process Model (Witte, 1992a). Although some of these health behavior theories continue to be criticized for (a) excluding social and environmental factors, (b) utilizing a unidirectional flow of information without regard for interactivity, (c) lack of feasibility (e.g., political or financial), and (d) limited applicability to certain audiences (Hochbaum, Sorenson, & Loring, 1992), using the guidance of a theory in message design can save time, money, and resources. COMMONALITIES ACROSS THE THEORIES

When looking across these theories, several commonalities emerge (Witte, Meyer, & Martell, 2001). Specifically, there appear to be at least four categories of health communication variables that work together in a predictable manner. Most health communication theories focus on stimuli that trigger the motivation in an individual to perform an action (outcome variable) that is influenced by the individual’s appraisal of the environment and resources. Stimuli are the materials, actions, or procedures health message designers use to get receivers to attend to their message (Atkin & Freimuth, 1989). Motivation is the

473

474

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

internal drive derived from a person’s cognitions about the message. How a person thinks about the message, coupled with the person’s emotional arousal, determines the strength of the motivation that compels one to respond to the stimuli (Weinstein, 1993). The strength of the motivation affects the extent to which the person feels compelled to appraise his or her resources and environment to determine what coping mechanisms and resources are available to promote positive behavior and/or avert the potential threat. Finally, outcome variables are the concrete measures health communicators use to determine the effect the stimuli (messages) have had on an audience. Outcome variables include changes in beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors as well as negative responses to campaigns such as reactance or denial. The most complete and effective health communication message would address at least one variable in each of these four categories to cause health protective actions. The four categories are listed in Table 21.1; along with examples as defined by the various theories. Although these four categories are conceptually distinct, a single variable can be placed into more than one category. Attitudes, for example, play a role in the appraisal of resources and environment (attitudes or evaluations of people, places, or objects influence how people view their environment), but they also can be outcomes as can occur in attitude change. These four categories provide the framework for discussing the message content variables in this chapter. MESSAGE CONTENT VARIABLES Stimuli

Message designers must first decide how to effectively reach the target audience and get them to listen or attend to their messages. In short, they attempt to make the messages salient to the audience. A message is salient if it is considered important, significant, or relevant by that audience (Witte, Meyer, & Martell, 2001). Trying to reach an audience with a message is like entering an “information contest” (Salmon, 1989). Health message designers are forced to compete for attention, given the limitations of media outlets, competing messages in the environment, time, staffing and resources. Success is a matter of getting the audience to both attend to and act upon these messages. Following are some special issues to consider when developing effective health communication stimuli. Cues to Action. Initially conceptualized as part of the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, 1974a, 1974b), cues to action have been incorporated into many welldesigned health campaign messages regarding adolescent health (Weiler, 1997), AIDS/HIV (Mattson, 1999), drug and tobacco prevention (Borland, 1997; Hahn, Simpson, & Kidd, 1996; Hawkins & Hane, 2000), and mammography (Fox, Stein, Gonzalez, Farrenkopf, & Dellinger, 1998). Cues to action are those message features that prompt individuals to pay attention to the content of the message. They are important in triggering the motivation needed to cause an individual to appraise the resources available when acting on the message. Health message designers create the cognitions leading to motivation by choosing those message features, such as vividness, repetition, and placement in the mass media, among others, that communicate “this is important to your health.” (For an extended analysis on variables related to cues to action, see Albrecht & Bryant, 1996; Bonoma & Shapiro, 1983.) Although both internal and external cues exist, health message designers often focus Internal cues are those cues that occur within an individual, like a particular health state or mood or feeling. For example, a cough can act as an internal

475

Health Belief Model

Cues to Action Internal External

Threat

Benefits Barriers Self-efficacy

Intentions Behaviors

Theoretical Origin of Variables

STIMULI

MOTIVATIONAL VARIABLES

APPRAISALS OF ENVIRONMENT & RESOURCES

OUTCOME VARIABLES

TABLE 21.1

Danger control responses Fear control responses

Self-efficacy Response efficacy

Susceptibility Severity Fear

Fear appeals (mass media, interpersonal, group messages, etc.)

Extended Parallel Process Model

Intentions Behaviors

Attitudes Subjective norm

Attitudes Interaction with referents

Theory of Reasoned Action

Health Communication Variables of Theoretical Origins

Behaviors

Efficacy expectations Outcome expectations

Incentives

Personal experiences Vicarious experience Verbal persuasion Physiological arousal

Social Cognitive Theory

Intentions Behaviors

Attitudes Subjective norm Self-efficacy Behavioral control

Attitudes Interactions with referents

Theory of Planned Behavior

476

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

cue to a smoker, prompting him or her to cut back or quit smoking. External cues are those cues that occur outside of an individual, as in interpersonal interactions, mass media campaigns, or entertainment-education. The discussion below focuses on constructing effective external cues to prompt action. The transmission of external cues can be very simple or quite elaborate. A simple external cue might be the association of former NBA basketball player Magic Johnson’s name after public disclosure of his HIV infection. According to Rogers, Dearing and Chang (1991), telephone inquiries to the National AIDS Hotline jumped nearly 30-fold within months. Name recognition alone was enough to establish heightened awareness of the disease, and repetition of Johnson’s association with HIV helped to catapult the issue to a high priority. Repetition can also heighten the motivation to attend to a message. For example, Walker, Mandel and Tsevat (1999) provided chart reminders to physicians for end-of-life discussions with terminally ill patients. Those physicians who had chart reminders to discuss “do not resuscitate” orders (DNR’s) and living wills brought up the issues during the appointments. These physicians noted that patient decision-making on end-of-life issues increased by 60% (as opposed to family decision-making). In comparison, those physicians who did not have chart reminders often forgot to discuss some or all of the pertinent information, leaving the majority of decisions to be made in later medical interactions. Vividness in a message also enhances salience, which then triggers motivation. In the 1980’s, the entertainment-education rock music videos “That Situation” and “I Still Believe,” were created to promote sexual responsibility in the Philippines. Lyrics such as “I still believe in love at first sight, I don’t think it’s right to need me for a lonely night” and “It’s up to us to not jump into that situation, I’m too young, not ready yet” communicated the message that “sex can wait” (Singhal & Rogers, 2000). Combined with the artistry of t-shirts, posters, calendars, and cards promoting the same message, the materials prompted discussions among teens, increased calls to the national hotline, and increased the number of individuals seeking out contraceptive information (Kincaid, Coleman, Rimon, & Silayan-Go, 1991; Singhal & Rogers, 2000). Determining which external cues to use requires good formative research that outlines the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the target audience. Demographic characteristics include race and ethnicity, family history, gender, age, occupation, religion, education level, and so on (Grunig, 1989). For example, Stoddard, Johnson, Sussman, Dent, and Boley-Cruz (1998), in an analysis of tobacco advertisements marketed to minorities, found that billboards capitalized on age, gender, and race to increase audience attention. The central characters in African American neighborhoods were young, female, and couple-oriented. Asian neighborhoods, in contrast, had billboards showing individuals who were different ages, female, Caucasian, and non-romantic. However, Chen and Hawke (1999) caution message designers to avoid assuming a given audience is homogenous. For one thing, many members of the audience may view a message as not meant for them because they lack the exact characteristics employed by the designers. Psychographic characteristics can also be important for generating message salience. Originally conceptualized as AIO characteristics (i.e., activities, interests, and opinions), psychographic characteristics refer to lifestyle factors (e.g., stress, and health practices), values (e.g., priority given to health), and environmental factors (e.g., political agendas) (Wells & Tigert, 1971). The more AIO characteristics message designers transmit in a message, the more likely the target audience will pay attention and respond in the recommended direction. For example, Kirby Ureada, Rose, and Hussey (1998) found that music was important in conveying information to the African American community, particularly

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

477

in the case of women. The authors reported that those women who heard messages accompanied by old and modern gospel music increased their phone calls to a local telephone hotline to ask about mammography information and breast cancer prevention. By knowing their audience, health message designers were more likely to develop and disseminate messages that succeed in motivating them to act. Motivational Variables

Although stimuli are critical in creating attention and personal relevance, motivation is central to how a message is processed and whether or not action is taken. There are messages designed to increase awareness or knowledge without promoting action, but this chapter focuses on health messages whose purpose is to change behaviors. Over the past several decades, messages that motivate through fear and threat have predominated. Fear and threat imply social and personal responsibility for averting potentially negative health outcomes (Guttman, 2000). For example, in the brochure Understanding AIDS: Message from the Surgeon General (1988), Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said, I fell it is important you have the best information now available for fighting the AIDS virus, a health problem that the President has called “Public Enemy Number One.” Stopping AIDS is up to you, your family and your loved ones. Some of the issues in this brochure may not be things you are not used to discussing openly. . . . But now, you must discuss them.

This message tries to convince the reader that personal responsibility is equivalent to social responsibility. If you don’t participate in stopping AIDS, then you are part of the problem. Labeling AIDS as “Public Enemy Number One” heightens the threat of the message. Clearly, the message designers wanted individuals to be utterly persuaded that awareness about AIDS decreases their chances of contracting HIV. Implied in this message is that not talking about AIDS could be a death sentence. Let us now turn to a broader discussion of how fear and threat can trigger motivation. Fear. Fear is an affective response to a person, event, or object perceived as significant and personally relevant (Easterling & Leventhal, 1989; Ortony & Turner, 1990). It is one of the emotions that all humans experience. When an individual is confronted with a potentially threatening situation (Bargh, 1989), fear is manifested as a short, intense protective reaction. Although the threat can be real or perceived, the fear felt by the individual is real and often accompanied by physical responses, such as an accelerated heart rate, tense muscles, a change in breathing, perspiration, and feeling cold, as well as verbal responses, such as the inability to speak or feeling the need to scream (Scherer & Wallbott, 1994). Creating a fear appeal is a delicate task for health message designers. Too little fear has little persuasive value. It leaves individuals unmotivated to process a message (Witte, 1992a, 1994). For example, in a campaign to increase condom use for sexually active young adults, Sheer (1995) found this statement to be ineffective, “I have a lot of feelings for you and I don’t want anything to happen to you. So, let’s use a condom.” The statement does not specify a particular target (i.e., we don’t know who “you” refers to), so the message does not create fear and becomes ignored. Too much fear, on the other hand, can also generate little or no motivation for message processing. Although greater induction of fear through health message content generally increases perceived fear (Boster & Mongeau, 1984), extremely high levels of fear create

478

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

defensive and/or avoidance responses. Individuals become so preoccupied with their fear that they are unable to adequately or accurately appraise their available resources (i.e., they know how to effectively avert the threat) and they disregard the message in order to control their fear (Dillard, 1994; Witte, 1992a, 1994). Inducing high fear is only appropriate for the target audience members who can easily perform the recommended response (possess response efficacy), but do not recognize either the severity of the health threat or perceive that the threat will only impact others, not themselves. Health message designers should carefully analyze their target audience to find out if they are already fearful of the health threat. Fear must be channeled in a lifesaving direction so that individuals can protect themselves and avert a potential threat without prompting denial or defensive avoidance. Threats. Communication about risk and threat have been well researched in the health communication literature, in relation to AIDS (Edgar, Freimuth, & Hammond, 1988; Freimuth, Hammond, Edgar, & Monohan, 1990; Gray & Saracino, 1989; Witte, 1992b), alcohol (Dorsey, Miller, & Scherer, 1999), breast cancer (Kline & Mattson, 2000); drinking and driving (Montgomery, 1993); drugs (Stephenson, et al., 1999); immunizations (Smith, 1997); and smoking (Insko, Arkoff, & Insko, 1965; Sutton & Eiser, 1984). A threat is a danger or harm that exists in the environment, whether it is formally acknowledged by an individual or not (Witte, 1998). When an individual perceives a threat, he or she must assess the harm that could occur and the likelihood of experiencing the harm. For example, in an anti-marijuana use campaign targeting high sensation seekers, the following message, was used (Stephenson et al., 1999): Michael, an African-American male, liked to smoke marijuana because it made him do crazy things in front of his friends. One day, while smoking pot, Michael and his friends play a game of Russian Roulette—Michael lost, paralyzing him. He says, ‘I only smoked pot for a few months, but not I’m on drugs for life.’ (p. 182)

Michael’s threat came across as very real to the adolescent population to which this advertisement was marketed. Why? Because it pointed out a very real consequence to those individuals who take drugs, even recreationally. Adolescents were cued visually with intense graphics, then told that, “anyone who does drugs can get injured” and that “the consequences of taking drugs are serious.” These statements represent the two basic components of an effective health threat: perceived susceptibility and perceived severity. Adolescents saw paralysis as a very severe outcome of “playing around with drugs” and believed that everyone present was potentially at-risk for this serious behavioral outcome. Perceived Severity. The perceived severity or seriousness of a health threat relates to the magnitude of harm believed to be a likely consequence of the threat. If a person does not perceive the health threat to be serious, then he or she is likely to abandon further processing of the message. In contrast, message designers who are capable of perceptions of moderate perceived severity can convince individuals that not only negative consequences will befall them if action is not taken, but that the consequences will be devastating. Greater perceived severity (also-labeled perceived seriousness or significance), should improve both attention to the message and heighten motivation for self-protection against the threat (Witte, 1998). For example, in the 1980’s, ads intended to convince pregnant women to stop smoking, included warning labels: smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight, and smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

479

(Condit, 1995). Women who perceive the risks to the fetus and themselves as serious consequences are less likely to engage in the behavior. How serious they view these consequences to be is a function of their beliefs about and attitudes toward smoking and the ability of message designers to tap into those beliefs and attitudes. Establishing the magnitude of the threat in a health message requires the use of multiple resources. Messages often attempt to demonstrate the severity of threat through statistics, graphics, personal testimonials, and intense and descriptive language (e.g., AIDS kills or oozing sores that won’t heal.) Consider the excepted message from a study that attempted to motivate males to perform testicular self-exams: Some guys are so macho they’d never stoop to having their testicles checked. They’d rather die first. Testicular cancer is the most common cancer among men ages 20–34. With a 96% malignancy rate and 19% death rate, it is the most fatal cancer for men this age. My name is Kyle. I’m 21 years old and a senior business major at the University of Kansas. I thought I had everything under control—I had a great girlfriend, solid job prospects, a nice apartment, lots of money and loyal friends. What I didn’t have under control was developing cancer. But not just any cancer, testicular cancer, which I had no clue was the most common form of cancer in guys ages 20–34. It’s also the most fatal form of cancer for men in this age group. Anyway, I stared to have pain in my left testicle. After about a month, I finally went to the doctor because my girlfriend made me go. And he found cancer. With a 96% malignancy rate and a 19% death rate for guys like me, I knew I was in big trouble. (Morman, 2000, p. 113–116).

The first section of the message establishes the severity of the threat by citing statistics, its high malignancy rate and its lethality. The second section is in the form of a loss-frame testimonial (e.g., “I had a great girlfriend” and “I knew I was in big trouble”). Together, they foster a perception that testicular cancer is negative, serious, and devastating to a person’s life. Although Allen and Preiss (1997) have claimed that statistical evidence messages are more persuasive than narrative evidence messages (see also Baesler & Burgoon, 1994; Kasoleas, 1993; Kopfman, 1998), others have disagreed. According to Allen and Preiss (1997), statistics are compelling proof of a threat’s existence; they increase the types of thoughts about a message (e.g., negative messages generate negative thoughts), and they can increase message credibility. Bruner (1986), in comparison, identifies narratives as equal in persuasive power on the basis that they demonstrate “lessons learned” by the protagonist. Morman (2000), however, found no difference between the use of statistical evidence versus narrative evidence in motivating testicular examinations. So, although the literature is unclear about which method produces the greatest effect, message designers can be assured that both are possible tools for constructing a savvy message that heightens perceived severity. Loss framing, used in the example above, is another important technique for creating perceptions of threat. Meyerowitz and Chaiken (1987) found that loss framing works to positively influence audience attitudes, intentions and subsequent behaviors in the desired direction. The authors modified a breast self-examination pamphlet to include either lossframed or gain-framed statements about breast cancer and self-examination. Consistent with the predictions, women who received the loss-framed statements (e.g., “If you don’t perform breast self-exams, it can knock years off your life”) were more likely to have performed a breast self-exam during the four month follow-up than women who had

480

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

received the gain-framed statements (e.g., “Performing a breast self-exam can add years to your life”). Subsequent studies have similarly observed that providing people with lossframed information is an effective way to promote mammography (Banks et al., 1995), HIV testing (Kalichman & Coley, 1995), and skin cancer examinations (Block & Keller, 1995). So what happens when message designers don’t use some or all of these techniques? Consider for a moment the analysis of 25 AIDS brochures targeted at intravenous drug users and their sexual partners (Perloff & Ray, 1991). Although the brochures did provide many facts about AIDS (e.g., that it could be spread by sharing dirty needles or having unprotected sex), 52% of the brochures did not provide severity information. The brochure did not state that AIDS was fatal. There was little use of statistics, graphics, or personal testimonials, intense and descriptive language, or loss-framing. As a result, the audience perceived the threat with less importance than it deserved and the brochures produced few, if any, effects. Perceived Susceptibility. Perceived susceptibility is the likelihood that individuals will experiences the negative consequences associated with a threat (Witte, 1992a, 1992b). Message designers must convince the target audience that not only the is the threat serious, but they are at risk for those consequences. If individuals think that the threat is serious, but don’t believe themselves to be at risk, then they will ignore the threat. On the other hand, if they believe they are at risk, they will be motivated to act to increase selfprotection and avert the threat. Message designers must persuade the target audience that the possible harm is severe and the risk of harm is real in order to maximize audience responsiveness to the threat. For example, in a gun safety video (Roberto, Meyer, Johnson, & Atkin, 2000), perceptions of susceptibility were created by means of the following statements, “I’ve been around guns all my life, I knew gun safety. I was always careful. I never thought that I could have an accident with a gun,” “If it could happen to me, it could happen to you” and “You never expect something like this to happen to you. You expect it to happen to the guy down the street or across town. But it can happen to you.” These statements made the point that gun accidents can happen to anyone. Message designers use of statements such as these, heighten feelings of vulnerability, and are key to promoting perceptions of susceptibility. When message designers want to create perceptions of susceptibility, they use personalized references as opposed to neutral or general references to increase motivation for action (Witte, 1993). The use “you” or “your” in a message conveys that “this can happen to you” an opposed to “this happens to others”. For example, in a study on skin cancer, Stephenson and Witte (1998) found that health messages containing personalized references (e.g., “You can get cancer after one serious burn” and “If you’ve ever gotten too much sun, you’re at risk for getting skin cancer”) increased perceptions of susceptibility to skin cancer (see also Parrott, 1995). Another method to increase perceived susceptibility is to have target audience members vicariously experience a threat through some person they identify with or someone who seems similar to them. Seeing someone just like you experience the negative consequences of a health threat makes target audience members feel that the same-fate could befall them. In particular, messages showing individuals of the same age, ethnic orientation, socioeconomic status, and education level tend to increase perceived susceptibility (Gonzales, Goepplinger & Lorig, 1990). For example, in a cancer prevention study Sennott-Miller (1994) found that older Hispanic women were much more likely to get mammograms to protect themselves from cancer when the messages included pictures and behaviors of similarly aged Hispanic women than when Caucasian women were used.

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

481

Message designers need to aim at creating high levels of perceived susceptibility and perceived severity. Neglecting one component or the other enables the target audience to ignore the message; they will believe either that the harm and its consequences are trivial, or that they are not at risk. On the other hand, if the audience members are convinced of their vulnerability to a serious threat, they will be motivated to take the next step of message processing—appraisal of available resources and the environment. Appraisal of Resources and Environment

When individuals appraise their available resources and environment, they take inventory and try to figure out not only what options can work to avert the threat but the degree to which they would be able to use those options to avert the threat. The appraisal process encompasses (a) the individuals’ determination of perceived efficacy (i.e., response efficacy, self-efficacy, efficacy outcomes and efficacy expectations), (b) the individuals’ beliefs about what others think they should do (i.e., subjective norm), and (c) factors that can affect the individuals’ beliefs about their ability to carry out recommended actions (i.e., identified barriers, benefits, locus of control, attitudes, and belief structures). Researchers have found that when message designers introduce a threat, positioning efficacy immediately after the threat is the best tactic for promoting action (Leventhal & Singer, 1966; Skillbeck, Tulip, & Ley, 1977). The term efficacy or effectiveness refers to a broad range of beliefs that can be separated into several categories: response efficacy, self-efficacy, efficacy expectations, and efficacy outcomes. Response Efficacy. Individuals can vary in their beliefs about whether or not a recommended response really works in averting a threat (Witte, 1992a). For example, most people in the United States believe that condoms block HIV transmission. Such people perceive condoms (the response) as having a high level of efficacy. In some parts of the world, however, people think the condoms don’t block HIV transmission because they leak, have holes. Some people think condoms might actually spread HIV because the lubricant contains (Witte, Cameron, Lapinski, & Nyzuko, 1998). These people view condoms as having a low level of response efficacy. What can health message designers do to convince the target audience of the recommended response efficacy? Messages that demonstrate that the response consistently works, by providing specific information tend to increase response efficacy. The best strategy is to be as explicit as possible. The audience should not be left to guess what action is advocated and why it is being advocated. If there are multiple explanations available, the message should provide the logical links between them to strengthen the audience members’ beliefs in the recommended response. It is essential to be realistic and accurate in identifying when, why, and how the response works. If people try the recommended response and experience failure, their perceptions of efficacy can be severely damaged. Self-Efficacy. Self-efficacy (or efficacy expectations) is defined as the perceived ability to achieve an outcome through one’s own action. For example, to perform a recommended response is related to an individual’s perceived confidence, competence, and ability to perform an action in a specific setting, and is not, thus, a stable personality trait (Costa & Metter, 1994; Strecher, DeVellis, Becker, & Rosenstock, 1986). There are many factors that affect a person’s self-efficacy. First, self-efficacy is dynamic and reciprocal. That is, a person’s self-efficacy is related to the person’s perceptions of how his or her actions influence and are influenced by the environment (Frankish, Lovato,

482

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

& Shannon, 1999). For example, a person does not believe that his or her actions are affecting the environment in which the threat exists, then the person’s self-efficacy will be low for this action in this setting. Second, self-efficacy is context-bound (Bandura, 1977). People believe that they have greater ability to avert some threats over others (e.g., they can wear seatbelts to reduce the severity of injury in a car crash but may not be able to prevent people from smoking in restaurants to avoid the health effects of environmental smoke). Third, if someone does not know how to do something (e.g., has never used condoms), has tried something and previously failed (e.g., has used defective condoms), or feels inhibited about doing something (e.g., is embarrassed to suggest condom use with his or her partner), then the person’s perceived self-efficacy is sure to be negatively affected. Message designers, therefore must take into account what action is advocated, whether it affects the environment from which the threat originates, the context in which the action is advocated, and what procedural knowledge is necessary to carry out the action effectively. Further, they must convince members of the target audience that they capable of performing the advocated action. Typically, message designers portray the action as easy and convenient. For example, “A Su Salud En Accion”, a campaign targeted at the Latino populations in San Antonio, Texas, has the goal of reducing type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity. Message designers used the statements “You can easily arm yourself against diabetes” and “You have control over you life” to bolster feelings of self-efficacy (Ramirez, Villarreal, & Chalela, 2000, p. 180). Audience members were told that changes in eating behavior (e.g., eating less fatty foods, baking rather than frying, and eating more fruits and vegetables) could directly reduce their risk of diabetes. The fact that small changes did not alter the tastiness of the food or the preparation time could help avert the threat was important for the audience to learn. In addition, those lacking procedural knowledge were directed to community resources to learn how to make meals healthier (e.g., they attended cooking classes, were given recipe cards, met with nutritionists, and were shown how to food shop). Self-efficacy messages must be tailored to their audience in order to maximize the audience’s confidence in their abilities. Maibach, Flora, and Nass (1991) found that repetition of self-efficacy messages is needed during long-term interventions. An evaluation of the Healthy Living Program, a year-long healthy eating and exercise program, showed that self-efficacy levels fluctuated for particular actions, and that the effectiveness of messages in increasing perceptions of competence, confidence and ability also fluctuated throughout the year. To assist in message development, message designers should determine their target population’s baseline self-efficacy rate to understand what actions are perceived as easy and effortless. The baseline will help in discovering which self-efficacy messages are more effective over time. Another reason for obtaining a baseline measurement is that individuals with high self-efficacy have slightly different message needs than those with low self-efficacy. Maibach and Murphy (1995) found that individuals with high self-efficacy tend to attribute failures to external factors, whereas those possessing low self-efficacy perceived failure as a result of their personal inability to carry out a task. Further, those who possess high self-efficacy and fail are more likely to try again than those with low self-efficacy (who believe their failure is a reflection of their person inadequacies). This finding has been replicated in numerous studies, including studies on smoking cessation (Condiotte & Lichtenstein, 1981); increasing physical activity to prevent cardiopulmonary disease (Holman & Lorig, 1992); pain control, and the use of condoms (Wulfert & Wan, 1995). It indicates that individuals with high self-efficacy may just need encouragement to

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

483

continue the process whereas those with low self-efficacy may need help in restructuring their belief system (e.g., overcoming their feelings of inadequacy) before the messages can take effect. Finally, when addressing efficacy issues, it is important to find out what is impeding one’s self-efficacy. Barriers to self-efficacy include anything that negatively influence one’s perceived ability to perform an action. Barriers to Self-Efficacy. Barriers to self-efficacy act as obstacles to the performance of a recommended response (Witte, 1995). They can not be overlooked in designing a health message. Janz and Becker (1984), in a review of 46 studies, found that perceived barriers had the strongest association with the lack of preventative health behavior and with sick role behavior. The greater the perceived barriers, the less likely audience members are able to successfully avert health threats (i.e., the more likely they are to have low self-efficacy). Perceived barriers can include financial costs, physical discomfort, social costs, and environmental limitations. For example, Smith (1997) found that barriers to child immunization included immunization cost, fear of allergies, physician apathy, absence of routine well-baby visits, broken appointments, inaccessible clinic hours, and competing parental agendas. One message used to counteract the cost barrier was, “You see, for every single dollar you spend on immunizations, ten dollars are saved in medical cost” (p. 280). Another message used for the same perceived barrier was, “At community health centers, children’s clinics and public health clinics, you can get your child vaccinated for free or at a very low cost” (p. 280). Similar messages can be constructed for each of the other barriers identified to heighten the appeal of the recommended action. Lack of specific knowledge about “what to do” may be an important barrier to selfefficacy (Parrott, Monohan, Ainsworth, & Steiner, 1998). Most health messages focus on factual knowledge that X is the threat and Y will avert X rather than procedural knowledge or here are the seven steps to Y. People need to know how to do the recommended behavior before they feel able to do so. For example, in the gun safety video (Roberto et al., 2000) besides stating that trigger locks are inexpensive and easy to use, they showed in detail how to use trigger locks. Barriers to self-efficacy can be internal (e.g., pain, discomfort) or external (e.g., social strain, monetary costs) (Allison, Dwyer, & Markin, 1999). Message designers need to communicate how to overcome both kinds of barriers. For example, in the “A Su Salud En Accion” diabetes prevention campaign, Ramirez and colleagues (2000) found that although Latino women were willing to make healtheir meals, their families did not want these meals. Deciding to make healthier meals is a great step forward. Meals that are healthy and low cost can be counter to the traditional fare of a culture. If the advocated action is perceived as too difficult, the barrier can supercede positive perceptions of selfefficacy (e.g., “I can make healthy meals”) and response efficacy (e.g., “Eating healthy meals will prevent diabetes”), and alter perceptions of efficacy outcomes (e.g., “I won’t benefit a lot from making this dish low-fat”). Thus, message designers must provide options surrounding the recommended action. For example, they might include messages such as “High fiber reduces diabetes,” “Eat at least one low-fat meal per day,” and “Weight loss can win you a new life” (p. 181). Overall, the more a message is able to reduce perceived barriers, the more likely the audience will take steps to avert the health threat. Outcome Expectations. Outcome expectations are the beliefs held by individuals that performance of an action will have certain positive or negative outcomes. These

484

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

expectations are a function of the individuals’ perceptions of the hindrances to benefits of performing the action (Rosenstock & Kirscht, 1988). For example, Wulfert and Wan (1995) found that college students’ positive intentions to use condoms during sex was based on their expectations of low pleasure reduction, high disease prevention, and high contraceptive effectiveness. Other students, unwilling to use condoms cited their belief that negative consequences would outweigh the positive consequences. Thus, it is important for health messages not only to establish new positive outcome expectations or reinforce existing positive ones, but to reduce negative outcome expectations. Outcome expectations can affect perceptions of an action and also perceptions of physical consequences of action (Maibach & Cotton, 1995). Consider the Stanford Five City Multi-factor Risk Reduction Project (Farquhar et al., 1985). As part of this project, individuals participated in diet and exercise programs to prevent ten onset of cardiovascular disease. Weight loss was associated with messages targeting outcome expectations. Specifically, participants who lost weight believed the outcomes supplied in the messages (i.e., increased energy, improved physical appearance, added years of life due to reductions in blood pressure and cholesterol) and agreed they felt healthier, looked better, had more energy, and demonstrated improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol, and other physical tests. Hence, knowing target audience members beliefs allows message designers to use these expectations to heighten overall efficacy. Benefits. Identifying and enumerating the benefits associated with averting a health threat can serve as a powerful mechanism for promoting action. Perceived benefits can take almost any form and range from the benign (e.g., this will make you feel better) to the extravagant (e.g., this will save your life). Message designers often find out through formative research that target audience members are unaware of the many potential benefits associated with a self-protective action (Valente, Paredes, & Poppe, 1998). Research suggests that target audiences balance perceived benefits and perceived barriers against each other. Thus, the target audience members need to be convinced that the benefits of an action outweigh any barriers. If they become convinced, they are likely to perform the action but not otherwise. Thus, message designers must account for both the size and scope of each barrier to convince their audience that the benefits are more than adequate to warrant performing the recommended action. The Michigan Department of Community Health (1999) pamphlet utilized this approach to teach parents about second-hand smoke and its effects on children. The text reads as follows: The greatest benefit of a smoke-free home is that you will remove all the health Risks associated with secondhand smoke. Plus when your home is smoke free: –It will smell much better. –Your food will taste better. –You’ll spend less time, energy, and money cleaning your curtains, walls, windows and mirrors. –Your insurance rates may be lower –Even your pets will be happier

Ames, Murphy, Mellen, Murray-Johnson and Kendal (2000) analyzed the data from this school-based prevention campaign. They found that 20% of parents were more likely to seek smoking cessation kits and information once the benefits of not smoking were made clearer, especially when lower insurance costs were mentioned. Glanz, Lew, Song, and

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

485

Cook (1999) found that perceived benefits were important in predicting the sun protection habits for parents and their children. Parents and children were more likely to were T-shirts, sunhats, sunglasses, and sunscreen once they understood these behaviors prevented skin cancer, wrinckles, even uneven skin tone, and led to a more youthful appearance. These benefits were viewed as outweighing the perceived barriers, such as being pale-skinned or the financial cost of buying sunscreen. Thus, highlighting perceived benefits in a message is a useful technique. Social Norms. In addition to self-efficacy, and perceived barriers and benefits, perceived social norms can strongly affect the behavior of target audience members. A social norm can be defined as the social appropriateness of a particular behavior (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). The power of a social norm is influenced by two factors (a) what a person thinks other people or groups think about a behavior or recommended action and (b) the person’s motivation to comply with those particular people or groups. Thus, message designers need to figure out which persons or groups target audiences are motivated to comply with and what the audience members think those persons or groups think. For instance, college students may think that their parents expect them to avoid “getting drunk” but that their friends expect them to drink until they are drunk. Further, they are probably more motivated to comply with their friends than their parents. Therefore, they may feel pressured to binge drink alcohol based on the incorrect perception that “it is all right to get wasted.” As an example of how perceived social norms can be used to good effect in health messages, Lederman and colleagues (2001) gathered baseline research to find out how many students at Rutgers University binge drink and then publicized this information to create a new perceived social norm. They discovered that two thirds of the students stopped at three or fewer drinks and that one in five students did not drink alcohol at all. They included this information in a campaign stating the top ten misperceptions at Rutgers. Key to the message’s effectiveness was that the source of the information was “you” the Rutgers student. The impact of a social norm cited in a message is dependent on the information presented and how the information can be incorporated into a person’s belief structure (Bandura, 1977). The greater the cohesiveness, size, and uniformity of the referent group, the more the individual needs approval from their referent group(s), the more important it is to address social norms in a message (Fisher, 1988). For example, Organista, Organista, Garcia de Alba, Castillo Moran, & Ureta Carrillo (1997) found strict social norms regarding condom use among Mexican migrant laborers. Specifically, men in the study reported that it was “the man’s job” to provide condoms for protected sex, although they often failed to use condoms even with multiple sex partners. When the women were questioned about personal responsibility for protected sex, they agreed that it was the man’s responsibility and indicated that their social network consisting of female migrant workers thoroughly discouraged them from carrying condoms. More than 75% of the female respondents reported never carrying a condom, even for emergencies. Hence, by understanding the strength of a social norm, message designers can determine if it is reasonable to attempt to change the norm, or if it is possible to work with that norm to increase the advocated behavior. For instance, in this case, message designers might create a campaign to motivate the men to do what is expected of them; that is to provide and use condoms. Prior Attitudes and Belief. People’s attitudes and beliefs influence how they appraise and move forward with message processing. Attitudes are positive or negative evaluations of a person, object, or event. For example, a person who feels that wear seatbelts

486

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

is good and getting drunk is bad, has a positive attitude toward seatbelts and a negative attitude toward getting drunk. In contrast, beliefs are thoughts about a person, object, or event that are either true or false. For example, “wearing a seatbelt can prevent a driver from being thrown from a car during an accident” and “getting drunk causes hangovers” are common beliefs about seatbelts and getting drunk. Because prior attitudes and beliefs can have a strong influence on behaviors, they must be addressed in a campaign. The message designers might find it useful to survey their target audience to discover salient attitudes toward and beliefs about the health threat and recommended response. Salient beliefs are those first five to nine beliefs that come to mind when someone thinks about an issue. People have an infinite number of beliefs about any given object but only a few that can be attended to in a given time period because of the effort needed (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Similarly, people may have some “salient” attitudes, those that come to mind when they think about a recommended response. For example, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about bicycle helmets? Is it that helmets save lives or that helmets are uncomfortable? If the first thought comes to mind, you will likely have a positive attitude toward helmets. If the second, you might have a negative attitude. It is a person’s total set of salient beliefs, not just one, that determines his or her attitude toward a behavior. Although message designers believe that individuals react to messages based on rational, scientifically based beliefs, Burgoon & Hall (1992) have found that this is not always the case. In a study conducted on the causes of and solutions to common health threats, some respondents stated that they believed “sin causes illness,” “chamomile tea eases childbirth,” “vitamin E increases sex drive,” and “taking a large dose of vitamins cures illness” (pp. 104–106). Thus, savvy message designers must be aware that individuals may hold nontraditional beliefs about health and wellness and be able to determine whether or not these beliefs are central (salient) or peripheral (less consistently used for health decisions). Designers may wish to increase attitude accessibility, which is the degree to which an attitude springs to the forefront of a person’s mind when faced with a person, object, or event (i.e., the object of the attitude). Attitude accessibility is a function of the strength of association between the attitude object and the attitude (Fazio, 1986, 1989; Powell & Fazio, 1984). To get the target audience to link a positive attitude with the recommended response, messages need to evoke the attitude frequently. Message designers can seek to reinforce, modify or change their target audience’s attitudes or beliefs. Reinforcement is appropriate when the attitudes and beliefs are consistent with what is being advocated. For example, in a child bicycle helmet campaign, Ressler and Toledo (1998) reinforced positive attitudes toward helmet by calling it “smart,” “fashionable,” and “safety conscious” (p. 364). If the attitudes and beliefs are not consistent with the campaigns recommendations, the message designers may opt for attempting to modify or change them. In a study promoting a local smoking cessation program to college age smokers, Babrow, Black, and Tiffany (1990) determined that students believed that quitting smoking would lead to gaining weight, feeling stressed and pressured, and becoming jittery or fidgety. To counteract these beliefs, students were told that withdrawal from nicotine might result in a few days of queasiness, but not a few weeks, as they believed, and that weight gain and stress can be managed with additional support. By working to modify the audience’s salient beliefs, the authors were able to achieve greater enrollment for the smoking cessation program. Thus far, we have discussed the importance of providing stimuli to motivate the target audience of doing an appraisal of the available resources and the environment to ensure

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

487

that they have the means to act. The appraisal, as we have seen, should encompass the audience’s self-efficacy, the barriers and benefits of action, as perceived by the audience, and social norms that could influence audience behavior. Now, we turn to a discussion of the types of outcomes yielded in health communication campaign. Outcome Variables

Intentions and Behaviors. When it comes to evaluating message outcomes, many of the theoretical variables discussed in this chapter are used to determine if change occurred (e.g., changes in attitudes, social network, self-efficacy, etc.) Ultimately, message designers hope to effect behavior change; that is, the adoption of a new behavior, or the modification or discontinuance of a prior behavior. Behavior is the actual performance of a recommended response. As a part of this process, intentions for the behavior are also evaluated. Behavioral intentions refer to the plans individuals have about whether or not they intend to perform the recommended behavior (from adoption to discontinuance). It is important to measure the entire range of intentions individuals might have for a particular behavior. For example, an anti-smoking campaign might influence some individuals to self-report their intentions to seek out a tobacco cessation kit. It would be important for health message designers to measure both their intentions for the behavior change (tobacco use cessation) as well their plans in moving towards this behavior change (seeking out a cessation kit). Yet, moving individuals toward a goal of change necessitates evaluating the message at its most basic level: Did the message generate a response, and if so, what type of response was generated? No Response. First, if the target audience members perceive the threat as trivial or irrelevant, they will lack the motivation to act. “No response” to a message means that neither intended nor unintended outcomes resulted from the message. Intended outcomes include changes in attitudes, beliefs, intentions, and behaviors that are in accordance with the message’s recommendations. Unintended outcomes include denial of the threat, defensive avoidance (avoiding thoughts about the threat), and reactance (perceptions of being manipulated). No response to a message means just that, neither positive nor negative outcomes occurred, and most likely, the message was simply ignored. If the message generates no response, the message designers must portray the health threat as relevant, imminent, and serious. Danger Control Response. A message can also trigger a “danger control response.” This response is common when a fear appeal message motivates the audience members to act and their appraisal of available resources and the environment leads them to believe that they are able to “control the danger.” Thus, they do what the message recommends. In a danger control response, the individuals have been successful in determining which specific actions are necessary to avert the threat. They believe they are capable of performing these actions. Thus, messages that cause people to believe that they can do something to effectively address a health threat often lead to danger control responses. Fear Control Response. Another possible message response is the “fear control response.” This response occurs when a fear appeal message has convinced audience members that the threat is real but their appraisal of resources and the environment has led them to believe they are unable to do anything about the threat. Instead, they turn to “controlling their fear” through psychological defense mechanisms like denial, defensive

488

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

avoidance, or reactance (Witte, 1992a, 1992b, 1998). Use of one of these mechanisms are often called the “unintended” campaign outcomes and the mechanisms have thus been rarely studied (Salmon & Murray-Johnson, 2000). Note that a fear control response is not the same as no response. No response is what occurs when there is a lack of perceived threat or motivation. In a fear control response, there is strong motivation to act and the threat is perceived, but there is a lack of perceived available resources or environmental readiness. Individuals must believe they are able to engage in an effective recommended response before they will do so, and therefore, issues of self-efficacy, response efficacy, outcome expectations, barriers, benefits, social norms, and prior attitudes and beliefs should be addressed if they inhibit positive appraisals of resources and the environment. Effective health messages create the motivation to respond to a health threat and also cause the audience members to believe they have the appropriate resources to take action. If any link in this chain is missing, audience members will possibly ignore or misinterpret the message, leading to unintended message outcomes. This chapter can be used to construct a checklist of the necessary steps to ensure not only that a health message is heard and processed but that the audience actually engages in the recommended behavior. FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN HEALTH MESSAGE DESIGN

There are at least four areas of health message design in need of research. First, although the health message variables discussed in this chapter have been used in campaigns for many years, they have typically been studied in isolation, one or two variables at a time. Researchers have compared and contrasted one or two theories to explain how variables work but rarely has attention been given to the myriad variables in one overall framework. As a result, we know a great deal about individual message design variables, but little about how they all work together; all the various interactions, indirect effects, and unintended effects that can occur. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, future research needs to investigate the impact of social and environmental contexts, values, the political environment, policies and mandates, and so on, on health-related behaviors. Studies conducted from the social ecological perspective (e.g., Stokols, 1992), taking into account the relative influence of individuals, groups, and the environment would also be a welcome addition to the literature. A second area in need of study is how the different variables of perceived susceptibility, severity, self-efficacy, response efficacy, outcome expectations, barriers, benefits, attitudes and social norms relate to the outcomes of attitudes, intentions and behavior. We know of at least one study to date that has analyzed how input variables from multiple theories (i.e., motivation and appraisal processes) affect specific outcomes of attitudes, intentions, and behaviors (Murray-Johnson, Witte, Boulay, Figueroa, Storey, & Tweedie, 2002). But many more are needed to crate a unified conceptualization of message design. Studies that measure and analyze variables from competing theories are needed to assess the synergistic effects of these variables on outcomes. Third, messages designers need to take another look at the delivery of health messages. As the saying goes, what we say is as important as how we say it. Currently, we have a developing understanding of how to channel traditional forms of mass media (e.g., telephone, television, newspaper, and internet, to name a few) to our audiences. In the synergistic approach of combined mass and interpersonal message dissemination, message designers should consider the noncontent variables of interpersonal communication, such as vocal tone, pace, and nonverbal elements on health-related behaviors. One estimate suggests that the verbal content of a message accounts for only 7% of the meaning extracted from

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

489

that message (Mehrabian, 1971). If this is true, then health communication researchers have just begun to scratch the surface in their study of message design variables, because focus is placed predominantly on the message content variables. Fourth, there is currently little understanding of how message features trigger complex cognitive and emotional responses. Affect has been linked to stimuli, motivation, and appraisal of resources and environment by the behavioral approach system (BAS) and behavioral inhibition system (BIS) (Carver & White, 1994). The BIS scale predicts negative affect in response to a threat and the BAS scale predicts positive affect in response to benefits. Although Dillard and Peck (2000, 2001) and Dillard, Plotnick, Godbold, Freimuth, & Edger (1996) have made tremendous strides in identifying some of the emotions compatible with each system, it has become apparent that the reactivity of both systems interact with messages to produce motivation and to alert individuals to different cognitive and emotional processes when appraising their resources and environment. Systematic study of the dual-response process could lead to major leaps in our understanding of how message features affect message processing and persuasion. Finally, although there have been many laboratory-based studies of the message content variables discussed in this chapter, we need more information about how these variables operate in real-life settings. For example, Kline and Mattson (2000), in an analysis of breast self-exam pamphlets, found that the efficacy messages often exhibited a lack of quality that affected attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Although message designers may assume that lack of quality is an obstacle to achieving goals, we have little data supporting this hypothesis. External validity and generalizability demand more field research on these variables to determine exactly what the boundaries are and how to work with them. Overall, designers of health messages have made tremendous strides over the past decades to improve the quality of their work and move the field forward. Now is the time to continue these efforts and extend them into new research that addresses the complex interactions and issues found in applying these messages to real-life settings. REFERENCES Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179–211. Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1980). Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ajzen, I., & Madden, T. J. (1986). Prediction of goal directed behavior: Attitudes, intentions and perceived behavioral control. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 453–474. Albrecht, T. L., & Bryant, C. (1996). Advances in segmentation modeling for health communication and social marketing campaigns. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 65–80. Allen, M., & Preiss, R. W. (1997). Comparing the persuasiveness of narratives and statistical evidence using meta-analysis. Communication Research Reports, 14, 125–131. Allison, K. R., Dwyer, J. J. M., & Markin, S. (1999). Self-efficacy and participation in vigorous physical activity by high school students. Health Education and Behavior, 1, 12–24. Ames, B., Murphy, A., Mellen, A., Murray-Johnson, L., & Kendal, N. (2000, April). Assessing a school-based cancer prevention program utilizing community health workers in an underprivileged, multiethnic population. Paper presented at the LINKS Policy Conference, Richmond, VA. Atkin, C. K, & Freimuth, V. (1989). Formative evaluation research in campaign design. In R. E. Rice and C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns. (2nd ed., pp. 131–150). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

490

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

Author (1999). First-hand facts on second-hand smoking. Michigan Department of Community Health. Babrow, A., Black, D. R., & Tiffany, S. T. (1990). Beliefs, attitudes, intentions and a smokingcessation program: A planned behavior analysis of communication campaign development. Health Communication, 2, 145–163. Baesler, E. J., & Burgoon, J. K. (1994). The temporal effects of story and statistical evidence on belief change. Communication Research, 21, 582–602. Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Banks, S. M., Salovey, P., Greener, S., Rothman, A. J., Moyer, A., Beauvais, J., & Eppel, E. (1995). The effects of message framing on mammography utilization. Health Psychology, 14, 178–184. Bargh, J. A. (1989). Conditional automaticity: Varieties of automatic influence in social perception and cognition. In J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintentional thought (pp. 3–51). New York: Guilford. Block, L. G., & Keller, P. A. (1995). When to accentuate the negative: The effects of perceived efficacy and message framing on intentions to perform a health-related behavior. Journal of Marketing Research, 32, 192–203. Bonoma, T. V., & Shapiro, B. P. (1983). Segmenting the industrial market. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Borland, R. (1997). Tobacco health warnings and smoking-related cognitions and behaviours. Addiction, 92, 1427–1435. Boster, F. J., & Mongeau, P. A. (1984). Fear-arousing persuasive messages. In R. Bostrom (Ed.), Communication yearbook 8 (pp. 330–375). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burgoon, M., & Hall, J. R. (1992). Myths as health belief systems: the language of salves, sorcery and science. Health Communication, 6, 97–116. Carver, C. S., & White T. L. (1994). Behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation, and affective responses to impending reward and punishment: The BIS/BAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 319–352. Chen, M. S., & Hawks, B. L. (1999). A debunking of the myth of healthy Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. American Journal of Health Promotion, 9, 261–268. Condiotte, M. M., & Lichtenstein, E. (1981). Self-efficacy and relapse in smoking cessation programs. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 49, 648–658. Condit, D. M. (1995). Tugging at pregnant consumers: Competing “Smoke!” “Don’t Smoke!” media messages and their messengers. In R. L. Parrott and C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book (pp. 154–174). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Costa, P., & Metter, J. (1994). Personality stability and its contribution to successful aging. Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 27, 79–87. Dillard, J. P. (1994). Rethinking the study of fear appeals: An emotional perspective. Communication Theory, 4, 295–323. Dillard, J. P., & Peck, E. (2001). Persuasion and the structure of affect: Dual systems and discrete emotions as complementary models. Human Communication Research, 27, 38– 68. Dillard, J. P., & Peck, E. (2000). Affect and persuasion: Emotional responses to public service announcements. Communication Research, 27, 461–495. Dilliard, J. P., Plotnick, C. A., Godbold, L. C., Freimuth, V. S., & Edgar, T. (1996). The multiple affective consequences of AIDS PSA’s: Fear appeals do more than scare people. Communication Research, 23, 44–72.

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

491

Dorsey, A. M., Miller, K. I., & Scherer, C.-W. (1999). Communication, risk behavior, and perceptions of threat and efficacy: A test of a reciprocal model. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 27, 377–395. Du Pre, A. (2000). Communicating about health: Current issues and perspectives. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Easterling, D. V., & Leventhal, H. (1989). Contributions of concrete cognition to emotion: Neutral symptoms as elicitors of worry about cancer. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74, 787–796. Edgar, T., Freimuth, V. S., & Hammond, S. (1988). Communicating the AIDS risk to college students: The problem of motivational change. Health Education and Research: Theory and Practice, 3, 59–65. Farquhar, J., Fortman, S., Maccoby, N., Haskell, W., Williams, P., Flora, J., Taylor, C., Brown, B. Jr., Solomon, D., & Hulley, S. (1985). The Stanford Five City Project: Design and methods. American Journal of Epidemiology, 122, 323–334. Fazio, R. H. (1986). How do attitudes guide behavior? In R. M. Sorrentino & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior. (pp. 204– 243). New York: Guilford. Fazio, R. H. (1989). On the power and functionality of attitudes: The role of attitude accessibility. In R. A. Pratkanis, S. J. Breckler, & A. G. Greenwald (Eds.), Attitude structure and function. (pp. 153–179). Hillsdale, NJ; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1981). Acceptance, yielding and impact: Cognitive processes in persuasion. In R. E. Petty, T. M. Ostrom, & T. C. Brock (Eds.), Cognitive responses in persuasion (pp. 339–359). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fisher, J. (1988). Possible effects of reference group-based social influence on AIDS risk behavior and AIDS prevention. American Psychologist, 43, 914–920. Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1984). Social cognition. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Fox, S. A., Stein, J. A., Gonzalez, R. E., Farrenkopf, M., & Dellinger, A. (1998). A trial to increase mammography utilization among Los Angeles Hispanic women. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9, 308–321. Frankish, C. J., Lovato, C. Y., & Shannon, W. J. (1999). Models, theories, and principles of health promotion with multicultural populations. In R. M. Huff & M. V. Kline (Eds.), Promoting health and multicultural populations: A handbook for practitioners (pp. 41–71). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freimuth, V. S., Hammond, S. L., Edgar, T., & Monahan, J. L. (1990). Reaching those at risk: A content analytic study of AIDS PSA’s. Communication Research, 17, 775–791. Glanz, K., Lew, R. A., Song, V., & Cook, V. A. (1999). Factors associated with skin cancer prevention practices in a multiethnic population. Health Education and Behavior, 26, 344– 359. Gonzalez, V., Goepplinger, J., & Lorig, K. (1990). Four psychosocial theories and their application to patient education and clinical practice. Arthritis Care and Research, 3, 132–142. Gray, L. A., & Saracino, M. (1989). Aids on campus: A preliminary study of college students’ knowledge and behaviors. Journal of Counseling and Development, 68, 199–202. Grecas, V. (1989). The social psychology of self-efficacy. Annual Review of Sociology, 15, 291–316.

492

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

Grunig, J. E. (1989). Publics, audiences and market segments: Segmentation principles for campaigns. In C. T. Salmon (Ed.), Information campaigns (pp. 199–228). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Guttman, N. (1997). Ethical dilemmas in health campaigns. Health Communication, 9, 155– 190. Guttman, N. (2000). Public health communication interventions: Values and ethical dilemmas. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hahn, E., Simpson, M. R., & Kidd, P. (1996). Cues to parent involvement in drug prevention and school activities. The Journal of School Health, 66, 165–181. Hawkins, K., & Hane, A. C. (2000). Adolescents’ perceptions of print cigarette advertising: A case for counteradvertising. Journal of Health Communication, 5, 83–96. Hochbaum, G. M., Sorenson, J. R., & Loring, K. (1992). Theory in health education practice. Health Education Quarterly, 19, 295–314. Holman, H., & Lorig, K. (1992). Perceived self-efficacy in self-management of chronic diseases. In R. Schwarzer (Ed.), Self-efficacy: Thought control of action (pp. 305–323). Washington, DC: Hemisphere. Insko, C. A., Arkoff, A., & Insko, V. M. (1965). Effects of high and low fear-arousing communications upon opinions toward smoking. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1, 256–266. Janz, N. K., & Becker, M. H. (1984). The health belief model: A decade later. Health Education Quarterly, 11, 1–47. Kalichman, S. C., & Coley, B. (1995). Context framing to enhance HIVantibody testing messages targeted to African American women. Health Psychology, 14, 247–254. Kasoleas, D. C. (1993). A comparison of the persuasive effectiveness of qualitative versus quantitative evidence: A test of explanatory hypotheses. Communication Quarterly, 41, 40–50. Kincaid, D. L., Coleman, P. L., Rimon II, J. G., & Silayan-Go, A. (1991, November). The Philippines multimedia campaign for young people project: Summary of evaluation results. Paper presented to the American Public Health Association, Atlanta, GA. Kirby, S. D., Ureada, J. R., Rose, R. L., & Hussey, J. (1998). Peripheral cues and involvement level: Influences on acceptance of a mammograhy message. Journal of Health Communication, 3, 119–135. Kline, K. N., & Mattson, M. (2000). Breast self-examination pamphlets: A content analysis grounded in fear appeal research. Health Communication, 12, 1–21. Kopfman, J. E., Smith, S. W., Ah Yun, J. K., & Hodges, A. (1998). Affective and cognitive reactions to narrative versus statistical evidence organ donation messages. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 26, 279–300. Lederman, L. C., Stewart, L. P., Barr, S. L., Powell, P. L., Laitman, L., & Goodhart, F. W. (2001). RU SURE? Using communication theory to reduce dangerous drinking on a college campus. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 295–299). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Leventhal, H., & Singer, R. P. (1966). Affect arousal and positioning of recommendations in persuasive communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 137– 146. Maibach, E. W., & Cotton, D. (1995). Motivating people to behavior change: A stages social cognitive approach to message design. In E. Maibach & R. L. Parrott (Eds.), Designing health messages: Approaches from communication theory and public health practice (pp. 41–65). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

493

Maibach, E. W., Flora, J. A., & Nass, C. (1991). Changes in self-efficacy and health behavior in response to a minimal contact community health campaign. Health Communication, 3, 1–16. Maibach, E. W., & Murphy, D. A. (1995). Self-efficacy in health promotion research and practice: Conceptualization and practice. Health Education Research and Theory Practice, 10, 37–50. Mattson, M. (1999). Toward a reconceptualization of cues to action in the Health Belief Model: HIV test counseling. Communication Monographs, 66, 240–265. Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Meyerowitz, B. E., & Chaiken, S. (1987). The effect of message framing on breast self-examination attitudes, intentions and behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 500–510. Monahan, J. L. Thinking positively: Using positive affect when designing health messages. In E. Maibach & R. L. Parrott (Eds.), Designing health messages: Approaches form communication theory and pubic practice (pp. 81–98). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Montgomery, K. C. (1993). The Harvard alcohol project: Promoting the designated driver on television. In T. E. Backer and E. M. Rogers (Eds.), Organizational aspects of health communication campaigns: What works? (pp. 178–202). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Morman, T. (2000). The influence of fear appeals, message design, and masculinity on men’s motivation to perform the testicular self-exam. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 28, 91–116. Murray-Johnson, L, Witte, K., Boulay, M., Figueroa, M. E., Storey, D., & Tweedie, I. (2002). Using health education theories to explain behavior change: A cross-country analysis. International Quarterly of Community Health Education, 20, 323–345. Organista, K. C., Organista, P. B., Garcia de Alba, J. E., Castillo Moran, M. A., & Ureta Carrillo, L. A. (1997). Survey of condom-related beliefs, behaviors, and perceived social norms in Mexican migrant laborers Journal of Community Health, 22, 185–198. Ortony, A., & Turner, T. J. (1990). What’s basic about basic emotions? Psychological Review, 97, 315–331. Parrott, R. (1995). Motivation to attend to health messages. In E. Maibach & R. L. Parrott (Eds.), Designing health messages: Approaches from communication theory and public health practice (pp. 7–23). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Perloff, R. M., & Ray, G. B. (1991). An analysis of AIDS brochures directed at intravenous drug users. Health Communication, 3, 113–126. Powell, M. C., & Fazio, R. H. (1984). Attitude accessibility as a function of repeated attitudinal expression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 10, 139–148. Ramirez, A. G., Villarreal, R., & Chalela, P. (1999). Community-level diabetes control in a Texas barrio: In R. M. Huff & M. V. Kline (Eds.), Promoting health in multicultural populations: A handbook for practitioners (pp. 169–187). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ratzan, S. C., Payne, J. G., & Massett, H. A. (1994). Effective health message design: The America responds to AIDS campaign. American Behavioral Scientist, 38, 294–316. Ressler, W. H. & Toledo, E. (1998). Kasdah B’Rosh Tov: A description and evaluation of the Israeli bicycle helmet campaign. Health Education and Behavior, 25, 354–370. Roberto, A. J., Meyer, G., Johnson, A. J., & Atkin, C. K. (2000). Using the extended parallel process model to prevent firearm injury and death: Field experiment results of a video-based intervention. Journal of Communication, 50, 157–175. Rosenstock, I. M. (1974a). Historical origins of the health belief model. Health Education Monographs, 2, 328–335.

494

MURRAY-JOHNSON AND WITTE

Rosenstock, I. M. (1974b). The health belief model: Origins and correlates. Health Education Monographs, 2, 336–353. Rosenstock, I. M., Strecher, V. J., & Becker, M. H. (1988). Social learning theory and the health belief model. Health Education Quarterly, 15, 175–183. Salmon, C. T. (1989). Campaigns for social “improvement”: An overview of values, rationales and impacts. In C. T. Salmon (Ed.), Information campaigns (pp. 19–53). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Salmon, C. T. & Murray-Johnson, L. (2000). Communication campaign effectiveness: Critical distinctions. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns, (3rd ed., pp. 168–180). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Scherer, K. R., & Wallbott, H. G. (1994). Evidence for universality and cultural variation of differential emotion response patterning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 310–328. Sennott-Miller, L. (1994). Using theory to plan appropriate interventions: Cancer prevention for older Hispanic and non-Hispanic white women. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 20, 809– 814. Sheer, V. C. (1995). Sensation seeking predispositions and susceptibility to a sexual partner’s appeals for condom use. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 23, 212–219. Singhal, A., & Rogers, E. M. (2000). Entertainment-education: A communication strategy for social change. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Skillbeck, C., Tulips, J., & Ley, P. (1977). The effects of fear arousal, fear position, fear exposure, and sidedness on compliance with dietary instructions. European Journal of Psychology, 7, 221–239. Smith, S. (1997). The effective use of fear appeals in persuasive immunization: An analysis of national immunization intervention messages. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 25, 264–292. Stephenson, M., Palmgreen, P., Hoyle, R. H., Donohew, L., Lorch, E. P., & Colon, S. E. (1999). Short-term effects of an anti-marijuana media campaign targeting high sensation seeking adolescents. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 27, 175–195. Stephenson, M., & Witte, K. (1998). Fear, threat, and perceptions of efficacy from frightening skin cancer messages. Public Health Reviews, 26, 147–174. Strecher, V., DeVellis, B., Becker, M., & Rosenstock, I. (1986). The role of self-efficacy in achieving health behavior change. Health Education Quarterly, 13, 73–91. Stoddard, J. L., Johnson, C. A., Sussman, S., Dent, C., & Boley-Cruz, T. (1998). Tailoring outdoor tobacco advertising to minorities in Los Angeles county. Journal of Health Communication, 3, 137–148. Stokols, D. (1992). Establishing and maintaining healthy environments: Toward a social ecology of health promotion. American Psychologist, 47, 6–22. Sutton, S. R., & Eiser, J. R. (1984). The effect of fear-arousing communications on cigarette smoking: An expectancy-value approach. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 7, 13–33. Thompson, T. L. (1984). The invisible helping hand: The role of communication in the health and social service professions. Communication Quarterly, 32, 148–163. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (1988). The Surgeon General’s report on AIDS: HHS, Publication No. HHS-88-8404, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Valente, T. W., Paredes, P., & Poppe, P. R. (1998). Matching the message to the process: The relative ordering of knowledge, attitudes, and practices in behavior change research. Human Communication Research, 24, 366–385. Walker, N. M., Mandell, K. L., & Tsevat, J. (1999). Use of chart reminders for physicians to promote discussion of advance directives in patients with AIDS. AIDS Care, 11, 345–353.

21. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

495

Weiler, R. (1997). Adolescents’ perceptions of health concerns: An exploratory study among rural midwestern youth. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 287–299. Weinstein, N. D. (1993). Testing four competing theories of health-protective behavior. Health Psychology, 12, 324–333. Wells, W. D., & Tigert, D. J. (1971). Activities, interests and opinions. Journal of Advertising Research, 11, 27–35. Witte, K. (1992a). Putting the fear back into fear appeals: The extended parallel process model. Communication Monographs, 59, 329–349. Witte, K. (1992b). Preventing AIDS through persuasive communications: A framework for constructing effective, culturally-specific, preventative health messages. International and Intercultural Annual, 16, 67–86. Witte, K. (1993). Message and conceptual confounds in fear appeals: The role of judgment methods. Southern Communication Journal, 58, 147–155. Witte, K. ( 1994). Fear control and danger control: A test of the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM). Communication Monographs, 61, 113–134. Witte, K. (1995). Fishing for success: Using the persuasive health message framework to generate effective campaign messages. In E. Maibach & R. L. Parrott (Eds.), Designing health messages Approaches from communication theory and public health practice (pp. 145–166). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Witte, K. (1998a). Fear as motivator, fear as inhibitor: Using the Extended Parallel Process Model to explain Fear appeal successes and failures. In P. A. Andersen & L. K. Guerrero (Eds.), The handbook of communication and emotion: Research, theory, applications, and contexts (pp. 423–450). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Witte, K., Cameron, K. A., Lapinski, M. K., & Nzyuko, S. (1998b). Evaluating HIV/AIDS prevention programs according to theory: A field project along the Trans-Africa Highway in Kenya. Journal of Health Communication, 4, 345–363. Witte, K., Meyer, G., & Martell, D. (2001). Effective health risk messages: A step-by-step guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wulfert, E., & Wan, C. K. (1995). Safer sex intentions and condom use viewed from a health belief, reasoned action, and social cognitive perspective. Journal of Sex Research, 32, 299– 318.

22 Using Computers to Narrowcast Health Messages: The Role of Audience Segmentation, Targeting, and Tailoring in Health Promotion Rajiv N. Rimal University of Texas

A. Dawn Adkins Texas A&M University

Use of the Internet as a source of health information continues to soar with the popularity of the Internet. It is estimated that the number of adults who use the Internet for health-related information increased from 60 million in 1999 (Fox & Raine, 2001) to 97 million in 2001 (Harris Interactive, 2001). Researchers believe that this new technology can help transform both personal and public health (Eng & Gustafson, 1999; Sonnenberg, 1997). The increased reliance on the Internet, however, has also raised concerns about the quality and ease of retrieving relevant health information (Biermann, Golladay, Greenfield, & Baker, 2000; Kassirer, 1995; Widman & Tong, 1997). A recent study concluded, for example, that searching for health information on the Internet is not efficient and that the coverage is often poor (Berland et al., 2001). It thus appears that, to meet the public’s growing appetite for health-related information, providers need to do a better job of marketing their product. In this chapter, we argue that social marketing, which is “a comprehensive approach to health behavior change” that “fuses commercially tested practices of business marketing with responsiveness to the program audience’s preferences” (Cirksena & Flora, 1995, p. 211), can be used to ensure a better fit between the public’s demand for health information and providers’ supply of such information. The technique of narrowcasting health information (i.e., providing timely and relevant information according to the needs of the consumer) can be developed from the extant literature on health promotion and behavior change. One of the primary goals of health promotion efforts is to maximize message exposure among the target audience. Indeed, exposure to the message is a necessary, though certainly not a sufficient, condition for campaign success (Hornik, 1989; E. M. Rogers & Storey,

497

498

RIMAL AND ADKINS

1987). Two primary considerations involved in the strategic use of communication to maximize exposure include audience segmentation and targeting. Audience segmentation is a process of dividing the audience into groups of individuals based on some meaningful criterion. The criterion used to segment the audience, in turn, depends upon the objective of the campaign (Cirksena & Flora, 1995). For example, commercial campaigns designed to sell a product may segment audience members according to whether they have used the product in the past, whether they are likely to use the product in the future, and so forth. Similarly, health campaigns designed to change individuals’ behaviors may segment the audience according to various criteria, such as audience members’ psychological profile, their demographic characteristics, and their communicative behaviors (Williams & Flora, 1995). Audience segmentation is based on the assumption that different groups of audience members possess different characteristics that make them more or less likely to pay attention to, process, and be influenced by different messages. Use of audience segmentation principles in health promotion is largely derived from early work in social marketing in which audience members were grouped into meaningful clusters, largely based on their demographic characteristics (Kotler, 1972; Zimmerman et al., 1994). Income, age, and education, for example, were used to form audience clusters in order to design specific messages that would be relevant for specific groups defined by these attributes (Broom & Dozier, 1990). The assumption on which this early practice rested—that individuals within a cluster possess similar interests, needs, and skills—is the same assumption that guides much of the current work in audience segmentation in health promotion. The only difference is that clusters today are based on criteria more sophisticated than simple demographic differences. In some cases, demographic differences can still be used to define meaningful audience clusters. For example, segmenting the audience according to age can be a sound campaign strategy if the goal of the campaign is to change attitudes and behaviors that are salient to an older but not to a younger population. Reduction of cardiovascular disease is a good example of such a goal, as the age of the audience is a primary motivational factor (Ettema, Brown, & Luepker, 1983). Similarly, segmenting the audience members according to their sex is not a bad strategy if the goal of the campaign is to reduce the incidence of breast cancer among women. The move to develop more sophisticated segmentation criteria is guided by the realization that, when segments are defined solely on the basis of demographic attributes, intrasegment differences may be so large as to render a single message ineffective (Bryant, 1982; Novello, Wise, & Kleinman, 1991). That is, even among women, interest in breast cancer related information may not be uniformly high. Similarly, there may be considerable variance in motivation to seek information about heart disease among the elderly. Hence, audience segmentation strategies, at their core, are guided by the goal of developing criteria that can be used to form audience clusters that are highly homogenous in their information-seeking needs, desires, and motivations. Put another way, smaller the intrasegment variance, better the segmentation criteria that produced the segments. In the extreme case, intrasegment variance can be reduced to zero if the segment consists of only one individual. As the number of individuals within a segment increases, so does the variance. In campaigns that use traditional media to disseminate messages, having segments of single individuals, however, has not been a practical strategy because of the enormous cost of achieving such a fine segmentation. This is where computers can make an enormous difference, a point we return to later in the chapter. The audience segmentation challenge, then, is to find the balance between the fewest number of messages (and channels) required to disseminate effective information, on the one hand, and to form audience segments that are as homogenous as possible, on the

22. USING COMPUTERS TO NARROWCAST HEALTH MESSAGES

499

other. In essence, this is the balance between reach and specificity (Schooler, Chaffee, Flora, & Roser, 1998). Greater the reach of a campaign, greater the number of individuals who can be affected, but increased reach comes at the expense of higher-order changes. After all, messages designed to reach a broad cross-section of the audience are likely to be less effective in bringing about higher-order (e.g., behavioral) changes than lower-order (e.g., attitudinal) changes. Strecher (1999) noted, for example, that smoking cessation campaigns have to make trade-offs between impersonal self-help interventions that have high reach but low success rates and personalized, intense, and intimate interventions that have high dropout rates. It is our view that the extent to which effective segmentation strategies can be derived to obtain a good balance between reach and specificity will depend on the extent to which such strategies are based on theoretical principles of health behavior change and media use. Grunig’s (1989) nested model was an early attempt to segment audiences based on their individual-level characteristics (e.g., psychographics, demographics, media use patterns) as well as their membership in larger social groups. Similarly, Slater and Flora (1991) developed a theory-based model consisting of seven healthy lifestyle subgroups. Their model draws substantially from theories such as the health belief model (Becker, 1974), social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), and the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). These models are significant departures from earlier conceptualizations not only because they are theory based but also because they recognize the importance of incorporating audience members’ communicative behaviors in defining meaningful segments. Grunig’s situational theory (1983), for example, makes specific predictions about how different audience segments, defined by three psychological variables (problem recognition, constraint recognition, and involvement), use different media for different purposes. AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION, TARGETING, AND TAILORING

Once audience members have been divided into various segments according to some predefined criteria, a health campaign then has to develop implementation strategies that will ensure that campaign messages reach their intended audience. A primary consideration at this stage of the campaign is channel selection. Campaigns have to determine which communication channels are likely to be most effective in reaching the intended audience. This process is known as targeting. It is based on the principle that certain groups or segments of audiences utilize certain kinds of channels and that cost-effectiveness can be maximized if the placement of campaign messages in particular channels corresponds with the use of the channels by the intended audience. Reliance on television as a source of health information, for example, is a characteristic of older individuals (Davis & Miller, 1983), and so campaigns designed to reach such individuals could target their audience through this channel. Hence, whereas audience segmentation refers to the process of dividing the audience according to a meaningful criterion, we define targeting as the strategic use of communication channels to reach the audience segments. Exposure to campaign messages can thus be enhanced if audiences are properly segmented and if health messages are disseminated through proper channels. Channel selection is guided not only by audience preferences but also by the intersection between campaign goals and channel characteristics. It has long been a truism in the health communication literature that the mass media are effective channels for raising awareness about an issue and that interpersonal channels are superior for promoting behavior change (Rogers & Storey, 1987). Although this dichotomy may be simplistic, the important point

500

RIMAL AND ADKINS TABLE 22.1

Audience, Channel, and Message Considerations Process

Primary Consideration

Description

Segmentation

Audience characteristics

Targeting

Communication channels

Tailoring

Messages

Dividing audience members according to some meaningful criterion Selecting the proper channel, based on audience characteristics Crafting health messages to reflect audience characteristics

is that channel selection is based not only on audience characteristics but also on the nature of the change sought by the campaign. Changing ingrained or addictive behaviors, for example, may be a difficult proposition if the campaign relies predominantly on flyers and pamphlets. It is likely that such behaviors require monitoring of progress, timely feedback, and extensive interaction with the audience. Other channels of communication may be more appropriate for this purpose. The mass media, in turn, may be excellent channels for disseminating information about new health policies affecting a community. For such a campaign, one-time exposure to campaign messages may be all that is required. For most health behaviors that require long-term maintenance, however, exposure is only the first step in ensuring campaign effectiveness. Once audience members have been exposed to campaign messages, they have to be persuaded to enact the relevant behaviors. Hence, in addition to segmentation and targeting, a campaign needs to construct its messages to cater to individuals’ needs, interests, abilities, and motivations. This process of crafting messages to reflect individuals’ characteristics is known as tailoring (De Vries & Brug, 1999). It has been formally defined as the process of customizing information “to meet the unique needs, interest, and concerns of a specific individual” (Kreuter, Farrell, Olevitch, & Brennan, 2000, p. 2). Table 22.1 lists the three processes we have discussed so far. These three processes are, of course, interrelated. For example, audience members are often segmented according to their use of various communication channels (those who obtain most of their health information from newspapers and magazines rather than from television, for example), and some communication channels, as discussed above, are more appropriate for certain purposes (raising awareness) than others (changing behavior). Similarly, in order to tailor messages properly, message designers need to know the characteristics of the audience. Despite these interrelationships, focusing on each of these processes separately allows us to review the literature according to the specific strategies that public health professionals have used to expand their reach and persuade their audiences to enact changes in their health behaviors. In this chapter, we focus primarily on the use of emerging interactive technologies to tailor messages according to the characteristics of the target audience. Hence, because we are concerned predominantly with computer-based channels and thus hold them constant, we do not explicitly address issues of targeting (according to the definition outlined above), but we do discuss issues that arise when more than one channel is used in disseminating campaign messages. Although any number of channels of communication can be used to tailor messages, in recent years computer-based technologies have emerged as the most efficient means of tailoring (Abrams, Mills, & Bulger, 1999). They provide instant feedback, offer relative

22. USING COMPUTERS TO NARROWCAST HEALTH MESSAGES

501

anonymity, and can be highly adaptive to particular health behaviors (De Vries & Brug, 1999). Further, computers are more interactive than other channels, can be used to craft individualized messages, and can network patients and providers across a wide geographical area (Rimal & Flora, 1997). EFFECTIVENESS OF TAILORED MESSAGES

The primary topic of this chapter is the relationship between audience segmentation and message tailoring in campaign design, intervention, and evaluation. Numerous studies have documented the greater effectiveness of tailored as opposed to nontailored messages across a wide variety of health domains: acquiring cancer information (Cawsey, Jones, & Pearson, 2000); diet and nutrition (Brug, Campbell, & van Assema, 1999; Campbell et al., 1999); medical decision-making (Spunt et al., 1996); nursing (Brown, 1992); physical activity (Bull, Kreuter, & Scharff, 1999; Rosen, 2000); sexually transmitted diseases (Paperny, 1997); smoking (Kreuter & Strecher, 1996; Prochaska, DiClemente, Velicer, & Rossi, 1993; Strecher, 1999; Strecher et al., 1994; Velicer et al., 1993); and weight loss (Kreuter, Bull, Clark, & Oswald, 1999; Kreuter, Oswald, Bull, & Clark, 2000). A few representative examples from this literature can help us understand the influence of tailored messages. In their intervention to improve dietary behavior, Campbell et al. (1999) developed messages that were tailored according to individuals’ existing patterns of fruit and vegetable consumption, and they compared the effectiveness of the tailored messages with messages that were developed by experts without regard to individuals’ existing consumption patterns. Tailored messages, for example, included graphical representation of participants’ current fruit and vegetable intake; their perceived risk of cancer and perceived benefit from eating fruit and vegetables; and their social support. Overall, tailored messages resulted in a significantly better diet (.8 servings) at a two year follow-up than that of the control group individuals who received the generic messages. Similarly, Bull et al. (1999) administered a randomized trial in which participants received one of three types of messages encouraging them to engage in physical activities: messages that were tailored (based on participants’ stage of readiness to change, exercise goals, motives, and preferred type of physical activity) and personalized (used participants’ names), messages that were nontailored and personalized, and messages that were nontailored and nonpersonalized. A fourth control group received no educational materials. Overall, the researchers found that, at a three month follow-up, those who received tailored and personalized messages were significantly more likely to have increased their physical activity levels (65%) than those in the other groups (46%, 56%, and 54%, respectively). Because these studies used different channels to disseminate their messages about various health issues to diverse audiences, generalizations have to be made with caution. However, the literature does seem to suggest that, on the whole, interventions that disseminate tailored as opposed to nontailored messages have better outcomes. Skinner, Campbell, Rimer, Curry, and Prochaska (1999) reached a similar conclusion from their comparison of interventions that used tailored and nontailored print media. Tailored interventions were read more often, were better remembered, and were perceived as more credible. They also found that six out of eight interventions resulted in greater changes in behavior when tailored interventions were used. Thus, evidence across a number of domains supports the superiority of tailored as opposed to nontailored messages (Kristeller, Merriam, Ockene, Ockene, & Goldberg, 1993; Peppers & Rogers, 1993; Rimer et al., 1994). There is also evidence that nontailored messages supplemented with tailored messages are superior to nontailored messages only

502

RIMAL AND ADKINS

(Dijkstra, De Vries, & Roijackers, 1999; Dijkstra, De Vries, Roijackers, & van Breukelen, 1998; Velicer et al., 1993; Prochaska et al., 1993). Given these findings, researchers began to investigate why tailored messages seem to be more effective than nontailored messages (see, e.g., Bental, Cawsey, & Jones, 1999; De Vries & Burg, 1999). In the next section, we discuss some of the theoretical principles that could guide us in understanding why tailored messages are superior to nontailored ones. In discussing the mechanism underlying tailoring effects, we also propose specific hypotheses that could be tested in future research. A CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND ON THE USE OF COMPUTERS FOR MESSAGE TAILORING

Message-tailoring efforts in recent years have increasingly relied on findings from the social psychology literature to shape their messages. This strategy involves delineating specific behavioral determinants from theories about behavior change and then shaping messages so that they conform to those concepts. For example, concepts from the transtheoretical model (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992), which is the theory most extensively applied in developing smoking cessation campaigns, are used to tailor messages based on individuals’ stage of change. According to the theory, individuals can be categorized according to their readiness to make changes in their behaviors. Individuals least ready to change are classified as being in the precontemplation stage, and those who have already made the changes are thought to be in the maintenance stage; the intermediate stages include contemplation, preparation, and action (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983). Application of this theory involves measuring individuals’ readiness to change, classifying them into the appropriate stage, and tailoring messages that are specific to that stage. This strategy shows promise across a number of health domains, including smoking cessation (Prochaska et al., 1993), physical activity (Rosen, 2000), treatment of bulimia nervosa (Levy, 1997), diet (Cowan, Britton, Logue, Smucker, & Milo, 1995), and AIDS prevention (Prochaska, Redding, Harlow, Rossi, & Velicer, 1994). The basic premise seems to be that, when messages are tailored according to individuals’ motivational and behavioral needs, then individuals are more likely to be exposed to the message, pay attention to it, and be influenced by it. Toward this end, Murray-Johnson and Witte, in Chapter 21, propose that interventions need to be cognizant of four categories of health communication variables that emerge from extant theories of behavior change. These refer to the stimuli that trigger motivations to induce an outcome that in turn is influenced by individuals’ appraisals of the environment. In line with their conceptualization, we operationalize three of their categories into three groups of variables: relevance of the message (pertaining to the stimuli), perceived risk (pertaining to motivation), and self-efficacy (pertaining to appraisal). Althuogh the reader can refer to Chapter 21 for a more thorough treatment of these variables, our purpose here is to discuss them in the context of explaining the effects of message tailoring on health outcomes. Furthermore, we believe that the effectiveness of each of these variables can be significantly enhanced through feedback. RELEVANCE

In order for a health message to make its impact, audience members must perceive that the health issue is relevant to them. Adopting a functional view of attitudes (Levin, Nichols, & Johnson, 2000), we can define relevance of the message as the extent to which it fulfills the desires and motivations of individuals. One of the reasons for the effectiveness

22. USING COMPUTERS TO NARROWCAST HEALTH MESSAGES

503

of tailored messages could be that messages designed specifically for individuals in a particular stage of change are perceived to be more relevant (i.e., more functional) than generic, nontailored messages. It is likely, for example, that individuals who have made no plans to quit smoking and thus would be classified as being in the precontemplation stage would find messages that describe the harmful effects of smoking to be relevant. By contrast, individuals in the action stage would likely not find such messages to be relevant, as they are already aware of the risks associated with smoking and have taken steps toward cessation. Closely related to relevance is involvement with an issue. Johnson and Eagly (1989) defined involvement as “a motivational state induced by an association between an activated attitude and the self-concept” (p. 290). Levin et al. (2000) pointed out that, in order to change attitudes, “it is important to understand individuals’ relationships with the attitudes in question” (p. 166). According to this line of reasoning, we could hypothesize that messages tailored according to individuals’ attitudes would elicit greater attention than nontailored messages. Some findings are consistent with this hypothesis (e.g., Kreuter & Strecher, 1996; Kreuter et al., 1999). Paying attention to the message is one of many steps required to move individuals toward behavior change. According to the elaboration likelihood model, individuals must also possess the ability to process the message (Lasky & Chapandy, 1976). Messages judged too complex are likely to be ignored (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981) unless redundancy is built into them (Sonnenschein & Whitehurst, 1982). By knowing beforehand the cognitive abilities of the target audience, health professionals can design messages that are suitable for the audience’s consumption. Research indicates that personal relevance and the nature of arguments in a message interact to determine persuasion. When personal relevance is low, the nature of the arguments makes little difference, but when personal relevance is high, messages with many arguments are perceived to be more persuasive than those with fewer arguments (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979). Furthermore, processing of complex messages is mediated by peripheral cues, such as source credibility, whereas processing of simpler messages is mediated by cognitive effort, with the result that simpler messages are more persuasive (Hafer, Reynolds, & Obertynski, 1996). Hence, it is likely that messages tailored according to the cognitive ability and personal relevance of the target audience are likely to be more effective than nontailored messages. PERCEIVED RISK

Perceived risk, people’s belief in their susceptibility to various ailments and diseases, is thought to be a reliable predictor of preventive health behavior (Becker, 1974; Drabek, 1986; Janz & Becker, 1984). Perceived risk plays a central role in many health behavior theories, although it is given various names, including perceived susceptibility, in the health belief model (Rosenstock, 1974, 1990); probability of occurrence, in protection motivation theory (Rogers, 1975); subjective probability of the threat, in subjective expected utility theory (Sutton, 1982); and perceived threat, in the extended parallel process model (Witte, 1992). The underlying assumption in each of these theories is that potential threat can motivate individuals to take preventive action. Even though perceived risk is often conceptualized as a cause of self-protective behavior, researchers generally have not drawn explicit links between risk perception and communication activity. Many studies treat the relationship between risk perception and self-protective behavior as being mediated by communication activity, but few researchers have tested this assumption. Hence, although risk perception is treated as a motivational

504

RIMAL AND ADKINS

factor, what it actually motivates individuals to do is still unclear. Engagement in selfprotective behaviors is one possibility. Another strategy for dealing with heightened risk levels may be to seek more information about the topic. Individuals may believe that if they are armed with sufficient information about the topic, they will be better able to make the requisite behavioral changes. Yet another way of dealing with heightened risk levels is to ignore the issue altogether. Whether risk perception leads to productive behavior (e.g., seeking more information) or counterproductive behavior (avoidance) is largely determined by the individuals’ efficacy beliefs (Rimal, 2001; Witte, 1992), a point we return to in the next section. In the literature, risk been conceptualized as a property of individuals as well as messages, and hence it is not clear how risk information in messages interacts with individuals’ risk perceptions to determine communication activity. Resolving this issue, we believe, has direct implications for research on message-tailoring effects. We do not currently know, for example, whether individuals who perceive themselves as being at high risk prefer messages that also highlight the risks associated with various behaviors or whether such messages are more suitable for those who perceive themselves as being at relatively low risk. On the one hand, it would appear that individuals who are objectively at risk for certain diseases (e.g., smokers for lung cancer) may be motivated to take action if health messages emphasize the inherent risks associated with inaction. This suggests that high-risk messages should be tailored for individuals who are themselves at high risk. On the other hand, such individuals could ignore messages that make their risk status more salient. Similarly, individuals at low risk for a disease may find high-risk messages to be of little relevance. But we could also hypothesize the opposite: that individuals who engage in low-risk behaviors need to be reminded, through high-risk messages, about the dangers associated with contrary behaviors. The important point is that we know little about how message properties and audience members’ risk perceptions interact with each other. It is likely that a better understanding of this issue could also help our message-tailoring efforts. SELF-EFFICACY

Self-efficacy, defined as the perceived ability to exert personal control (Bandura, 1977, 1997), is one of the most reliable predictors of behavior change. Its effect on human behavior has been extensively documented across a variety of health domains: drug use (Hays and Ellickson, 1990), sexual activity (Jemmott, Jemmott, Spears, Hewitt, & CruzCollins, 1991; Kalisky, Rubinson, Lawrance, & Levy, 1990; Kasen, Vaughan, & Walter, 1992), smoking (Lawrance and Rubinson, 1986), and weight loss and diet (Baranowski et al., 1990; Glynn and Ruderman, 1986; Hertog, Finnegan, Rooney, Viswanath, & Potter, 1993; Uzark, Becker, Dielman, & Rocchini, 1987). According to social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1977, 1986), individuals with greater self-efficacy initiate challenging behaviors, persevere more extensively in their efforts, and construe failures as momentary setbacks to be overcome with more effort (Maibach & Murphy, 1995). Self-efficacy can also act as a predominant factor in determining whether individuals construe the desired behavioral modification as being within their volitional control. Perceived volitional control, in turn, is a major determinant of behavior change, according to Ajzen and Fishbein’s (1980) theory of reasoned action. Self-efficacy also plays a major role in the maintenance of health behaviors (Fuchs, 1996). Given these positive effects of self-efficacy on human behavior, segmenting audience members according to their perceived ability seems a viable campaign strategy. Research

22. USING COMPUTERS TO NARROWCAST HEALTH MESSAGES

505

indicates that individuals’ propensity to seek information about a health issue is a function of the joint influence of efficacy beliefs and risk perceptions. In one study, Rimal (2001), based on Witte’s (1992) extended parallel process model, segmented the audience into four groups: those with responsive (high efficacy, high perceived risk), proactive (high efficacy, low perceived risk), avoidance (low efficacy, high perceived risk), and indifference (low efficacy, low perceived risk) attitudes. The resulting framework was significantly associated with differential motivation to seek information (about heart disease). Furthermore, classification into the four groups also predicted individuals’ information-seeking behavior in both cross-sectional and longitudinal data (up to 6 years), similar patterns were found in the domain of skin cancer prevention (Rimal & Real, in press). It thus appears that individuals’ risk perceptions and efficacy beliefs can be used to segment the audience into groups that are likely to differ in their motivation to seek information. The question for message-tailoring efforts then becomes: What should be the efficacy and risk content of health messages that are designed for the consumption of the four attitudinal groups? FEEDBACK

Many health behavior changes, such as smoking cessation or dietary modification, require long-term maintenance, vigilance, and perseverance in order to be successful. Furthermore, individuals must be able to gauge their progress against some frame of reference, which might include the behavioral progress of others who are similar to themselves, their own prior history, or a prescribed regimen from a trustworthy source. In other words, efforts to change behaviors are likely to be successful when individuals receive timely monitoring and feedback on their progress. With such feedback, individuals can be motivated by their own achievements. They can modify their strategies and gauge the proximity of their goals. Research indicates that behavior changes are much more likely to occur when interventions include a significant feedback component (Brug, Glanz, van Assema, Kok, & van Breukelen, 1998; Gask, 1998). In their review of computer-assisted message-tailoring effects, Brug et al. (1999) point out that the effectiveness of feedback can be enhanced if interventions (a) pay attention to motivators and reinforcers that are personally relevant to the target audience, (b) personalize self-evaluation or self-assessment techniques, and (c) allow members of the target audience to actively participate. To the extent that feedback is a crucial message-tailoring strategy, we might hypothesize that tailored messages with feedback are more effective than those without feedback. Furthermore, feedback that is narrowly tailored to individuals’ specific characteristics is likely to be more effective than feedback that is more diffused. If the effectiveness of message-tailoring efforts is to be enhanced by including a feedback component, one of the questions that message designers have to ask is: What kind of feedback will be most effective? De Vries and Brug (1999) pointed out that feedback can be personal, normative, or ipsative. Personal feedback is evaluative information provided to an individual based on his or her responses, normative feedback is information on how an individual compares with others, and ipsative (or iterative) feedback is information comparing an individual’s current and prior states. Each of these types of feedback can be incorporated into the message-tailoring efforts we have described so far. For example, personal feedback might include pointing out the individual’s risk status. This type of feedback, also known as a health risk appraisal, has been successfully used to enhance relevance of the health issues (Gemson & Sloan, 1995). Similarly, normative feedback can be provided to individuals by pointing out how their health risk appraisal compares

506

RIMAL AND ADKINS

with those of others with similar risk factors, and ipsative feedback can be provided by comparing an individual’s health risk appraisal over time. Clearly, incorporating these forms of feedback in any large-scale intervention effort can be time and labor intensive. However, use of interactive technology is likely to facilitate this task and make it cost effective in the long run. THE ROLE OF COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET

The task of narrowly segmenting the audience and providing tailored information is complicated by the fact that the preferences, needs, and desires of the target audience are likely to shift over time, which means that messages must also be adaptive. Accomplishing both these tasks—crafting highly specialized messages and doing so in an interactive manner— is an enormous challenge for campaigns that rely on traditional channels to disseminate their messages. With the advent of computers, however, the challenge need not be insurmountable. Indeed, with proper algorithms, these tasks can be readily accomplished. We next review some of the attributes of emerging interactive technologies that make them highly suitable for message-tailoring efforts. As discussed by Turner in chapter 23, telemedicine has emerged as a major form of health care delivery, as it facilitates synchronous and asynchronous communication across great distances at a relatively low cost (Scheerhorn, Warisse, & McNeilis, 1995). The Internet is widely used as a medium for the transmission of health information, communication between providers and patients, the conducting of research on treatment options, and numerous other health-related tasks. From a health promotion standpoint, the Internet can also serve as a powerful medium for disseminating health campaign messages to millions of individuals. Perhaps the most highly acclaimed feature of the Internet is the interactivity that it accords users. Although interactivity has been defined in numerous ways (see, e.g., Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; Rafaeli, 1988), Heeter’s (1989) definition is one of the most comprehensive in that it comprises six dimensions: complexity of choice, effort exerted by users, responsiveness, monitoring of information use, ease of adding information, and facilitation of interpersonal communication. In fact, so broad is her definition that we can discuss all major aspects of message-tailoring efforts in terms of the six dimensions. Heeter’s first dimension of interactivity has to do with the range of content options from which users can choose to satisfy their own preferences and information needs. The more content that a campaign has, the better the ability to develop a message that is narrowly tailored to the individual. As for the second dimension, high interactivity means that users have to exert substantial effort in selecting and navigating through the content. The greater the effort exerted by the user, the greater the likelihood that the user will play an active role in information acquisition. Conversely, systems that require little effort on the part of the user promote passive processing of content. This is another consideration for message-tailoring efforts: the more that users can be persuaded to play an active role in selecting and processing content, the greater the likelihood that the messages will be effective. The third dimension of interactivity, responsiveness, is analogous to feedback in message-tailoring efforts: computer systems that are responsive to users’ needs are likely to be more effective. Heeter’s fourth dimension, monitoring of information use, represents the ability, on the part of content developers, to continuously evaluate utilization of the provided services. In campaign terminology, this is a type of process evaluation. By monitoring usage,

22. USING COMPUTERS TO NARROWCAST HEALTH MESSAGES

507

campaigns can adapt quickly to users’ preferences. Whereas responsiveness represents evaluation on the part of the user, monitoring of information use represents evaluation on the part of the information provider. The fifth dimension, ease of adding information, concerns the extent to which the system allows users to modify content. Whereas modification of content was virtually impossible with traditional media, many Internet sites now allow users to post their feedback for others’ consumption. Modification is a radical idea for message-tailoring efforts because health professionals have traditionally not allowed users to modify content. Whether allowing users to modify content results in more effective outcomes is a question open to research, but it could provide valuable information for campaign designers. Heeter’s last dimension, facilitation of interpersonal communication, concerns the ease with which users are able to communicate with each other. Evaluating the effectiveness of messages socially constructed in this manner is yet another area for future research. We could hypothesize that, from an audience perspective, messages originating from users similar to oneself, as opposed to (the hierarchically distal) information providers, would be perceived as more credible and hence more persuasive. Beside interactivity, there are other attributes of emerging technologies that facilitate message-tailoring efforts. Compared with traditional media, these new technologies offer distinct advantages in the form of multimodality, telepresence, networkability, temporal flexibility, sensory vividness, and anonymity, among others (Rimal & Flora, 1997). Each of these attributes can contribute to our ability to craft messages more precisely to match the preferences of audiences. Another common theme is their ability to enhance user choice and control. The greater the control users perceive themselves as having over information retrieval and consumption, the greater the likelihood that messages so tailored will be effective (Brug et al., 1999). Finally, it is worth repeating that we believe the use of powerful interactive technologies in health promotion is likely to lead to significant enhancements in campaign effectiveness if such technologies incorporate the two strategies emphasized in this chapter: the tailoring of messages and the provision of the three types of feedback. As pointed out by Brug et al. (1999), the number of message configurations increases exponentially with the addition of each variable on which tailoring occurs. For example, if we segment the audience into two relevance-based groups (high and low), whose risk perceptions are either high or low, and whose efficacy beliefs are either high or low, we need 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 different messages. Furthermore, if each group is to be provided the three feedback types (personal, normative, and ipsative), we end up with 8 × 3 = 24 messages, and the number will increase further if more than one episode of ipsative feedback occurs. Whereas traditional media would render this strategy prohibitively costly, emerging computer-based technologies are likely to make it feasible. CONCLUSION

Given the vast amount of information that individuals are exposed to on a daily basis, public health campaigns face enormous challenges in reaching their audience with messages that are relevant, comprehensible, and effective in promoting and sustaining healthy behaviors. Careful use of segmentation, targeting, and tailoring can improve the likelihood of success. To employ these techniques effectively, we need to understand audience characteristics, channel capabilities, and message properties, respectively. Although achieving an understanding of these is daunting in and of itself, the greater challenge lies in developing theoretical perspectives that take into account how these three factors interact with

508

RIMAL AND ADKINS

each other to determine exposure to and reception of campaign messages. In other words, it is not sufficient to study these factors individually; rather, we must develop models that take into account their collective impact. In future research, for example, we might segment audience members according to their risk perception, differentiate channels according to their reach, and tailor messages according to their level of specificity, but we also need to investigate how these three factors combine to influence message processing. Otherwise it is unlikely that campaigns will benefit much from such studies. A more fruitful line of research may be to map out whether, for example, the nature of information sought through the Internet, as opposed to interpersonal sources, differs according to individuals’ risk perceptions. In this example, we can identify tailoring effects (the nature of the information sought), targeting effects (use of the Internet or interpersonal sources), and segmentation effects (high or low perceived risk). Similarly, we might examine the relative effectiveness of various message frames (tailoring) among those with different levels of risk perception (segmentation), holding the channel constant (targeting). The important point here is that audience segmentation, channel targeting, and message tailoring decisions should be made by considering how each of these factors informs and is informed by the other two. This line of inquiry, we believe, not only is useful for theory development but also has practical implications. REFERENCES Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1980). Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Abrams, D. B., Mills, S., & Bulger, D. (1999). Challenges and future directions for tailored communication research. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 21, 299–306. Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman. Baranowski, J., Henske, J., Simons-Morton, B., Palmer, J., Tiernan, K., Hooks, P. C., & Dunn, J. K. (1990). Dietary change for cardiovascular disease prevention among Black-American families. Health Education Research, 5, 433–443. Becker, M. H. (Ed.). (1974). The health belief model and personal health behavior. Health Education Monographs, 2, 324–473. Bental, D. S., Cawsey, A., & Jones, R. (1999). Patient information systems that tailor to the individual. Patient Education and Counseling, 36, 171–180. Berland, G. K., Elliott, M. N., Morales, L. S., Algazy, J. I., Kravitz, R. L., Broder, M. S., Kanouse, D. E., Munoz, J. A., Puyol, J., Lara, M., Watkins, K. E., Yang, H., & McGlynn, E. A. (2001). Health information on the Internet: Accessibility, quality, and readability in English and Spanish. Journal of the American Medical Association, 285, 2612–2637. Biermann, J. S., Golladay, G. J., Greenfield, M. L., & Baker, L. H. (2000). Evaluation of cancer information on the Internet. Cancer, 86, 381–390. Broom, G. M., & Dozier, D. M. (1990). Using research in public relations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Brown, S. J. (1992). Tailoring nursing care to the individual client: Empirical challenge of a theoretical concept. Research in Nursing and Health, 15, 39–46. Brug, J., Campbell, M., & van Assema, P. (1999). The application and impact of computergenerated personalized nutrition education: A review of the literature. Patient Education and Counseling, 36, 145–156.

22. USING COMPUTERS TO NARROWCAST HEALTH MESSAGES

509

Brug, J., Glanz, K., van Assema, P., Kok, G., & van Breukelen, G. (1998). The impact of computer-tailored feedback and iterative feedback on fat, fruit, and vegetable intake. Health Education and Behavior, 25, 517–531. Bryant, C. A. (1982). The impact of kin, friend and neighbor networks on infant feeding practices. Social Science and Medicine, 16, 1757–1765. Bull, F. C., Kreuter, M. W., & Scharff, D. P. (1999). Effects of tailored, personalized and general health messages on physical activity. Patient Education and Counseling, 36, 181–192. Campbell, M. K., Bernhardt, J. M., Waldmiller, M., Jackson, B., Potenziani, D., Weathers, B., & Demissie, S. (1999). Varying the message source in computer-tailored nutrition education. Patient Education and Counseling, 36, 157–169. Cawsey, A. J., Jones, R. B., & Pearson, J. (2000). The evaluation of a personalized health information system for patients with cancer. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 10, 47–72. Cirksena, M. K., & Flora, J. A. (1995). Audience segmentation in worksite health promotion: A procedure using social marketing concepts. Health Education Research, 10, 211–224. Cowan, R., Britton, P. J., Logue, E., Smucker, W., & Milo, L. (1995). The relationship among the transtheoretical model of behavioral change, psychological distress, and diet attitudes in obesity: Implications for primary care intervention. Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings, 2, 249–267. Davis, R. H., & Miller, R. V. (1983). The acquisition of specialized information by older adults through utilization of new telecommunications technology. Educational Gerontology, 9, 217–232. De Vries, H., & Brug, J. (1999). Computer-tailored interventions motivating people to adopt health promoting behaviors: Introduction to a new approach. Patient Education and Counseling, 36, 99–105. Dijkstra, A., De Vries, H., & Roijackers, J. (1999). Targeting smokers with low readiness to change with tailored and nontailored self-help materials. Preventive Medicine, 28, 203– 211. Dijkstra, A., De Vries, H., Roijackers, J., & van Breukelen, G. (1998). Tailoring information to enhance quitting in smokers with low motivation to quit: Three basic efficacy questions. Health Psychology, 17, 513–519. Drabek, T. E. (1986). Human system responses to disaster. New York: Springer-Verlag. Eng, T. R., & Gustafson, D. H. (Eds.). (1999). Wired for health and well-being. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Science Panel on Interactive Communication and Health. Ettema, J. S., Brown, J. W., & Luepker, R. V. (1983). Knowledge gap effects in a health information campaign. Public Opinion Quarterly, 47, 516–527. Fox, S., & Raine, L. (2001). The online health care revolution: How the Web helps Americans take better care of themselves. Washington, DC: Pew Charitable Trusts. Fuchs, R. (1996). Causal models of physical exercise participation: Testing the predictive power of the construct “pressure to change.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26, 1931–1960. Gask, L. (1998). Small group interactive techniques utilizing videofeedback. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 28, 97–113. Gemson, D. H., & Sloan, R. P. (1995). Efficacy of computerized health risk appraisal as a part of a periodic health examination at the worksite. American Journal of Health Promotion, 9, 464–466. Glynn, S. M., & Ruderman, A. J. (1986). The development and validation of an eating selfefficacy scale. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 10, 403–420.

510

RIMAL AND ADKINS

Grunig, J. E. (1983). Communication behaviors and attitudes of environmental publics: Two studies. Journalism Monographs, 81, 1–47. Grunig, J. E. (1989). Publics, audiences and market segments: Segmentation principles for campaigns. In C. T. Salmon (Ed.), Information campaigns: Balancing social values and social change (pp. 199–228). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Hafer, C. L., Reynolds, K. L., & Obertynski, M. A. (1996). Message comprehensibility and persuasion: Effects of complex language in counterattitudinal appeals to laypeople. Social Cognition, 14, 317–337. Harris Interactive. (2001). Cyberchondriacs update [Online]. Received November, 2001; from http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris poll/index.asp?PID=229. Hays, R. D., & Ellickson, P. L. (1990). How generalizable are adolescents’ beliefs about pro-drug pressures and resistance self-efficacy. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 20, 321–340. Heeter, C. (1989). Implications of new interactive technologies for conceptualizing communication. In J. L. Salvaggio & J. Bryant (Eds.), Media use in the information age: Emerging patterns of adoption and consumer use (pp. 217–235). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hertog, J. K., Finnegan, J. R., Jr., Rooney, B., Viswanath, K., & Potter, J. (1993). Self-efficacy as a target population segmentation strategy in a diet and cancer risk reduction campaign. Health Communication, 5, 21–40. Hornik, R. (1989). The knowledge-behavior gap in public information campaigns: A development communication view. In C. T. Salmon (Ed.), Information campaigns: Balancing social values and social change (pp. 113–138). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Janz, N. K., & Becker, M. H. (1984). The health belief model: A decade later. Health Education Quarterly, 11, 1–47. Jemmott, J. B., III, Jemmott, L. S., Spears, H., Hewitt, N., & Cruz-Collins, M. (1991). Self-efficacy, hedonistic expectancies, and condom-use intentions among inner-city Black adolescent women: A social cognitive approach to AIDS risk behavior. Journal of Adolescent Health, 13, 512–519. Johnson, B. T., & Eagly, A. H. (1989). The effects of involvement on persuasion: A metaanalysis. Psychology Bulletin, 106, 290–314. Kalisky, E. M., Rubinson, L., Lawrance, L., & Levy, S. R. (1990). AIDS, runaways, and self-efficacy. Family and Community Health, 13, 65–72. Kasen, S., Vaughan, R. D., & Walter, H. J. (1992). Self-efficacy for AIDS preventive behaviors among tenth grade students. Health Education Quarterly, 19, 187–202. Kassirer, J. P. (1995). The next transformation in the delivery of health care. New England Journal of Medicine, 332, 52–54. Kotler, P. (1972). A generic concept of marketing. Journal of Marketing, 36, 46–54. Kreuter, M. W., Bull, F. C., Clark, E. M., & Oswald, D. L. (1999). Understanding how people process health information: A comparison of tailored and nontailored weight-loss materials. Health Psychology, 18, 487–494. Kreuter, M., Farrell, D., Olevitch, L., & Brennan, L. (2000). Tailoring health messages: Customizing communication with computer technology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kreuter, M., Oswald, D. L., Bull, F. C., & Clark, E. M. (2000). Are tailored health education materials always more effective than non-tailored materials? Health Education Research, 15, 305–315. Kreuter, M. W., & Strecher, V. J. (1996). Do tailored messages enhance the effectiveness of health risk appraisal? Results from a randomized trial. Health Education Research, 11, 97–105.

22. USING COMPUTERS TO NARROWCAST HEALTH MESSAGES

511

Kristeller, J. L., Merriam, P. A., Ockene, J. K., Ockene, I. S., & Goldberg, R. J. (1993). Smoking intervention for cardiac patients: In search of more effective strategies. Cardiology, 82, 317– 324. Lasky, E. Z., & Chapandy, A. M. (1976). Factors affecting language comprehension. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 7, 159–168. Lawrance, L., & Rubinson, L. (1986). Self-efficacy as a predictor of smoking behavior in young adolescents. Addictive Behaviors, 11, 367–382. Levin, K. D., Nichols, D. R., & Johnson, B. T. (2000). Involvement and persuasion: Attitude functions for the motivated processor. In G. R. Maio & J. M. Olson (Eds.), Why we evaluate: Functions of attitudes (pp. 163–194). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Levy, R. K. (1997). The transtheoretical model of change: An application to bulimia nervosa. Psychotherapy, 34, 278–285. Maibach, E., & Murphy, D. A. (1995). Self-efficacy in health promotion research and practice: Conceptualization and measurement. Health Education Research, 10, 37–50. Newhagen, J. E., & Rafaeli, S. (1996). Why communication researchers should study the Internet: A dialogue. Journal of Communication, 46, 4–13. Novello, A. C., Wise, P. H., & Kleinman, D. V. (1991). Hispanic health: Time for data, time for action. Journal of the American Medical Association, 265, 253–254. Paperny, D. M. N. (1997). Computerized health assessment and education for adolescent HIV and STD prevention in health care settings and schools. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 54–70. Peppers, D., & Rogers, M. (1993). The one to one future: Building relationships one customer at a time. New York: Doubleday. Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1979). Issue involvement can increase or decrease persuasion by enhancing message-relevant cognitive responses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1915–1926. Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1981). Attitudes and persuasion: Classic and contemporary approaches. Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown. Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C. C. (1983). Stages and processes of self-change for smoking: Toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51, 390–395. Prochaska, J. O., DiClemente, C. C., & Norcross, J. C. (1992). In search of how people change: Applications to addictive behaviors. American Psychologist, 47, 1102–1114. Prochaska, J. O., DiClemente, C. C., Velicer, W. F., & Rossi, J. S. (1993). Standardized, individualized, interactive, and personalized self-help programs for smoking cessation. Health Psychology, 12, 399–405. Prochaska, J. O., Redding, C. A., Harlow, L. L., Rossi, J. S., & Velicer, W. F. (1994). The transtheoretical model of change and HIV prevention: A review. Health Education Quarterly, 21, 471–486. Rafaeli, S. (1988). Interactivity: From new media to communication. In R. P. Hawkins, J. M. Wiemann, & S. Pingree (Eds.), Advancing communication science: Merging mass and interpersonal process (pp. 110–134). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Rimal, R. N. (2001). Perceived risk and self-efficacy as motivators: Understanding individuals’ long-term use of health information. Journal of Communication, 51, 633–654. Rimal, R. N., & Flora, J. A. (1997). Interactive technology attributes in health promotion: Practical and theoretical issues. In R. Street & T. Manning (Eds.), Using interactive computing in health promotion (pp. 19–38). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Rimal, R. N., & Real, K. (in press). Perceived risk and self-efficacy as motivators of change: Support for the Risk Perception Attitude (RPA) framework from two studies. Human Communication Research.

512

RIMAL AND ADKINS

Rimer, B. K., Orleans, C. T., Fleisher, L., Cristinzio, S., Resch, N., Telepchak, J., & Keintz, M. K. (1994). Does tailoring matter? The impact of a tailored guide on ratings and shortterm smoking-related outcomes for older smokers. Health Education Quarterly, 9, 69– 84. Rogers, R. W. (1975). A protection motivation theory of fear appeals and attitude change. Journal of Psychology, 91, 93–114. Rogers, E. M., & Storey, J. D. (1987). Communication campaigns. In C. R. Berger & S. H. Chaffee (Eds.), Handbook of communication science (pp. 817–846). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Rosen, C. S. (2000). Integrating stage and continuum models to explain processing of exercise messages and exercise initiation among sedentary college students. Health Psychology, 19, 172–180. Rosenstock, I. M. (1974). Historical origins of the health belief model. Health Education Monographs, 2, 1–8. Rosenstock, I. M. (1990). The health belief model. In K. Glanz, F. Lewis, & B. Rimer (Eds.), Health behavior and health education: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 39–62). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Scheerhorn, D., Warisse, J., & McNeilis, K. S. (1995). Computer-based telecommunication among an illness-related community: Design, delivery, early use, and the functions of HIGHnet. Health Communication, 7, 301–325. Schooler, C., Chaffee, S. H., Flora, J. A., & Roser, C. (1998). Health campaign channels: Tradeoffs among reach, specificity, and impact. Human Communication Research, 24, 410– 432. Skinner, C. S., Campbell, M. K., Rimer, B. K., Curry, S., & Prochaska, J. O. (1999). How effective is tailored print communication? Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 21, 290–298. Slater, M., & Flora, J. A. (1991). Health lifestyles: Audience segmentation analysis for public health interventions. Health Education Quarterly, 18, 221–233. Sonnenberg, F. A. (1997). Health information on the Internet: Opportunities and pitfalls. Archives of Internal Medicine, 27, 151–152. Sonnenschein, S., & Whitehurst, G. J. (1982). The effects of redundant communications on the behavior of listeners: Does a picture need a thousand words? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 11, 115–125. Spunt, B. S., Deyo, R. A., Taylor, V. M., Leek, K. M., Goldberg, H. I., & Mulley, A. G. (1996). An interactive videodisc program for low back pain patients. Health Education Research, 11, 535–541. Strecher, V. J. (1999). Computer-tailored smoking cessation materials: A review and discussion. Patient Education and Counseling, 36, 107–117. Strecher, V. J., Kreuter, M., DenBoer, D., Kobrin, S, Hospers, H. J., & Skinner, V. S. (1994). The effects of computer-tailored smoking cessation letters in family practice settings. Journal of Family Practice, 39, 262–270. Sutton, S. R. (1982). Fear-arousing communication: A critical examination of theory and research. In J. R. Eiser (Ed.), Social psychology and behavioral medicine (pp. 303–337). London: Wiley. Uzark, K. C., Becker, M. H., Dielman, T. E., & Rocchini, A. P. (1987). Psychosocial predictors of compliance with a weight control intervention for obese children and adolescents. Journal of Compliance in Health Care, 2, 167–178. Velicer, W. F., Prochaska, J. O., Bellis, J. M., DiClemente, C. C., Rossi, J. S., Fava, J. L., & Steiger, J. H. (1993). An expert system intervention for smoking cessation. Addictive Behaviors, 18, 269–290.

22. USING COMPUTERS TO NARROWCAST HEALTH MESSAGES

513

Widman, L. E., & Tong, D. A. (1997). Requests for medical advice from patients and families to health care providers who publish on the World Wide Web. Archives of Internal Medicine, 27, 209–212. Williams, J. E., & Flora, J. A. (1995). Health behavior segmentation and campaign planning to reduce cardiovascular disease risk among Hispanics. Health Education Quarterly, 22, 36–48. Witte, K. (1992). Putting the fear back into fear appeals: The extended parallel process model. Communication Monographs, 59, 225–249. Zimmerman, R. S., Vega, W. A., Gil, A. G., Warheit, G. J., Apospori, E., & Biafora, F. (1994). Who is Hispanic? Definitions and their consequences. American Journal of Public Health, 84, 1985–1987.

23 Telemedicine: Expanding Health Care into Virtual Environments Jeanine Warisse Turner Georgetown University

Scenario A: A primary care physician practicing in a rural area is concerned about an irregular mole on her patient’s skin. Using an interactive videoconferencing system, the physician connects to a dermatologist located at an academic medical center 200 miles away and asks the specialist to take a look at the patient’s condition. Scenario B: A nurse in a dialysis unit moves a video monitor from bed to bed so that a nephrologist 50 miles away can consult with patients regarding their dialysis regimen. Scenario C: An emergency room in a rural clinic connects via videoconferencing equipment to an academic medical center emergency room to help triage a car accident victim who needs to be anesthetized. Scenario D: A heart surgery patient connects via computer at 3:00 A.M. to e-mail a nurse station concerning a medication dosage question. At 3:30 A.M. the patient receives an answer. Scenario E: A surgeon in Hawaii performs an orthoscopic surgery on a patient while being coached through the procedure via videoconference by an orthopedic specialist from Cleveland’s Mayo Clinic. Each of these scenarios, though not at all exhaustive, provides an example of health care practitioners using telemedicine technology to alleviate the constraints imposed by distance and time. Debakey (1995) argued that telemedicine, or the use of telecommunications technologies within the field of health care, has the potential for having a greater impact on the future of medicine than any other modality. This transformation of the doctor and patient environment provides a new and interesting context for health communication scholars. Removing the immediacy of face-to-face, in-the-same-room encounters has the potential to influence the relationships between health care practitioners, health care organizations, and practitioners and patients. Although telemedicine holds much promise for addressing cost and access concerns, new ways of practicing medicine within this virtual

515

516

TURNER

environment must be defined and understood. Although many aspects of telemedicine have been researched and explored, the communicative implications of this mediated encounter have been underemphasized. This review defines telemedicine, details its history, and describes barriers to implementation and applications. The review then examines literature related to communication research and discusses future trends in telemedicine and future opportunities for research. DEFINING TELEMEDICINE

Telemedicine can be broadly defined as the use of telecommunications technologies to facilitate the delivery of health care at a distance for the direct benefit of patients (Bashshur, 1997; Grigsby et al., 1994; Perednia & Allen, 1995). As technology has developed to create the potential infrastructure for practicing medicine outside of the constraints of time and space, the potential of telemedicine to alleviate three tenacious problems of the health care system has fueled its development and use: 1) address the uneven geographic distribution of health care resources, facilities, and personnel; 2) improve access to health care among underprivileged, isolated, and confined populations; and 3) slow the rising cost of care (Bashshur, 1997). Several names emerged in the late 1990s to describe the use of telecommunications technology and health (for example e-health, cyberhealth, telehealth, and teleeducation). These terms illustrate the vibrant growth of the field. Telemedicine has generally been used to describe clinical uses of the telecommunications infrastructure in the direct provision of patient care. Therefore, this review does not include health care database management, management of electronic patient records, or distance medical education. This review explores telemedicine as it relates to the clinical practice of patient care. Telemedicine applications span a number of technologies, diagnostic conditions, and configurations. The range of telemedicine technologies includes the telephone, facsimile, data transfer via modem, transmission of static visual images, and real-time interactive television (Perednia & Grigsby, 1998). Telemedicine has been used and been determined feasible within a variety of specialties, diagnostic conditions, and applications. Telemedicine Technologies

The term telemedicine can encompass a broad range of technologies. Tele is used to indicate the electronic transmission of information between one location and another. This information is typically digital in nature and includes images, video, audio, and other relevant patient data. The transmission may be synchronous (real-time communication, i.e., videoconference) or asynchronous (store and forward, i.e., e-mail). Teleradiology, telepathology, and teleconsultation comprised a significant portion of the telemedicine activity occurring in the 1990s. Teleradiology and telepathology involve the electronic transfer of diagnostic medical images and clinical data typically from an area of low specialization to a facility with highly specialized clinicians for interpretation. This information is usually captured or converted to a digital form and transmitted telephonically from one location to another. Images are then retrieved, interpreted, and returned to their originating location along with an opinion or diagnosis. Teleconsultation primarily involves the use of videoconferencing technology, although a telephone-only conversation could also fall into this category. In the 1990s, a significant growth in videoconferencing technology enabled real-time consultations among health care practitioners. The application of these technologies has not been without controversy as they are meant to replicate traditional health care encounters where practitioners, patients, and data are colocated.

23. TELEMEDICINE

517

Particularly with videoconferencing technologies, there have been no clinically endorsed technical standards for acquisition, compression, and display to provide some level of consistency across the health care industry (Chen, Turner, & Crawford, 1996). The technologies vary widely, resulting in an array of potential teleconsultation conditions creating difficulties in generalizing efficacy across telemedicine programs. This variance among program conditions is compounded as technologies evolve and change, making it difficult to aggregate samples for research and evaluation purposes. Although technology advancements have made evaluation difficult, they have helped to decrease the cost of telemedicine investments. Where a typical investment in videoconferencing technology to enable teleconsultations in the early 1990s may have cost nearly $100,000 per location, by the year 2000, the same type of capability could be acquired for less than $20,000. Similar price and performance improvements occurred within other telemedicine applications as well (for example, teleradiology and telepathology). This dramatic drop in cost fueled the development of telemedicine applications. Classifying Telemedicine Applications

Telemedicine is not a single homogenous entity but rather represents a variety of uses and processes that use a broad spectrum of technologies. In this way, telemedicine describes a system of care incorporating a variety of processes and technologies. These technologies, along with the people and organizations involved, create a virtual space where health care is practiced. To better understand the specific characteristics of various telemedicine applications, a classification scheme can be helpful. Figure 23.1 depicts a grid for categorizing specific telemedicine uses and the virtual context created. Grigsby (1997) suggested that telemedicine could be classified according to four approaches depending on the area of interest: management of specific diseases, use within specific specialties, technology category, or classes of clinical problems. Two additional approaches are also suggested: telemedicine roles and temporal aspects. According to Disease. Classifying telemedicine according to the management of specific diseases refers to the use of telemedicine for the treatment of certain conditions. Many of the research studies exploring feasibility of telemedicine are couched within

Telemedicine Approaches

Examples

Specific disease

Tumor, fractures, lesions, heart murmur, and so on

Specialty area

Psychiatry, dermatology, cardiology, general surgery, and so on

Class of clinical problem

Emergency triage, follow-up, routine consultation, diagnostic work-up, management of chronic disease, supervision and consultation without a physician, transmission of diagnostic images, transmission of other medical data, preventive medicine/patient education/public health

Technology

Telephone, fax, interactive video, e-mail, Web-based

Participants involved

Physician to physician, specialist to primary care, specialist to patient, and the like

History of encounter

One-time visit, long-term relationship, and so on

Figure 23.1 Telemedicine contexts: Telemedicine contexts are created through a combination of these six approaches.

518

TURNER

the study of a specific disease or condition occurring within a patient population. For example, one group of researchers explored the use of telemedicine in psychiatry to treat patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (Baer et al., 1995). The study compared faceto-face interviews with interviews conducted via two-way video. Results suggested that telemedicine provided an effective alternative for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. Both psychiatrists and patients were satisfied with the ability of the technology to transmit the necessary information for diagnosis and treatment. By classifying each application of telemedicine according to the disease in which it is used, researchers can generalize effectiveness of the telemedicine system as it is used for specific treatments. According to Specialty. Classifying telemedicine according to specialty has led to the grouping of telemedicine applications within specific specialty areas. This classification created such terms as telepsychiatry, teleoncology, telepathology, and teledermatology (for reviews of telemedicine’s use within these areas see Bashshur, Sanders, & Shannon, 1997). Classification of the effectiveness of telemedicine within specialties, coupled with an understanding of telemedicine use for specific diseases, can lead to clinical practice guidelines for telemedicine within specialty areas. According to Technology. Classifying telemedicine according to technology categories focuses the interest on the means of transmission. Examples of transmission options include telephone, fax machine, e-mail, interactive videoconferencing, and Webbased interactions. The technology creates the context for communication processes to take place within, limiting certain cues depending on the type of media used. In addition, different types of technology dictate time representation, specifically, whether an interaction takes place in real time or is asynchronous. The adequacy of each type of technology is determined by the requirements of the situation. According to Clinical Problem. Classifying telemedicine according to clinical problems focuses on the processes completed for specific types of telemedicine interactions. The clinical problems Grigsby (1997) suggested included nine areas: 1) initial emergency evaluation or triage, 2) medical and surgical follow-up, 3) routine consultations and second opinion, 4) extended diagnostic work-ups or short-term management of self-limited conditions, 5) management of chronic diseases and conditions, 6) supervision and consultation for primary care encounters when a physician is not available, 7) transmission of diagnostic images, 8) transmission of other medical data, and 9) preventive medicine, public health, and patient education. The classification according to clinical problems assumes that certain processes are common across specialties in terms of the mix and intensity of services provided. This classification also suggests that the way that telemedicine is provided (for example, emergency use versus follow-up care) may influence telemedicine’s effectiveness. One study of consumers’ perceptions of telemedicine suggested that perceptions of telemedicine’s effectiveness changed based on the situation where telemedicine was used. In a survey of 318 rural consumers, researchers found that perceived privacy, value, reliability, and relative advantage predicted consumers likelihood to use telemedicine. Perceived trust of the system was important in routine or specialty uses but not emergency uses, suggesting that different contexts through which telemedicine is provided influence perceptions of use (Turner, Thomas, & Gailiun, 2001). According to Telemedicine Roles. A fifth approach to telemedicine classification that is important to understanding the virtual space created is the role and

23. TELEMEDICINE

519

responsibilities of the individuals involved. For example, some telemedicine applications may involve practitioner-to-practitioner consultations, while others involve practitioner-topatient interactions. In addition, because the technology may link more than two sites, the addition of more clinical personnel complicates the communication environment and the telemedicine context, while simultaneously providing the opportunity for the advantages of collaboration. According to Temporal Aspects. A sixth approach to telemedicine classification focuses on the temporal aspects of the encounter. For example, a one-time visit may have different communicative implications than an encounter between a physician and patient with a long-term relationship or over a long term. Similarly, the extent to which the physician and patient have met face-to-face versus whether their interactions have existed solely through mediated encounters may also influence the communication process (Bordia, 1997). Telemedicine constitutes much more than the technological infrastructure created but rather involves the creation of a new organizational form (Turner, 1999). The classification grid (Fig. 23.1) enables researchers to identify the specific area of interest being explored within any particular application. This specification is critical to defining each use of telemedicine so that the results of a study can be situated in a specific context. Each approach within the grid helps to define the specific virtual context created. Because telemedicine constitutes such a broad spectrum of contexts, Bashshur (1995b) argued that telemedicine constitutes a new integrated system of care. The grid helps to illustrate the variables involved in this complex system of care. HISTORY OF TELEMEDICINE

The separation of physician and patient occurring without the aid of technology dates to the Middle Ages where at least one recorded instance describes a physician on one side of the river examining a patient for plague on the opposite side to diminish the risk to the physician. Similarly, the development of the postal service in the mid-19th century created the opportunity for patients to write to their physicians for advice and diagnosis (Elford & Battcock, 1997). Over the years, the use of telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, and wireless communication have facilitated interactions between patients and physicians and across specialties (Wooton, 1998/1999). Interactive-video (ITV)-mediated telepsychiatry was introduced in the late 1950s. By 1975, there were 17 ITV-mediated telemedicine programs in the United States. Despite their initial reports of clinical effectiveness and user satisfaction, early efforts were not able to economically sustain themselves (Allen, 1998/1999). New digital compression and transmission technologies invented in the early 1980s, coupled with the need for more equitable access to health care, spurred a resurgence in telemedicine applications (Chen, Turner, & Crawford, 1996). In the United States, the number of telemedicine programs has been doubling yearly since 1994 (Allen & Grigsby, 1998). A 1998 survey of U.S. programs found 139 active programs conducting over 40,000 consultations across 35 specialties (Allen, 1998/1999). Approximately 75% of these consultations were interactive-video-mediated (synchronous) while the rest were storeand-forward applications (asynchronous, for example, teleradiology or telepathology). Telemedicine programs have also developed and expanded in Canada, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Argentina, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Mexico, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and India (Allen, 1998/1999).

520

TURNER

Several growth factors contributed to the development of telemedicine applications in the mid- to late 1990s: the strong need for clinical medicine in remote areas, the politics and economics of a managed care approach to medicine, the suppliers of telemedicine equipment, and telecommunications carrying capacity (Perednia & Allen, 1995). The 1990s also witnessed large investments in telemedicine development, with the total amount of money spent by the federal government on grants, contracts, and appropriations for telemedicine in that decade approaching $700 million (Perednia & Grigsby, 1998). Bashshur (1995a) noted, “Unlike the early pioneering efforts of the 1970s in the development of telemedicine systems, which operated somewhat independently and in relative isolation of each other, the current generation of telemedicine systems is emerging as part of a larger social and cultural movement, embedded in the information age” (p. 81). Despite the growing interest in telecommunications technologies and virtual work, a number of similar concerns plagued telemedicine programs in the year 2000 that confronted earlier telemedicine programs. Specifically, both policymakers and the health care community expect “evidence of clinical effectiveness, distributive efficiency, and cost savings long before telemedicine systems are designed optimally and used sufficiently, and hence, long before scientifically valid evaluations can be completed” (Bashshur, 1997, p. 7). Although telemedicine programs have been the focus of telemedicine investments and development, isolated examples of health care providers searching for consultation assistance over the Internet provide low-cost interesting illustrations of the use of telemedicine. Growing use of the Internet has created unique opportunities for health care practitioners to collaborate. For example on April 10, 1995, e-mail users around the world read the message, “Hi. This is Peking University in China. . . . [a] young, 21-year-old student has become very sick and is dying. . . . Doctors at the best hospitals in Beijing cannot cure her. . . . So now we are asking the world—can somebody help us?” Within 3 weeks, 2,000 replies from physicians and researchers in 18 countries had come in, many accurately diagnosing her condition as resulting from poisoning by the heavy metal thallium (Weissert & Silberman, 1996). As this example illustrates, telemedicine can increase the scope and possibilities for new relationships and interactions to occur. BARRIERS TO TELEMEDICINE

Despite the continued expansion of telemedicine use in terms of applications and services, several barriers to telemedicine deployment still curb its growth. These barriers face many other industries that have tried to migrate their business from a bricks-and-mortar environment to virtual space. Sanders and Bashshur (1995) identified six challenges to the development of telemedicine applications: 1) interstate licensing and institutional credentialing of physicians, 2) legal liability and litigation, 3) privacy concerns, 4) reimbursement, 5) knowledge about telemedicine, and 6) system design and infrastructure. Most of these challenges reflect the problems in moving a system that has previously existed within a face-to-face, geographically centered environment to a virtual setting. Licensing and Legal Concerns

One barrier that confounds telemedicine deployment is the medical licensing system. Each state is free to determine how and under what conditions it will license practitioners. Consequently, no two states’ licensing provisions are the same (Blair, Bambas, & Stone,

23. TELEMEDICINE

521

1998). During telemedicine consultations, it becomes difficult to determine “where” care is practiced within virtual environments. When the patient is located in Wyoming and the physician is located in Ohio, where should the physician be licensed? At the end of the 1990s, care was defined as taking place where the patient is located, so the practicing physician must be licensed in both the state where the patient is located as well as the physician’s home state. Therefore, until a national licensing system is agreed upon, or until a specific provision for telemedicine practice is adopted, the technological capability to cross state lines to provide care is hampered by regulatory concerns. Legal liability within telemedicine contexts creates another area of concern for practitioners and patients (Granade, 1995). To compel a practitioner to answer in court for potential malpractice requires the court to have personal jurisdiction over the health professional (Blair, Bambas, & Stone, 1998). Therefore, if the physician is not in the state where the patient is located, it could be difficult to press charges against that physician. Standards of care regarding telemedicine have also yet to be determined. As the technology continues to develop and change, creating standards of care for telemedicine practice becomes difficult. Privacy

As the walls of the doctor and patient encounter expand across geographic space, the need for medical records to become digitized and transmitted, and the need for more individuals to be involved in the encounter, could compromise the patient’s privacy (Gilbert, 1995). Gilbert (1995) argued that most of the reported cases of unauthorized disclosure or use of patient confidential information describe the actions of persons who had legitimate access to the information but went beyond the scope of their authority. Telemedicine interactions can expand the doctor and patient encounter to include personnel who operate the equipment. Although a physician takes an oath to protect the privacy of her patients, additional personnel in the room may not feel the same obligation to the patients. Additionally, new forms of patient records may not have a means by which they can be classified. For example, some telemedicine programs have decided not to videotape telemedicine encounters because they do not have a system or space for storing the videotape record. This lack of systematic procedures and policies regarding electronic medical records and telemedicine interactions has slowed telemedicine deployment (Gilbert, 1995; Sanders & Bashshur, 1995). Reimbursement

Some argue that reimbursement provides one of the most significant barriers to telemedicine expansion since many telemedicine applications are not reimbursed. The U.S. Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), the federal agency responsible for Medicare and Medicaid, requires a face-to-face consultation for reimbursement (except for image applications like radiology) (Brecht & Barrett, 1998). In 1999, based on a mandate from Congress, HCFA began paying for telemedicine services within a limited context in Health Professional Shortage Areas. Some states (for example California, Oklahoma, and Texas) have legislated the elimination of face-to-face requirements when telemedicine is considered an appropriate alternative. However, those states that have developed reimbursement mechanisms for telemedicine only provide a fee for the consultant and do not make provisions for communication, infrastructure, or other inherent costs (Brecht & Barrett, 1998).

522

TURNER

Costs

Although telemedicine promises to reduce the overall cost of health care, the costs of implementing and supporting a telemedicine program have traditionally been somewhat prohibitive. As discussed earlier in this review, equipment costs were once considered to be prohibitive. Telecommunications transmission costs were also expensive as the bandwidth necessary to accomplish full-motion video could require dedicated phone lines. Additionally, the personnel required to operate and maintain the systems provided additional costs to the overall system. Equipment and transmission costs steadily decreased during the 1990s. In addition, federal grant money was allocated to support the development of telecommunications infrastructure in rural and remote areas to improve access to telemedicine as an option for health care delivery, making telemedicine systems more manageable. Organizational and Interpersonal Concerns

One of the primary challenges to telemedicine expansion involves the need to transform the traditional environment of the doctor and patient encounter to include individuals and organizations at distant locations. This transformation requires the development of a new virtual organization (Turner, 1999; Warisse, 1996). During telemedicine interactions, the entire health encounter is defined by the communication processes taking place. Telemedicine provides an example of a completely virtual organization, where the practice of care takes place within virtual space (Turner, 1999). The development of this new partnership, whether it involves organizations that already work together or new organizational alliances, requires attention to both product and process. The product or the specifics of the telemedicine technology has received much of the focus in the telemedicine literature. However, the processes involved—the organizational goals, strategies, and individual work practices that must change to adopt a new way of accomplishing tasks—become major obstacles to implementation (Tanriverdi & Iacono, 1999; Turner & Peterson, 1998; Warisse, 1996; Whitten, 1995). In addition to the new organizational forms that are created through telemedicine, new relationships must develop between health care practitioners. Activities that a physician may have previously accomplished herself must now be communicated to another health care practitioner to facilitate. Therefore, a trusting relationship between the health care practitioners involved at each site must be forged and facilitated (Warisse, 1996; Whitten, 1995). A physician is trained to perform an examination of her own patient. With telemedicine, a consulting physician must instruct a health care practitioner at a distant site how to examine the patient. Then the physician must trust that the examination was conducted effectively and that the information she receives from the health care practitioner is correct. These relationships take time and attention and if not sustained can hinder the success of a telemedicine program (Warisse, 1996; Whitten, 1995). TELEMEDICINE APPLICATIONS

The primary successful applications of telemedicine have come from prison and military settings. These contexts are not hampered by licensure and reimbursement concerns and therefore provide a more fertile ground for telemedicine use to develop. In addition, the incentives to overcome the costs of transporting patients are high. Within prison settings, transportation of inmate patients for health care requires expensive security measures, in

23. TELEMEDICINE

523

addition to the cost to society should an inmate escape. Allen (1998/1999) notes that 20% of all teleconsultations conducted in the United States take place within a prison setting. Military applications provide another population of individuals quite often isolated from medical care and frequently in need of rapid access to specialty care (see review, Edwards & Motta, 1997). Consultations on the battlefield, training, preventive care, and specialty consultations provide opportunities for telemedicine to overcome the distance obstacles to health care delivery. In a 1997 survey of teleconsultations, the most common types of teleconsultation included mental health (most common), emergency room, cardiology, dermatology, and surgery (Grigsby & Allen, 1997). Mental health uses rank as the primary specialty using telemedicine because they are less technology-intensive, do not require peripheral devices (for example, electronic stethoscope or dermascope), and can be accomplished effectively using low bandwidths (128 Kbps) (Grigsby & Allen, 1997). In fact, telepsychiatry ranks among the first uses of two-way audiovisual telecommunications in health care. A twoway closed-circuit microwave television system established in 1959 between the Nebraska Psychiatric Institute and Norfolk State Hospital in Nebraska proved effective at providing consultations, education, training, and research (Wittson & Benschoter, 1972). Although the resurgence of telemedicine during the 1990s centered primarily within academic medical centers with rural communities and providers playing a secondary role, later developments expanded telemedicine’s scope to a variety of institutions from federal agencies like the Department of Veterans Administration to statewide networks and long-term care facilities (Grigsby, 1997). Some private corporations and investor groups have also turned to telemedicine as a means to develop referring relationships with rural markets. With a few exceptions, managed care organizations have been slow to start telemedicine projects of their own. However, closed health care systems like HMOs, the Veteran’s Administration, prisons, and the military offer the greatest opportunity for a return on investment by providing efficient use of a fully capitated environment (Grigsby, 1997). THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

Most of the research determining telemedicine’s effectiveness has focused on clinical outcomes within various specialties. A systematic literature review of studies assessing the clinical effectiveness of “distance medicine” via computer technology or the telephone revealed that distant medicine technologies provided improved performance, positive outcomes, or significant benefits (Balas et al., 1997). Similarly, reviews of telemedicine via videoconferencing technology across a variety of specialties reveal positive clinical outcomes (see reviews of telemedicine use in dermatology, primary care, psychiatry, and oncology in Bashshur, Sanders, & Shannon, 1997). Little research has explored the communicative implications of telemedicine. However, with the changing context provided by the mediated virtual space, implications for communication research on an organizational and interpersonal dimension within this growing field are dramatic. As Fig. 23.2 indicates, a new virtual organization is created where health care is practiced. Depending on the relationships of the organizations and individuals involved, specialists may have dual allegiances to the telemedicine organization, the rural clinic, and the hospital where their practice is located. Telemedicine creates changes within the doctor and patient relationship, the provider-to-provider relationship, and the inter- and intraorganizational relationships among health care institutions as the space for interaction moves from a physical face-to-face to a mediated context.

524

TURNER Patient

Hospital Specialist

Primary Care Provider

Telemedicine Virtual Organization Clinic

Indicates traditional organizational and interpersonal alliances

Indicates telemedicine organizational and interpersonal alliances Figure 23.2 Telemedicine relationships: In a simple telemedicine network comprised of one hospital and one clinic, the practitioners involved must maintain multiple alliances.

Doctor and Patient Relationship

Teleconsultations remove the examining physician from the patient’s location. Touch must be replaced by directives and collaborative decision making between the health care practitioners and patients involved. Cukor et al. (1998) found in their study of telepyschiatry that clinical information exchange occurs primarily on audio channels. The role of the video channel was to provide nonverbal cues and create a social presence. The researchers argued that since the primary role was to provide social presence rather than information exchange or to make the task accomplishment easier, the need for a visual channel was limited. For communication scholars, the social presence provided by face-to-face interaction is more than a luxury. It provides a distinctive element to a communication encounter. The communication channel plays an important role in relational and information exchange (Cegala, McGee, & McNeilis, 1996). Therefore, the new context provided by the telemedicine encounter may have a significant impact (positive or negative) on the doctor and patient’s ability to communicate. Much of the research assessing perceptions of the role of telemedicine and its influence on the doctor and patient encounter stem from studies of provider and patient satisfaction. Assessment of patient and provider satisfaction is regularly conducted among telemedicine programs, but less than a dozen studies specific to patient satisfaction had been published by the end of the 1990s (see review, Gutske, Balch, West, & Rogers, 2000). Most of these studies had small sample sizes and focused on a specific specialty, with overall patient satisfaction ranging from 71%–100% (Gutske, Balch, West, & Rogers, 2000). Gutske et al. (2000) also found high satisfaction levels (98.35), noting that telemedicine satisfaction studies tend to report higher levels of satisfaction than even traditional doctor and patient

23. TELEMEDICINE

525

satisfaction studies. They attribute this to the characteristics surrounding telemedicine interactions, including less waiting time, less travel time, and ease in arranging appointments. One patient satisfaction study within a prison setting explored patient perceptions of telemedicine across informational and relational dimensions (Mekhjian, Turner, Gailiun, & McCain, 1999). This study found that patients were satisfied with both dimensions of the exchange, although most satisfied with the informational dimension. Researchers found no significant difference across specialties, suggesting that the characteristics of the specialist rather than that of a specific specialty contributed to patient satisfaction. Similarly, Allen and Hayes (1994) found that ease of access and the physician’s communication style were important contributors to patient satisfaction with telemedicine encounters. Most perceptions of telemedicine as compared to a traditional doctor and patient consultation focus on a comparison of a face-to-face context with a mediated context. The ability of the video image to replace a face-to-face encounter is stressed. However, some studies have found that a telemedicine encounter creates a completely new context for doctor and patient interaction, providing patients with new ways of taking part. Holtan (1998) found that telemedicine consultations provided a different symbolic structure than traditional consultations. In her study, Holtan found that patients noted the lack of scenery reinforcing the medical establishment and the power of the specialist. The encounter took place in a context devoid of these symbols (for example, long waiting time, medical instruments, medical personnel rushing about), providing a more open environment for interaction to take place. Another study suggested that patients did not adopt an active role within teleconsultations. This study of 26 teleconsultations explored the verbal content of participants to identify patterns of talk that could affect quality of care, the specialist-primary care provider relationship, and future utilization (Street, Wheeler, & McCaughan, 2000). Specifically, they were concerned with the roles of the three participants, the specialist, primary care provider, and patient and the extent to which each contributed to the interaction. Researchers found that the specialist was the most dominant communicator, with patients playing the least active role and receiving the least amount of information. Most of the conversation occurred between the specialist and primary care provider (Street et al., 2000). Although patients may not take as active of a role when additional medical personnel are consulting, they may be comforted through their involvement in the interaction. Callahan, Hilty, and Nesbitt (1998) found that patients perceived that the simultaneous involvement of a primary care provider and a specialist (in this case mental health) provided additional comfort and confidence in the encounter. The additional personnel helped to confirm the diagnoses and provided additional consistency to the encounter. Patients also appreciated the direct interaction between their primary care provider and specialist, thus keeping all interested parties in the same information loop. Turner (2000) in a study of dialysis patients’ perceptions of telemedicine encounters found that during times of low uncertainty (blood pressure and fluid check) or high uncertainty (emergency problem with their access site), telemedicine was a helpful substitute for a traditional consult. During the low uncertainty time, patients didn’t really need a physician and during the high uncertainty time they would accept whatever access to a physician was available. However, during periods of moderate uncertainty (need for a medication change or change in dialysis prescription), patients preferred face-to-face, traditional consultations. These findings corresponded with media richness theory (Daft & Lengel, 1986), suggesting that the richer social presence of an in-person consultation

526

TURNER

helped to alleviate the ambiguity created by the conditions of the illness (Turner et al., in press). Turner et al.’s (in press) research begins to underline the importance of a patientcentered approach to telemedicine assessments. Satisfaction with telemedicine may depend less on the technology and more on the diagnosis given during the teleconsultation. The technology itself can also influence the doctor and patient interaction. Manning, Goetz, and Street (2000) studied the influence of the telecommunication signal delay on the interpersonal coordination of the doctor and patient conversation during quasipsychotherapy sessions (stress evaluations) and client-perceived rapport. Telecommunication signal delay is caused by the digitization and transmission of the signal and can vary based on the equipment and infrastructure used. When the speaker at one location finishes her message, there is a slight delay before the receiver at the distant location receives the message. The researchers found that the delay did not influence the development of rapport when considering males and females together. However, when females were considered separately, researchers found that rapport actually increased during the videoconferencing condition as compared to the face-to-face condition. The researchers hypothesized that the increase in rapport may have had less to do with signal delay and more to do with distance. Female patients may have felt more comfortable with the male counselor when there was some distance between them, rather than when the patient and counselor were in the same room (Manning, Goetz, & Street, 2000). Changes in Health Care Practitioner Roles

Research regarding health care practitioner use and acceptance of telemedicine indicates that perceived usefulness is critical. Data gathered from more than 400 physicians practicing in public tertiary hospitals in Hong Kong found that perceived usefulness and attitude toward the technology were the strongest predictors of intention to use telemedicine. Ease of use was not found to be a significant predictor (Hu, Chau, Liu Sheng, & Tam, 1999). Telemedicine creates a new environment for interaction among health care practitioners. This interaction can take place between specialists and general practitioners, nurses and physicians, or groups of specialists. Consultations among providers are not new to medicine. However, consultations within the presence of the patient provide a new twist to the encounter. During consultations involving a general practitioner and patient at one location with a specialist at a remote location, research has found that the exchange provided educational opportunities for all parties involved (Whitten, 1995). In the context of a traditional encounter, a patient might visit her general practitioner, be referred to a specialist, travel to see the specialist, and then return with the results to the general practitioner. During real-time telemedicine consultations, the specialist, general practitioner, and patient are in the room at the same time—each informing the other. Warisse (1996) found that telemedicine decreased the number of referrals within some specialties as the general practitioner became educated on certain diagnoses. The nurse may develop an expanded role within telemedicine interactions as well. Turner (2000) found that nurses within the dialysis unit enjoyed telemedicine encounters because they were given more control of the session. During traditional sessions, the nurse was delegated to following the doctor from bed to bed, taking notes. However, during telemedicine sessions, where the nurse remained at the bedside with the patient and the physician consulted from a remote office, nurses reported that they were given the increased responsibility of becoming the hands of the doctor. (Obviously, this added responsibility also gives rise to the opportunity for malpractice litigations.) The nurses provided the in-person medical observation to the physician. When a physical exam was

23. TELEMEDICINE

527

necessary, the nurse had to complete it. The caregivers’ generation of a trusting relationship between one another and a collaborative work environment was critical to telemedicine’s success. Changes in Organizational Relationships

Research into the changing organizational relationships involved with telemedicine has determined that the development of a telemedicine consultation requires both the interpersonal exchange between the doctor and the patient or provider and provider, as well as an organizational commitment on the part of the organizations involved. Administratively, investment in the equipment, telecommunications infrastructure, and additional personnel is required before teleconsultations can take place (Warisse, 1996; Whitten & Allen, 1995). Partnerships between information technology personnel, health care practitioners, and administrators are necessary so that teleconsultations can meet both efficiency needs and clinical needs (Tanriverdi & Iacono, 1999). Telemedicine also calls for the development of new relationships between organizations. Warisse (1996) conducted a longitudinal case study over a 20-month period of 3 health care organizations implementing a telemedicine program. Warisse (1996) suggested that effective implementation of telemedicine systems required attention to technological, organizational, and interpersonal dimensions of the virtual space created. Specifically, organizations and individuals needed to develop telecompetence, recognizing that effective communication within this new virtual space required new processes and practices (Warisse, 1996). Telecompetence requires the attention to a three-staged process of 1) planning and establishing, 2) learning and use, and 3) formalizing routines (Turner, 1999). In a case study of organizational members’ perceptions of telemedicine, researchers found that telemedicine is multifaceted (Whitten, Sypher, & Patterson, 2000). The study found that members define telemedicine as more than just technology. Organizational members’ talk revealed that they viewed telemedicine as access, an economic tool, education, technology, and a grant activity. These themes emerged from both the central site (hub), as well as the rural sites (spokes), suggesting that telemedicine is perceived as more than just technology, but instead as a process of care. Another study of the organizational impacts of telemedicine on medical care practice focused on the impact of teleradiology on changing the social organization of radiological work (Barley, 1986). Barley (1986) studied the implementation of CT scanners within radiology departments of two academic medical centers. He found that adoption and implementation of identical technology systems within the two settings created similar structuring processes but led to two divergent forms of organization. Barley’s (1986) research shows how the study of telemedicine can provide the opportunity to explore technology use as a source of structure within organizations. FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES FOR COMMUNICATION SCHOLARS OF TELEMEDICINE

As telemedicine applications develop, so do opportunities for communication research. The late 1990s saw telemedicine expanding from interactive videoconferencing applications to Web-based initiatives. As the costs of interactive television decreased with the creation of the CODEC and the improvement of telecommunications infrastructures, expensive room-based videoconferencing systems have been replaced with desktop and Web-based versions. The development and increased use of the Internet expanded the use

528

TURNER

of telemedicine in real time, moving from interactive videoconferencing applications to Web-based applications. Demand for Web-based health care services have surged (Anderson, 1999). A study by one electronic customer relations’ manager provider, Cyber Dialogue Health Practice, New York, predicts 88.5 million adults will use the Internet to find health information and communicate with health providers by 2005 (Cyber Dialogue, 2002). Many of these sites explicitly state that they provide information but will not diagnose or prescribe medication, which does not fit the true definition of telemedicine. Although these Web sites stretch the current definition of telemedicine from the direct provision of patient care to provision of medical information, it is important to consider Web applications as they constitute a future direction for telemedicine growth. Most of these medical Web sites advertise and promote access to health care practitioners where consumers can send an e-mail to the site for advice about a condition. These Web sites are supported by a range of sponsors that can include pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, medical schools, insurance companies, and physician practices. Some sites also offer searchable databases, an online pharmacy, and online stores for health products. Online advice can be offered asynchronously, where a consumer sends an e-mail and waits for a response, or synchronously in real-time chats. For example, AmericasDoctor Web Services provides information to consumers in response to health information inquiries. The site (AmericasDoctor.com) boasts that “it is the only medical/health Internet site to offer private, real-time, one-on-one chats with board-certified, board-eligible physicians 24 hours a day, seven days a week at no cost to the consumer” (AmericasDoctor.com, 2000). Brown (1999) reported that at its busiest time, as many as 20 physicians at two call centers can be answering “guest” questions. The AmericasDoctor Web site specifically refers to Web callers as “guests” and not patients and argues that the site does not provide an online medical practice and suggests that the information consumers retrieve from sites is similar to the information that might be received at a cocktail party or a library (Brown, 1999). Regulations regarding medical licensing prevent most sites from positioning themselves as offering a doctor and patient encounter. Although these Web advice sites characterize themselves as providing medical information, rather than a doctor and patient relationship, many consumers may perceive the interaction differently. Home care has become another growing telemedicine application. An aging population and efforts to avoid expensive hospitalization are leading to more complex care being delivered in the home. Telecommunications capabilities that allow patients to connect to their health care providers from home have energized the home care market. One study from home health agencies in Massachusetts, Chicago, and Kansas City reviewed 900 charts to assess the activities performed by visiting nurses during home health visits. Goldberg (1997) noted that on-site home nursing is highly inefficient because the average visiting nurse can only see five patients a day with much of the day devoted to travel time. The analysis revealed that over half of the activities could be accomplished remotely via telecommunications technologies at less than half the cost of an on-site nursing visit (Goldberg, 1997). Telemedicine has also been successful in managing chronic diseases for patients while in their home setting. One study explored use of telemedicine as a means of monitoring diabetes patients (Mun & Turner, 1999). Patients used a blood glucose monitor to transmit information regarding their condition to their physician. The study found that the consistent transmission of information helped the physician to educate the patients on their condition

23. TELEMEDICINE

529

and increased the average in range glucose readings from 34% to 51% (Mun & Turner, 1999). The opportunity for telemedicine to expand within the managed care environment is promising. Telemedicine using nonphysician providers at the patient location linked electronically with physicians permits the distribution of specialty and subspecialty service that is available at central sites to be expanded throughout an entire network. Telemedicine multispecialty clinics could provide services across a large geographic area in a potentially efficient and cost-effective manner. However, the opportunity and future of telemedicine requires attention to the communicative implications of expanding the walls of the doctor and patient encounter into virtual space. Future research from health communication scholars can inform this discussion. CHALLENGES OFFERED BY RESEARCH METHODS

The telemedicine research literature at the end of the 1990s is plagued by small sample sizes, evolving technological infrastructures, and confusing definitions. The costs involved in developing a telecommunications infrastructure to technologically provide the potential for telemedicine consultations coupled with the organizational, political, and interpersonal barriers to telemedicine adoption have resulted in low use. Telemedicine programs with larger sample sizes have primarily been limited to prison populations. Specialty-specific telemedicine applications have also been plagued by low sample size. Similarly, studies are prevented from random assignment to telemedicine conditions because the viability of telemedicine within certain specialties is still being researched. As technologies expand and develop, the mediated space within which teleconsultations take place is changing. Improved telecommunications infrastructures with lower costs and refinements in equipment are making problems faced in teleconsultations during the early 1990s obsolete. However, as discussed previously in this chapter, the disparate technological approaches and inconsistent adherence to or general absence of technological standards creates replicability challenges. Finally, suggesting that telemedicine is effective or ineffective, or that telemedicine has negative or positive communicative implications, requires a more specific definition of the mediated environment involved. Telemedicine using interactive videoconferencing technology creates a different environment than telemedicine in an asynchronous, store-and-forward environment. Similarly, provider-to-patient telemedicine creates a different context than provider-to-provider telemedicine. Defining the characteristics of the mediated space is critical to understanding and generalizing research implications. The grid provided in Fig. 23.1 describes the various dimensions of telemedicine that should be considered when generalizing results from telemedicine studies. Although sample size has made some research problematic, the opportunity for studies employing qualitative methodologies over time within telemedicine settings can help to set the agenda for communication research. For example, case studies can provide close examination of the communicative phenomenon of interest providing “thick description” to help researchers better understand this emerging environment (Yin, 1984; Eisenhardt, 1989). Longitudinal studies can illustrate how communication within these mediated settings can evolve over time as the technology takes a background position to exploring the organizational and interpersonal processes that develop (Warisse, 1996). Barley (1990) offered an excellent research design for pursuing a qualitative study in a systematic and explicit manner. In Barley’s study of the implementation of CT scanners within radiology departments of two academic medical centers, he described the use of

530

TURNER

synchronic, diachronic, and parallel analysis. Synchronic analysis allowed Barley to study changes in the technology from one condition to another. Diachronic analysis provided the opportunity to contrast earlier and later periods of a single technology’s use. Parallel analysis allowed Barley to follow these processes within two hospital settings (Barley, 1990). Finally, the technology that provides the opportunity for telemedicine to take place can also serve as a means of documenting the encounter for research to take place. Specifically, telemedicine encounters can be videotaped for later viewing and coding purposes. These tapes can provide the data for analyzing interactions between health care practitioner collaborators as well as health care practitioners and their patients. QUESTIONS FOR COMMUNICATION SCHOLARS

The majority of the research exploring telemedicine has focused on the ability of the technology to transfer information across distances. The changing role of the communicative context among telemedicine participants has been largely neglected by most health care communication scholars. As such, telemedicine contexts provide a ripe area of research for exploring the influence of these new mediated environments within health care settings. Previous researchers have argued that the use of technology by organizations is social. As technologies enter established contexts, their features are transformed through social patterns of behavior, which in turn transform the patterns of behavior as well (Barley, 1986; DeSanctis & Monge, 1999; DeSanctis & Poole, 1994; Koza & Lewin, 1998). As Koza and Lewin (1998) argued, technology, organizational structure, and communication patterns are tightly coupled. This coupling suggests that communication systems and organizational form coevolve. Therefore, understanding how new communication technology systems like telemedicine are implemented to create virtual organizations requires a study of all three: the technology, the organizational context, and the interpersonal dynamics existing within the social environment. Doctor and Patient Interactions

Telemedicine separates the dyad in space and time, creating a unique opportunity to study how technology mediates the encounter. Media researchers have explored the use of telecommunications technologies within business and interpersonal settings. However, health care offers a unique context for studying the implications of these findings within a health care context. For example, media richness theory suggests that managers choose a medium to match the equivocality of the message (Daft & Lengel, 1986). Turner (2000) found that patients preferred richer media (face-to-face) when faced with equivocal health care situations. Should physicians choose a media based on their own need for equivocality reduction or the needs of the patient? These findings also have interesting implications for the role of patient as consumer. The ability of the technology to transmit both informational and relational dimensions provides another interesting area for research. The lack of social presence and touch during telemedicine consultations may remove some of the cues necessary for communicating empathy and relational support. This removal of the social presence of the physician may reinforce a negative stereotype of the roles of nurse as caring and physician as curing. However, telemedicine can also create a new context for examining communication, providing an additional focus to the communication exchange on the part of the physician and the patient. One physician noted that telemedicine sessions, because of the transmission delay, helped him to realize how often he interrupted his patients (Warisse, 1996).

23. TELEMEDICINE

531

This realization caused him to monitor his communication behavior more closely during traditional encounters. Much of the focus of telemedicine has been on the mediated space where the telemedicine consult takes place. As telemedicine separates the health care provider from the patient, future research could explore the influence of the context where the patient and provider participate. Specifically, if patients participate in a teleconsultation from home, are they more comfortable in discussing their concerns with their doctor than if they participated in a teleconsultation from an office location? Additionally, will a patient’s comfort level in interacting with a specialist increase if he or she experiences a telemedicine consultation in the presence of his or her primary care provider? Health care provider characteristics may also serve to provide an interesting research area as they relate to media use. Some health care providers may be more effective communicating with their patients during teleconsultations than they are in a face-to-face, in-the-same room encounter. Others may prefer e-mail interactions. As health care provision moves toward these new mediated environments, health care practitioners’ abilities to navigate within these environments will be important to understand. Telemedicine applications offer interesting contexts for studying compliance with health care instructions. The use of telemedicine technology to manage chronic diseases has suggested that increased involvement of the physician in the patient’s everyday monitoring may lead to better outcomes (Mun & Turner, 1999). Use of simple technologies like e-mail as a means of follow-up or reminders may improve patient compliance with instructions. Most of the research exploring telemedicine has focused on its ability to replace the doctor and patient exchange. These are primarily one-shot studies within a specific specialty and disease condition. Longitudinal studies of how telemedicine interactions may detract from the doctor and patient relationship are needed. The removal of the patient from the health care provider’s immediate context may lead to a less personal relationship and increase the likelihood that the patient be viewed as a specific disease condition rather than a patient with a specific condition. Additionally, the opportunity for the physician to use technology to contact the patient may deter him or her from meeting the patient face to face. The distance technologies could contribute to a distancing effect between the physician and the patient. Both positive and negative impacts of telemedicine on the doctor and patient relationship need to be explored. Health Care Provider-to-Provider Relationships

Telemedicine offers an interesting context for studying new relationships between health care providers. The need for the development of trust within virtual teams has been the subject of research within organizational settings (Jarvenpaa, Knoll, & Leidner, 1998) but not the health care setting. Telemedicine provides a dynamic environment for studying trust because a consultant at one location must trust a health care provider at another location to perform tasks normally performed by the consultant (Turner, 1999). Similarly, the consultant’s diagnosis is limited by the communicative competence of the health care provider at the patient’s location. Telemedicine can also create a dynamic new environment for the health care practitioner. Specifically, most health care practitioners can diagnose a patient in the privacy of their own office. During some telemedicine applications (for example, real-time, videoconferencing interactions), the specialist may diagnose the patient in the presence of a primary care physician that he or she does not know. In a field where most health care

532

TURNER

practitioners provide care in a private setting, this exposure of their treatment procedures may be uncomfortable to providers. Research into the dynamic created by practicing “in public” may reveal interesting insights into the power relationships that may exist between consulting specialists and primary care providers. Intra- and Interorganizational Relationships

Telemedicine creates new organizational forms, providing interesting opportunities for researching communication within and between health care organizations. Health care administrators and practitioners must work together in developing viable telemedicine systems. Exploring the incentives necessary for establishing and maintaining these relationships can contribute to our understanding of communication within virtual organizations. Policy Implications

Telemedicine focuses the attention of health care on efficiency and access, enabling practitioners to reach more patients in an easier, quicker way. Health care communication scholars can play an important role in this dialogue in investigating whether the efficiencies of care compromise the communication exchange. CONCLUSION

Telemedicine creates a new and dynamic environment for health care communication scholars to explore. Unlike a traditional health care encounter existing within a physical space, a telemedicine encounter is created and exists through the communication interaction that takes place. The very practice of telemedicine makes the communication between health care providers and their patients problematic. This focus alone makes telemedicine an important area for health care communication research. REFERENCES Allen, A. (1998/1999). Telemedicine—a Global perspective. European Telemedicine, 13–15. Allen, A., & Grigsby, B. (1998). Fifth annual program survey: Part 2–Consultation activity in 35 specialties. Telemedicine Today, 6(5), 18–19. Allen, A., & Hayes, J. (1994). Patient satisfaction with telemedicine in a rural clinic. American Journal of Public Health, 84, 1993. AmericasDoctor.com. (2000, August). [Online]. Available: http://www.AmericasDoctor.com. Anderson, J. (1999). The business of cyberhealth care. MDComputing, 16(6), 23–25. Baer, L., Cukor, P., Jenike, M., Leahy, L., O’Laughlen, J., & Coyle, J. T. (1995). Pilot studies of telemedicine for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152, 1383–1385. Balas, E. A., Jaffrey, F., Kuperman, G., Boren, S., Brown, G., Pinciroli, F., & Mitchell, J. (1997). Electronic communication with patients: Evaluation of distance medicine technology. Journal of the American Medical Association, 278, 152–159. Barley, S. (1986). Technology as an occasion for structuring: Evidence from observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, 78–108. Barley, S. (1990). Images of imaging. Organization Science, 1(3), 220–247.

23. TELEMEDICINE

533

Bashshur, R. (1995a). Health policy and telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal, 1(1), 81–83. Bashshur, R. (1995b). On the definition and evaluation of telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal, 1(1), 19–30. Bashshur, R. (1997). Telemedicine and the health care system. In R. Bashshur, J. Sanders, & G. Shannon (Eds.), Telemedicine: Theory and practice (pp. 5–36). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Bashshur, R., Sanders, J., & Shannon, G. (Eds.). (1997). Telemedicine: Theory and practice. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Blair, P., Bambas, A., & Stone, H. (1998). Legal and ethical issues. In S. Viegas & K. Dunn (Eds.), Telemedicine: Practicing in the information age (pp. 49–59). New York: LippincottRaven. Bordia, P. (1997). Face-to-face versus computer-mediated communication: A synthesis of the experimental literature. The Journal of Business Communication, 34(1), 99–120. Brecht, R., & Barrett, J. (1998). Telemedicine in the United States. In S. Viegas and K. Dunn (Eds.), Telemedicine: Practicing in the information age (pp. 25–40). New York: LippincottRaven. Brown, D. (1999, August 22). Log on and say ‘Ahhh.’ The Washington Post. pp. A1, A10. Callahan, E., Hilty, D., & Nesbitt, T. (1998). Patient satisfaction with telemedicine consultation in primary care: Comparison of ratings of medical and mental health applications. Telemedicine Journal, 4, 363–369. Cegala, D., McGee, D., & McNeilis, K. (1996). Components of patients and doctors perceptions of communication competence during a primary care interview. Health Communication, 8, 1–27. Chen, W., Turner, J., & Crawford, C. (1996). The process of elimination: Video compression in telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal, 2(1), 37–41. Cukor, P., Baer, L., Wilis, B. S., Leahy, L., O’Laughlen, J., Murphy, M., Withers, M., & Martin, E. (1998). Use of videophones and low-cost standard telephone lines to provide a social presence in telepsychiatry. Telemedicine Journal, 4(4), 313–321. Cyber Dialogue (2002). Survey information is available online: www.cyberdialogue.com, now known as Fulcrum Analytics. Daft, R., & Lengel, R. (1986). Organizational information requirements, media richness, and structural design. Management Science, 32(5), 554–571. Debakey, M. (1995). Telemedicine has now come of age. Telemedicine Journal, 1(1), 19–30. DeSanctis, G., & Monge, P. (1999). Introduction to the special issue: Communication processes for virtual organizations. Organization Science, 10(9), 693–703. DeSanctis, G., & Poole, M. S. (1994). Capturing the complexity in advanced technology use: Adaptive structuration theory. Organization Science, 5(2), 121–147. Edwards, J., & Motta, C. (1997). Telemedicine and the military. Telemedicine: Theory and Practice (pp. 327–351), Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Eisenhardt, K. (1989). Building theories from case study research. Academy of Management Review, 14, 532–550. Elford, R., & Battcock, A. (1997). The fourth annual telemedicine program survey, Part 1: Canada. Telemedicine Today, 5(3), 32–37. Gilbert, F. (1995). How to minimize the risk of disclosure of patient information used in telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal, 1(2), 91–94. Goldberg, A. (1997). Telehome health care on call: Trends leading to the return of the housecall. Telemedicine Today, 5(4), 14–15. Granade, P. (1995). Malpractice issues in the practice of telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal, 1(2), 87–89.

534

TURNER

Grigsby, J. (1997). Telemedicine in the United States. In R. Bashshur, J. Sanders, & G. Shannon (Eds.), Telemedicine: Theory and Practice (pp. 291–325). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Grigsby, B., & Allen, A. (1997, August). Fourth annual telemedicine program review. Telemedicine Today, 30–38, 42. Grigsby, J., Sandberg, E., Kaehny, M., Kramer, A., Schlenker, R., & Shaughnessy, P. (1994). Telemedicine case studies and current status of telemedicine. Denver, CO: Center for Health Policy Research. Gutske, S., Balch, D., West, V., & Rogers, L. (2000). Patient satisfaction with Telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal, 6(1), 5–13. Holtan, A. (1998). Patient reactions to specialist telemedicine consultations—A sociological approach. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 4, 206–213. Hu, P., Chau, P., Liu Sheng, O., & Tam, K. (1999). Examining the technology acceptance model using physician acceptance of telemedicine technology. Journal of Management Information Systems, 16(2), 91–112. Jarvenpaa, S., Knoll, K., & Leidner, D. (1998). Is anybody out there? Antecedents of trust in global virtual teams. Journal of Management Information Systems, 14(4), 29–64. Koza, M. P., & Lewin, A. Y. (1998). The co-evolution of strategic alliances. Organization Science, 9(4), 255–264. Lovett, J., & Bashshur, R. (1979). Telemedicine in the USA. Telecommunications Policy, 3(1) 3–14. Manning, T., Goetz, E., & Street, R. (2000). Signal delay effects on rapport in telepsychiatry. Cyberpyschology and Behavior, 3(2), 119–127. Mekhjian, H., Turner, J. W., Gailiun, M., & McCain, T. (1999). Patient satisfaction with telemedicine in a prison environment: A matter of context. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 5, 55–61. Mekhjian, H., Warisse, J., Gailiun, M., & McCain, T. (1996). The Ohio telemedicine system for prison inmates. Telemedicine Journal, 2(1), 17–24. Mun, S. K., & Turner, J. W. (1999). Telemedicine: Emerging e-medicine. Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering, 1, 589–610. Perednia, D., & Allen, A. (1995). Telemedicine technology and clinical applications. Journal of the American Medical Association, 273(6), 483–488. Perednia, D., & Grigsby, J. (1998). Telephones, telemedicine, and a technologically neutral coverage policy. Telemedicine Journal, 4(2), 145–152. Sanders, J., & Bashshur, R. (1995). Perspective: Challenges to the implementation of telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal, 1, 115–123. Street, R. L., Wheeler, J., & McCaughan, W. (2000). Specialist-primary care provider-patient communication in telemedical consultations. Telemedicine Journal, 6(1), 45–54. Tanriverdi, H., & Iacono, S. (1999). Diffusion of telemedicine: A knowledge barrier perspective. Telemedicine Journal, 5(3), 223–243. Turner, J. W. (1999, August). Becoming virtual: Creating a virtual organization within a telemedicine network. Paper presented at the annual Academy of Management conference, Chicago, Ill. Turner, J. W. (2000, August). Communicative implications of telemedicine on the doctor and patient encounter. Paper presented at the Academy of Management annual conference, Toronto, Canada. Turner, J. W., & Peterson, C. (1998). Organizational telecompetence: Creating the virtual organization. In S. Viegas & K. Dunn (Eds.), Telemedicine: Practicing in the information age (pp. 41–48). New York: Lippincott-Raven.

23. TELEMEDICINE

535

Turner, J. W., Thomas, R., & Gailiun, M. (2001). Consumer response to virtual service organizations: The case of telemedicine. International Journal of Medical Marketing, 1(4), 309–318. Turner, J. W., Robinson, J. D., Alaoui, A., Winchester, J., Neustadtl, A., Levine, B., Collmann, J., & Mun, S. K. (in press). Media attitudes vs. media use: Understanding the contribution of context to the communication environment of telemedicine interactions. Health Care Management Review. Warisse, J. (1996). Communicative implications of implementing telemedicine technology: A framework of telecompetence (Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 1996). (University Microfilms No. 9710670). Weissert, W., & Silberman, S. (1996). Health care on the information highway: The politics of telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal, 2(1), 1–15. Whitten, P. (1995). Defining a structure for delivery of telemedical services. The Journal of the HealthCare Information and Management Systems Society, 9(3), 23–33. Whitten, P., & Allen, A. (1995). Analysis of telemedicine from an organizational perspective. Telemedicine Journal, 1, 203–213. Whitten, P., & Allen, A. (1996). Organizational structure in telemedicine programs. Telemedicine Today, 4, 28–29. Whitten, P., Sypher, B. D., & Patterson, J. D. (2000). Transcending the technology of telemedicine: An analysis of telemedicine in North Carolina. Health Communication, 12(2), 109–135. Wittson C. L., & Benschoter, R. (1972). Two-way television: Helping the medical center reach out. American Journal of Psychiatry, 129, 624–627. Wooton, R. (1998/1999). Telemedicine: An introduction. European Telemedicine, 10–12. Yin, R. K. (1984). Case study research. London: Sage.

24 Health as Profit: Public Relations in Health Communication Jeffrey K. Springston University of Georgia

Ruth Ann Weaver Lariscy

Public relations is a powerful force in society and an essential component of our economy. This is particularly evident in the $400,000 billion plus health care industry where most medical services—from physician care to hospital stays, to pharmaceutical sales and health insurance—function in a highly competitive environment. In the wide breadth of forprofit health organizations—HMOs, hospitals, nursing homes, pharmaceutical companies, medical clinics, and health-science research centers to name a few—strong need exists for the broadly based, issues-oriented public relations strategic function. While public relations is vital to both for-profit and not-for-profit health care organizations, this chapter focuses on the role of advocacy messages and campaigns in the for-profit sector of health communication. DEFINING AND DISTINGUISHING

Before examining the role of for-profit health care public relations, it is important to first clarify terms. Much understandable confusion exists regarding how public relations, marketing, and advertising are similar and how they differ. These terms are often referred to synonymously, and indeed there are many situations in which they overlap, especially in the for-profit sector. However, there are important fundamental differences between the three functions. Under ideal circumstances, both public relations and marketing are part of an organization’s strategic management. Both functions deal with messages and media, public opinion, and segmentation of audiences or “publics.” A primary distinction between marketing and public relations, however, is in how publics come to exist. In marketing, publics are typically targeted and sought in order to achieve the goal of selling the organization’s

537

538

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

products, services, or point of view. In public relations, creation of a public is issue driven; publics often come into existence whether an organization wants them to or not. Public relations scholars generally view the population as a collection of individuals whose inclusion in a particular public is driven by a common interest, need, or concern (e.g., Seitel, 1993; Wilcox, Ault, Agee, & Cameron, 2000). There are certainly instances and environments, notably the for-profit sector, where public relations and marketing functions are highly complementary. Given marketing’s focus on selling the organization, it is clearly associated with customer service, product development, distribution, packaging, pricing, and retailing. Effective public relations, in part, allows the marketing function to accomplish its objectives by providing an environment that is free of conflict, discord, and antagonism. Public relations focuses on developing productive relationships with a wide variety of groups including the community, elected officials, government regulators, employees, investors, and the media. It is important to note that these groups may be, but most often are not, consumers who would be targets for the organization’s marketing objectives. Rather, public relations manages relationships with important groups (publics) who have the ability to impact the organization through public opinion often ultimately resulting in regulation. A second important distinction between the two functions is philosophical. Hutton (2001) noted that there is a different mind-set between the two functions. The marketing mind-set tends to be more aggressive, competitive, hyperbolic, and focused on selling. The public relations mind-set tends to be more conciliatory and concerned with fostering mutual understanding and cordial relations with important publics (audiences). Philosophically, the public relations mind-set seeks to not only adjust public attitudes and behavior to the benefit of the organization, but also to facilitate change in the organization to benefit the public. The exception to this conciliatory posture is when an organization is under what it considers unwarranted attacks by an outside group(s). Not all groups are interested in negotiating a mutually beneficial position. In such cases, an organization’s public relations efforts will aggressively fight for its position. Whereas these are important differences between public relations and marketing, the two functions share many of the same tools, which contributes to the confusion surrounding their functions. For example, the campaign steps are essentially the same. They include:

r r r r r r

Researching the situation to determine opportunities or threats Analyzing and segmenting publics Establishing campaign goals and objectives Developing message strategies and tactics Selecting channels of communication Implementing, maintaining, and evaluating the campaign

Another specific tool used by both marketing and public relations is advertising. Advertising is the purchase of media space or time to promote a product, service, or viewpoint. Unlike publicity, which refers to third-party media coverage such as news stories about a company and its products or services, advertising content and presentation are directly controlled by the sponsoring organization. Whereas marketing is more likely to use advertising to achieve its goals, and public relations is more likely to seek publicity to achieve its aims, this is not always the case. For example, when a pharmaceutical company uses advertising to promote the sales of a particular drug, it is clearly a marketing effort. On

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

539

the other hand, when that same company produces advertising that touts its philanthropic efforts in a community, it is a public relations effort. In order to maximize benefit, marketing, public relations, and advertising need to work in concert with one another. As Heath (1994) and others pointed out, an organization needs to speak with one “voice.” This chapter focuses on public relations theory and practice rather than marketing, though areas where the two should integrate are addressed. USES OF PUBLIC RELATIONS IN HEALTH COMMUNICATION

Health issues and the financial burden of health care remain of paramount interest and importance to an exceedingly high percentage of Americans. Compared to many other issues, including elections of public officials, health overshadows even those that may receive more time and attention from media news and information reports. As a result of this heightened interest, for-profit health organizations have considerable stake in the manner health issues are presented and discussed. Public relations is at the center of this critically important presentation and discussion of health issues via the media. Some public relations practices have an established place in health organizations, most notably hospitals. Brochures, newsletters and health fairs are standard productions for hospital public relations departments. The 1990s saw dramatic new challenges facing health care businesses and practices; arguably, health care became the issue of the 1990s, driven by two increasingly critical problems: cost and access that necessitated introduction of both increased and innovative public relations strategies to meet them (Cutlip, Center, & Broom 2000). Public relations activities in for-profit health practices and organizations may be classified according to their goals and may include the following: (1) protect corporate image and build brand and name equity for the corporate client; (2) create a positive public opinion climate for health issues, products, and companies in order to win regulatory and legislative approvals; (3) reduce costs and save time for health care providers and payers by reducing managed care pay outs and by educating and training consumers regarding preventive health practices, symptoms, and treatment options; and (4) assist the marketing function by increasing sales for prescription and over-the-counter drugs and by attracting patients to a particular health care provider, facility, or company. There are numerous examples that illustrate each category. Protect Corporate Image and Build Brand Equity

There are several traditional ways through which corporations build equity in their name and protect and enhance their corporate image. Whereas the following is not an exhaustive list, each of the examples illustrates opportunities for the organization to receive positive news coverage. Change in Corporate Structure. Whether there is a corporate merger, buyout, or simpler reorganization, such business issues provide opportunity to enhance corporate image. One such example is the purchase of San Diego–based S. D. Dura Pharmaceuticals in 2000 for $1.8 billion by the Irish drugmaking giant Elan Corporation (San Diego Union Tribune, 2000). The purchase provided numerous chances for Elan to publicize the economic benefits that will accrue to San Diego County as a result of the purchase, as well as the enhanced ability to market new pharmaceuticals resulting from the combination of resources. While it is difficult to measure the value of such publicity, the use of positively

540

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

framed news stories to build brand equity and enhance image is a widely practiced public relations technique. Introduction of New Technique or Product. Association of a corporate name with a life-saving technique or product is another invaluable method for image enhancement and equity development. One Chicago-based clinic is often cited in news stories as a leader in a technique, called preimplantation genetics diagnosis, that is increasingly being used to detect genetic diseases and prevent them prior to in vitro fertilization (Chicago Sun Times, 2000). Recurring use of the name of the clinic in stories about the procedure helps build strong brand identity. Similarly, when a corporation is linked with a prestigious research institution to introduce its product, a halo effect may embrace both the corporation and the research institution. Such is the case in the release of a new cancer treatment, by the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa and Yale University (St. Petersburg Times, 2000). Association of the treatment center with research is a positive element of image enhancement for health care facilities. Establishment of the Corporate Brand as a Credible Information Source on Industry Issues. Placement of highly competent individuals from an organization as expert sources in news stories is a long-practiced technique of corporate image building. Thus, Phizer Inc. is one beneficiary of the release of a World Health Organization (WHO) report that predicts that by the year 2020 up to 40% of all deaths will be related to cardiovascular diseases (BusinessWorld, 2000). How? Consider this news story lead: “People should be more conscious of their heart nowadays. Clinical studies show that cases of cardiovascular disease (CVD) continue to increase, said pharmaceutical firm Phizer Inc.” While the article text subsequently explains that the study was conducted by the Cardiology Division of the WHO Health Department, Phizer is repeatedly cited as the spokesperson. Of equally positive benefit is when a corporation becomes an information source for consumers on how consumers can maximize benefits from the corporation’s products and services. A classic example of this is found in this story, from a London newspaper, that explains how consumers can lower their health insurance costs (Why Only the Best Is Good Enough, 2000). The sources for this information are the health insurance providers themselves. They are positively framed as providers of useful information for consumers— in this case, they are advising customers how to save money on the product they sell. Repair and Restore Industry Image. Finally, the managed care industry itself is struggling with a public backlash against HMOs and is relying heavily on public relations to improve its beleaguered image (Miller, 2000). A group of 22 of the largest managed-care companies in the United States formed the Coalition for Affordable Quality Healthcare in early 2000 to mount a massive public relations campaign on behalf of the entire industry (USA Today, 2000). The Coalition has spent over $9 million on television ads designed to improve the image of managed care health providers. Such efforts, Although designed to improve the overall industry image, powerfully reflect on the individual corporate images of the sponsors and enhance brand equity for all participating organizations. Create Positive Public Opinion Climate to Win Regulatory and Legislative Approvals

The image of the managed care industry is a critical component driving health reform legislation across the nation (Easterbrook, 2000). According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, medical issues dominated legislative agendas in 1999, with 1,400

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

541

health care bills passed in state capitals; more than 1,600 hundred such bills were under consideration during the first quarter of 2000 alone (Cohen, 2000). At the national level, private industry lobbying has largely assumed leadership of health care reform, placing industry corporate reputation management at the center of the national health care debate (Pear, 2000). At both state and federal levels, legislators are debating initiatives that would place heavier regulation on managed care and make it easier for patients and doctors to take legal action against managed health care plans. Public relations ammunition was deployed during the summer 1999, when the Senate was battling over managed care reform (Politics & Polity, 1999). The American Medical Association ran a full-page ad in USA Today that asked “Criminals all have rights. Why don’t patients?” Text in the ad elaborated: “any legislation should give physicians the final say when it comes to deciding what’s medically necessary . . . give patients the right to a fair and timely appeal of denials and hold health plans and insurance companies accountable for their actions” (USA Today, 1999). The AMA ran other ads in specific states urging readers to contact their representatives and urge them to vote for “patients’ rights” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1999). Such campaigns have become common since the success of the “Harry and Louise” ads that helped defeat the 1994 Clinton health reforms (Politics & Polity, 1999). Individual health care plans also report increasing their public relations efforts with several key publics in order to enhance legislative approvals and prevent unwanted regulatory acts. United HealthCare produces statistical reports showing its program’s results, including patient recovery times, and publicizes these outcomes to patients, doctors, and media; Humana developed an Internet campaign that promotes success stories of patients and corporate goals; Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Florida enlisted support of patients and doctors to publicize positive aspects of their services to legislators, patients, and providers (Politics & Polity, 1999). Reduce Costs and Save Time

When for-profit health organizations become an active voice in educating potential consumers about symptoms of illnesses and how consumers can both recognize and initially treat certain health conditions, the organizations become an important information source that benefits three groups: consumers, health care providers, and themselves. Consumers benefit by being informed—that aspirin may help reduce the severity of heart attack, for example. Health care providers benefit by saving time and reducing costs—the more consumers know on their own, the less time health professionals spend educating them; the more consumers know to self-medicate to lessen the severity of a condition, the more economical the treatment of the individual can be. And the corporations benefit by increasing sales of their products, by enhancing their own credibility as they are seen as a valuable source of health information, and thus assisting development of image enhancement and development of greater brand equity. Numerous examples abound. Information on how to quit smoking is provided in advertising and news stories about nicotine-substitute products. Symptoms of osteoporosis are documented in advertisements for treatment drugs. And recognition of sometimes obscure conditions—like glucose intolerance—may be distributed by the publisher of a cookbook that contains exclusively gluten-free recipes (Tips Help Diagnose, Treat Celiac Disease, 2000). Symptoms of osteoarthritis are widely discussed in news reports about the possibility that a gelatin drink might reduce arthritis pain (Gelatin Drink May Reduce Arthritis Pain, 2000). Knox NutraJoint is manufactured by Nabisco, which commissioned the study.

542

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

The more a for-profit health organization—be it a producer or service provider—can assist in the education of consumers, the greater the benefits for all parties. Assist the Marketing Function: Promotion of Sales and Service

Prescription Drugs. While much advertising is designed to introduce new prescription drugs to consumers, press releases that accomplish the same purpose are increasingly important. Unlike advertisements, which are constrained by time (in broadcast) and length (in print), press releases allow for development; patients can read or listen in depth about how to recognize symptoms of a particular condition, about the benefits of a new drug treatment, or about the long-terms consequences of a discovery. When SmithKline Beecham achieved a breakthrough in developing an antimalaria vaccine, for example, the news value of the story was tremendous. “Malaria, ‘Mother of Fevers,’ Disease: It Kills Millions Annually. But Promising Results Last Year Have Raised Scientists’ Hopes for Finding A Vaccine,” is a typical headline reflecting the importance of both the drug and what its development foretells (Los Angeles Times, 2000). For years, SmithKline Beecham had regarded its efforts as “an act of charity,” given the low interest in what was regarded as a third world disease. But when a link was established between the malaria vaccine and a potential AIDS vaccine, strong interest was rejuvenated, resulting in the breakthrough that has catapulted SmithKline into the media spotlight. Supplements, Nutriceuticals, and Over-the-Counter (OTC) Drugs. The last decade of the 20th century witnessed dramatic growth in interest in nonprescription remedies, preventive supplements, and alternative medical practices. Although there is no specific count of the number of public relations agencies that manage OTC health product clients, there are ample indications that both the number of firms doing such product-related public relations and the number of health-based clients for agencies already possessing consumer health industry clients are increasing. Since passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994, which eased restrictions on dietary supplements and allows manufacturers to make broader health benefits claims, an explosion in the newly created “nutriceutical” and “cosmeceutical” markets occurred (Krantz & Bjerklie, 1997). Nutriceuticals, the blending of nutrients and pharmaceuticals, and cosmeceuticals, the blending of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, are becoming a major force in the marketplace. The American Pharmaceutical Association estimates that over 80% of pharmacies sell these products, and multibillion-dollar corporations like Monsanto, Dupont, and Procter & Gamble are spending major resources to discover new ways to enhance the health benefits of foods and supplements (Zeisel, 1999). The popularity of health discussions has proved a bonanza for publicists placing spokespeople for their products and companies on television and radio talk shows, like Oprah Winfrey, and for successfully pitching program segments for infotainment programs, like 20/20. Many of these nontraditional products and practices have been introduced and publicized through effective publicity from public relations. News releases in print, segments on national television news broadcast shows, and talk show appearances by advocates have all been utilized by OTC proponents who advance that, among other things, consumers should be in control of their own treatment plans. The keys to gaining long-term success in any public relations and marketing campaign are to be completely truthful and to not oversell the product. The OTC/nutriceutical market is no exception. In addition, research by the International Food Information Council demonstrates that consumers perceive health claims on a label to be propaganda from the

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

543

company, whereas media publicity and nutritional labeling are more believable (Wellner, 1998). Research conducted by reputable scientists is particularly credible, such as the study confirming that glucosamine is an effective treatment for osteoarthritis (Reginster et al., 2001). Many other studies such as those sponsored by the National Institutes of Health investigating the role foods and extracts play in reducing cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis and a variety of other diseases will further fuel the interest in these products (Nelson, 1999). Physicians. Public relations has become increasingly important to physicians as they seek improved bargaining positions for managed care contracting (Healthcare PR and Marketing News, 2000). Whether a press release announces a new piece of advanced technology their practice is using, cites a physician-expert for information on a particular medical condition, or emphasizes a patient human-interest angle in a story, when physicians appear in such positive news stories they enhance their personal reputations and thus their bargaining power. Physician Web sites are used to promote practices (MCIC Releases ‘Health Care and the Internet, 2000). In addition to the kinds of traditional information for releases just mentioned, Web sites are well-suited for publicizing medical research in which the physician is involved; using graphics to illustrate medical procedures employed in the physician’s practice; and providing interactive opportunities for patients’ questions and comments. There is some evidence that public relations services for physicians will increase in importance as primary care physicians (PCPs) are asked to assume greater responsibilities for their patient populations, particularly by shifting focus from treating sickness to preventing it and promoting health (Tselikis, 1999). Managed care plans also utilize public relations to market themselves to consumers (Managed Care Efforts That Resonate with Consumers, 2000). Many HMOs regularly practice positioning, for example, connecting with consumers regarding a wide array of issues, before the consumer is a patient needing care. Such communication involves letting members know of pending legislation that may change how their health care is delivered; may keep them informed of any mergers, closures, or reductions in services that may affect them; and may keep them current on what they need to know to manage their own health care, like when there are periods of open enrollment and how to manage a planned health care issue like childbirth. The Washington, DC–based American Association of Health Plans (AAHP), an association representing health plans, reports spending more than $2 million on public relations efforts in 1999–2000 to enhance the image of managed care generally. Their efforts go beyond launching television and print ads and include conducting press tours and organizing debates on federal and state mandates that would impact managed care firms (Volz, 2000). Another coalition of health care agencies, the Washington, DC–based Health Care Leadership Council, developed a public relations campaign, “Reality 98,” to produce a flood of faxes to media whenever a politician or candidate made a misstatement about the managed care industry. There are a number of promising theories that have been applied to public relations but have not been widely applied in health communication. This chapter discusses several of these models and theories. THEORY AND MODELS

Theory allows health communicators to identify key audiences and understand influences that promote knowledge and mold attitudes and behavior. As Lapinski and Witte (1998) pointed out, an essential element of any effective health communication campaign is that

544

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

it be guided by theory. These authors argued that theories must be applied that emphasize the interactive nature of communication, are practical and feasible, allow application to unique audiences, and avoid focusing on the individual to the exclusion of social and environmental factors. Protect Corporate Image and Build Brand Equity

Druckmiller (1993) argued that a corporate brand is a company’s reputation, and this brand reflects the character of the leaders in the organization and their relationship with all stakeholders to the company. He further contended that corporate reputation carries a heavier load than product brands, necessitating continual attention. Any organization can experience threats and crisis events that endanger the reputation, profitability, and, in extreme cases, survival of the organization. The best way to minimize the damage of a crisis is to avoid one in the first place. To accomplish crisis avoidance, an organization must conduct an ongoing program of issues management, which includes scanning the environment, researching potential issues discovered from the scanning process, urging organizational change when necessary, and developing communication strategies focused on preventing the crisis. Although issues management can be successful in warding off many potential problems, crises can and often do engulf even the most vigilant organizations. Therefore, all health care organizations should have a crisis management plan in place in case such an event transpires. Message Action Plans. Werner (1990) developed a practical crisis system he termed a message action plan or MAP. He argued that a well-planned MAP can overcome many of the inevitable problems that occur during times of crises that can hinder effective communication to the organization’s key publics. These problems include emotion, confusion, confidentiality issues, and stress. The key elements of a MAP are knowing key publics with which to regularly communicate; what message elements must be present; what communication techniques are to be used; who is responsible for various duties (e.g., spokespersons, data gathering); how messages and activities should be timed; and how postcrisis evaluations, of both the MAP’s effectiveness and conditions that led to the crisis, should be conducted. Model of Crisis Types. Handling the logistics of a MAP can be worked out well in advance of any crisis. Specific strategies and message components often cannot be anticipated but must be carefully tailored to each unique situation. It is here where public relations models and theories can prove useful to the organizational crisis team. The first step is to identify what type of crisis has occurred. Coombs (1995) developed a two-by-two matrix of crisis types by distinguishing between intentional and unintentional crises and internal versus external ones:

r r r

Accidents (unintentional and internal): Example: A Florida surgeon amputates the wrong limb (Palosky, 1995). Transgressions (intentional and internal): Example: An Arkansas-based nursing home company is accused of defrauding the government for millions of Medicare dollars (Malone, 2000). Faux pas (unintentional and external): Example: A health clinic being supplied with RotaShield (a diarrhea vaccine before it was pulled off the market in 1999) is linked to some deaths and severe illnesses (Harris, 1999).

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

r

545

Terrorism (intentional and external): Example: A product like Johnson and Johnson’s Tylenol is the target of criminal tampering (O’Connor, 1994).

Attribution Theory and the Model of Image Restoration Strategies

Coombs (1995) developed a model of image restoration that can guide crisis communicators’ responses. The model integrates five basic response strategies derived from the work of Allen and Caillouet (1994) and Benoit (1997): denial, distance, ingratiation, mortification, and suffering. Denial is when an organization denies that there is a crisis. Distancing is when an organization admits there is a crisis but deflects all blame for the crisis toward some external cause. Ingratiation assumes one of three forms: transcendence, bolstering, or praising others. (1) Transcendence is where an organization tries to place the crisis in a larger, more desirable context. For example, a drug company under fire for using animal testing could argue that while such testing may be distasteful, the larger good of finding effective treatments for humans is worth the cost. (2) Bolstering is when an organization reminds the public of the existing positive aspects of the company. For example, a health care company might admit to a serious error, but point out its otherwise strong record and steady contributions to the community. (3) Praising others is used to win approval from the target of the praise. An example would be a managed care organization praising the “fair and professional conduct” of federal investigators during an audit of business practices that were triggered by allegations of fraudulent Medicare billing.

Mortification strategies can also assume one of three forms: remediation, repentance, and rectification. Remediation occurs when the organization agrees to provide some form of compensation to help victims. For example, when a botched surgery occurs, the hospital could agree to pay for all subsequent medical bills for the aggrieved party. Repentance is when an organization offers an unqualified apology for its misdeeds. Rectification involves taking action to prevent a recurrence of the crisis event, such as instituting a review board to survey existing procedures and make necessary changes. The final strategy is suffering. This refers to a situation in which an organization in crisis points out that it, too, is suffering. Take for example a health clinic that unwittingly administers a vaccine that makes people sick, including patients and some members of its own staff. Clinic spokespersons could point out that their own people are suffering as are other members of the community. Attribution theory forms the foundation of the model of image restoration strategies by explaining the relationships between crisis situations and appropriate crisis response strategies. The theory holds that judgments toward an organization will be harsher if the perceived cause of a crisis is internal rather than external, and if it is a regular occurrence. Coombs and Holladay (1996) developed a model of four crisis types by combining the dimensions of intentionality and locus of crisis origin. The model includes: accidents (internal and unintentional), transgressions (internal and intentional), faux pas (external and unintentional), and terrorism (external and intentional). As would be expected, the researchers found that individuals were much more forgiving in crisis situations caused by faux pas or terrorism. However, companies must still handle the situation with great care. Whereas individuals may not condemn an organization for an externally caused crisis, they will judge how the crisis is handled.

546

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

Crises that originate internally pose the greatest potential problems for an organization. Transgressions are the least forgivable actions. The appropriate response is mortification, including repentance, rectification, and if appropriate, remediation for any parties harmed in the incident. The best response after a transgression is quick and full disclosure. Mitchell (1986) stated that the first 24 hours are the most crucial in forming public opinion about the crisis. Druckmiller (1993) reinforced this, adding that the company should provide essential facts as soon as it is available, that corporate leadership should be visible and approachable, and that communication channels must be selected in a way that information is dispersed quickly and accurately. Accidents are one of the most likely events a health care organization may encounter. Coombs (1995) argued that organizations must first determine whether major or minor damage has occurred (a subjective judgment), whether any victims are involved, and whether the company has a good or poor performance history. Obviously, crises that involve major damage are the most problematic. Mortification and ingratiation are recommended during these types of events. Situations involving minor damage require distancing and ingratiation; those situations where crisis evidence is false should use denial and clarification. The managed care industry in particular was besieged by crises in the 1990s. Once held up as the solution to runaway medical costs, managed care organizations are now commonly pilloried by consumers, media, and politicians. A major reason is the perception that what drives the industry is profit over health. The industry image problem is particularly problematic because it is seen as a calculated transgression of long duration. Media coverage is rife with cases of patients or their families complaining about denial of treatment, unnecessary red tape, and slow payments on approved claims. The fact that physicians and other health providers often join in the criticism is particularly damaging to the industry because doctors and nurses are among the most trusted professionals. It is wise for corporations to remember the thoughts of Arthur Paige, the first corporate public relations professional who stated that corporations only exist with approval of the public (Cutlip, 1997). Create a Positive Public Opinion Climate in Order to Win Regulatory and Legislative Approvals

Winning favorable regulation and legislation are among the most important activities health care public relations accomplishes. Without successful public relations efforts, a company’s ability to sell a product or service may be severely limited or completely denied. This type of health care public relations often involves arguing the company’s position, frequently against opposing organization’s arguments. Theories and models of particular utility help the organization clearly identify and track key organizations and publics. This enables an organization to accurately target messages and account for the impact other publics and organizations have on the legislative and regulatory environments. Situational Identification of Publics Theory. In the attempt to promote a positive climate of public opinion, the health care company must first clearly identify specific publics of concern to the health care organization. A public relations effort is likely to have limited effectiveness if demographics are the sole criteria for identifying important segments of a population. Although knowledge of demographic classification can be very useful (as is discussed later), demographic groups are rarely homogenous in terms of

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

547

attitudes, knowledge, and opinions. One theory that holds promise for effective health public relations is the situational identification of publics theory (Grunig & Hunt, 1984). This theory offers a mechanism for classifying individuals in relation to their levels of awareness and concern about a particular issue. Situational theory posits that a public’s perceptions of an issue or situation can be used to predict the extent to which members of that public will seek out and use information, or how much a public will passively process information they happen to encounter about that particular issue. Three independent variables are used to make these predictions: problem recognition, constraint recognition, and level of involvement. As the title indicates, problem recognition refers to the extent to which a person is aware of an issue or situation. Constraint recognition refers to the degree to which a person perceives significant constraints or impediments to his or her ability to do anything about an issue. Involvement level refers to the degree to which a person perceives she or he is directly affected by the issue or situation. Grunig (1989) contended that communication behavior can be either active or passive. Active communication involves higher levels of information seeking and deeper information processing. Passive communication is typified by little or no information seeking and processing. Different combinations of the three independent variables yield numerous possible types of publics. Grunig and Hunt (1984) acknowledged that some combinations are more likely to occur than others. The three most common public types are: active, aware, and latent. An active public is a highly involved group, characterized by high recognition of an issue and perception of few constraints to taking action. An aware public possesses high issue recognition but also perceives significant obstacles to action. These individuals can be either high or low in involvement. A latent public is low in problem recognition, high in constraint recognition, and can perceive either high or low involvement. Situational theory has the potential of great use to for-profit health care organizations, particularly with regard to promoting positive public opinion climate to achieve favorable legislation and regulation. If a company can distinguish different types of publics, it can create messages that respond to that public’s unique characteristics. In a study of a gubernatorial race Hamilton (1992) found that situational theory accurately predicted different levels of communication activity about the election. Whereas this particular study was not health related, the principle applies nonetheless. In the case of promoting favorable health care legislation, situational theory may be invaluable. Time and money can be saved when organizations can identify and reach active publics, the people most likely to take actions, like calling or writing a congressional member, mobilizing others to the cause, or voting for/against a ballot issue. Situational theory could help other facets of a company’s public relations effort as well. For example, messages could be constructed for an aware public that acknowledge perceived obstacles and present viable solutions to overcome those obstacles in order to help sell a product, service, or idea. As an illustration, assume that a company that produces an over-the-counter health supplement to treat depression conducts research identifying a large aware public. This public understands the seriousness of this condition but perceives a number of important obstacles to seeking treatment, including social stigma to seeking professional psychiatric care, concern about the expense associated with seeing a physician, and worry about consuming manufactured chemical antidepressants. Armed with this knowledge, the company could effectively design messages that promote use of its St. John’s Wort herbal extract as a private, inexpensive, “natural” way to combat depression.

548

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

Public Relations Field Dynamics. In a recently published chapter, Springston and Keyton (2001) describe a scenario in which drug maker Eli Lilly Corporation encountered a major threat to its image and its profitability. In the late 1980s, Prozac, one of Eli Lilly’s most profitable drugs, came under attack from a group called the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, later discovered to be a nonprofit group established by the Church of Scientology. The church is known for its stance against using drugs for the treatment of psychiatric illness. This group was able to garner so much media attention about the alleged dangers of the drug that it was able to pressure the FDA to temporarily withdraw approval of the drug. Eventually, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association spoke out in support of Prozac and Eli Lilly, thus helping to redeem the image of the company and the drug. Prozac was allowed back on the market. This case typifies the reality that organizations can and usually do operate in complex, multipublic environments. While Eli Lilly and the Church of Scientology were the direct antagonists in this particular case, a variety of other actors in the field were salient. In order to effectively manage the public relations environment, Eli Lilly needed to deal with each of these publics in a unique manner. In spite of the importance of accounting for the entire interaction field, most public relations models only pay lip service to multipublic environments (Leichty & Springston, 1993). Group communication theory offers promise as an approach that recognizes that such environments are both complex and fluid. One such model, Public Relations Field Dynamics (PRFD), is adapted from the study of small group communication and derived from Bales and Cohen’s (1979) System for the Multiple Level Observation of Groups (Springston, 1997a,b; Springston & Keyton, 2001; Springston, Keyton, Leichty, & Metzger, 1992). Springston (1997b) adapted the group system to macrolevel applications vital to public relations. The dimensions in the PRFD system reflect low-influence versus high-influence capability; self-orientation versus community orientation; and friendly versus unfriendly relationships. These three dimensions are essential to the study of public relations. The influence dimension helps determine which groups will be most attentive and involved in a public relations situation. This variable is similar to the involvement variable in situational theory. If, for example, a group perceives an organization to have a large influence on it, the group will likely be more attentive to that organization than it will be to organizations with low perceived influence. Knowledge of how influential a public sees itself to be in relation to the organization provides insight into how likely that public is to exhibit active behavior, helping practitioners determine communication strategy. The community versus self-dimension reflects perceptions of how motivated an organization is to achieve either an integrative or distributive outcome in a given situation. This ties directly into perceptions of trust. Companies that are perceived to be more interested in the bottom line at the expense of the community have serious public image problems, as many managed care organizations have discovered. Members of the media are often particularly skeptical of an organization’s community orientation. In general, the more an organization can demonstrate to the media and other publics that it has a genuine community orientation the more successful the organization is in negotiating its “brand” or position. Finally, perceptions of friendly versus unfriendly behavior are relevant at all levels of interaction. This dimension taps fundamental notions of friend or foe. PRFD allows organizations to identify allies, antagonists, and potential mediators. Combined, the three dimensions provide a powerful framework to map the entire field or public relations environment. The system is graphically displayed, placing the friendly-unfriendly dimension

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

549

LOW INFLUENCE

HIGH INFLUENCE

Community Oriented Actor A: Low Influence, Friendly, Community Oriented

Unfriendly

Actor B: Neutral Actor C: High Influence, Unfriendly, Self-Oriented

Friendly

Self-Oriented Figure 24.1 Field diagrams of the perceived relational landscape.

on the horizontal axis and the community versus self on the vertical axis. The influence dimension is represented by circle size—the more perceived influence, the larger the circle. Figure 24.1 displays three hypothetical actors in a relational field. Reduce Costs and Save Time

Theory can save time and money in a variety of ways. For example, theory can help identify those individuals most interested in a particular health product or service, eliminating the time and cost that might otherwise be spent on a broader communication campaign. Theory can also assist the health public relations practitioner in determining the most appropriate channel or channels through which to reach members of the target public. Additionally, theory can guide the development of messages in order to increase the likelihood that individuals will engage in preventive behaviors that can save time and money for patients, providers, and payers. A number of theories have been used effectively in health communication campaigns, and use of these theories has been widely published (e.g., Jackson & Duffy, 1998; Du Pre, 2000). These include microlevel theories such as the health belief model (Rosenstock, 1974), the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980), social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), the transtheoretical model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983), the extended parallel process model (Witte, 1992), and narrative theory (Fisher, 1987); and macrolevel theories such as cultivation theory (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994) and diffusion of innovation theory (Rogers & Shoemaker, 1971). Kaiser Permanente’s efforts during the 2000–2001 flu season provide a good example of how important elements of theory were incorporated in a communication campaign to urge Kaiser’s at-risk patients to get flu shots and to educate its patients about ways to avoid catching the flu before they were vaccinated. Influenza outbreaks can be very expensive for health care organizations. The cost of a flu vaccine is less than $30 per patient, whereas flu treatment can cost thousands of dollars per severe case. The 2000–2001

550

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

flu season threatened to be more costly than usual because the vaccine was in short supply in October and November. This placed a strong onus on communication campaign designers to both educate and influence patients to get vaccinated and also to engage in ways of avoiding the flu until they could get the shot. Kaiser mounted an aggressive campaign that incorporated key elements of several previously mentioned theories. Diffusion of innovation theory, for example, was demonstrated by Kaiser’s use of multiple communication channels to encourage individuals to relay information to friends and family. Kaiser also enlisted the help of highly respected physicians as spokespeople. It was clear that Kaiser understood both the role of opinion leaders and the process of information dissemination through a combination of mediated and interpersonal channels. The company’s efforts also reflected an understanding of risk theories such as the extended parallel process model. For example, in publicity Kaiser was able to generate about the issue, Director of Prevention Dr. Ned Calonge outlined the potential severity of the disease and emphasized the susceptibility at-risk patients face with the flu. He also conveyed information that was intended to bolster self- and response efficacy. In addition to stressing the effectiveness of the vaccine’s preventive power, Calonge and other physicians discussed practical ways in which an individual could avoid coming into contact with the flu virus. Dr. Calonge also discussed easy ways to boost the immune system to fight off any contact (Melani, 2000). Overall, this communication campaign demonstrated the practicality of incorporating theory to save both time and money. Assist the Marketing Function: Promotion of Sales and Service

There is a wealth of classic persuasion and motivation theories to draw from when designing messages to promote product sales. In addition to many of the theories already mentioned in this chapter are those that focus on source credibility (e.g., Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), selective exposure (e.g., McGuire, 1985), and cognitive and affective growth and stability theories (e.g., Festinger, 1957; Levinson, 1978; Leventhal, Meyer, & Nerenz, 1980). These theories all provide useful guidance about how to design messages. The utility of any persuasive theory will depend on the context and purpose of the message, however, one key consideration is whether an organization is trying to sell a product or a service. There is some debate about the applicability of strategies developed to promote products when used for promoting services (Abernethy & Butler, 1992). This is particularly important since much of the health care industry is service oriented. A number of marketing and advertising studies have focused on the intangible nature of service and how promotion efforts need different strategies (e.g., Grove, Pickett, & Laband, 1995; Stafford & Day, 1995). Service quality is an issue receiving particular focus with the growth of the service economy (Clow, Tripp, & Kenny, 1996). Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988, 1991) developed a taxonomy that may serve as a useful guide for promoting health services. SERVQUAL categorizes service along five dimensions: reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangibles. Reliability is the organization’s ability to provide the promised service(s) dependably. Responsiveness represents the organization’s willingness to provide prompt and helpful service. Assurance defines the organization’s ability to engender trust and confidence among consumers. This is related to how knowledgeable and courteous an organization’s service providers are perceived to be. Empathy refers to the degree to which service is perceived to be individualized and caring. Finally, tangibles is the category that includes professional appearance of personnel, equipment, and physical facilities.

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

551

An example of a public relations effort that follows the five dimensions articulated in the SERVQUAL model is the Children’s Hospital of Boston (2001) Web site. Reliability and responsiveness are compellingly conveyed through links that walk prospective patients and families through the experiences they will have when receiving treatment in the hospital. The site provides specific detail on a wide variety of subjects including inpatient stay, outpatient visits, medical records, activities for patients, and housing accommodations. Tangibles are reinforced by many images of children with professional-looking caregivers in attractive settings. Finally, the following passage from the site illustrates the tone of assurance and empathy conveyed: Colorful images painted along hallways and on windows . . . a clown’s antics . . . a little red wagon on an inpatient floor . . . emblems of childhood that remind young people that they are children first and patients second. The importance of Children’s Hospital as an institution exclusively dedicated to and designed for its young patients is played out every day when a new pediatric procedure succeeds, or a child smiles in wonder. A pediatric hospital is a serious environment, where childhood illness and disease are faced daily. Yet at Children’s, our world of color and play reinforces to caregivers, families, and patients themselves the joy of childhood. (Children’s Hospital of Boston, 2001)

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE

It is very likely that the rapidly changing health care environment of the 1990s will continue well into the 21st century. A myriad of forces, including escalating costs, shortages of skilled health professionals, advances in medical and communication technology, and changing demographics, will demand new and innovative public relations approaches in for-profit health care. Public relations will become ever more important to the corporate bottom line by advancing positions that protect the organization from threats and unfavorable legislation, promote public wellness and preventive health practices, and assist marketing efforts to sell products and services to various publics and other health care organizations. Future research must focus on greater understanding of the most effective and appropriate public relations strategies for protecting corporate image and building brand equity versus influencing the regulatory and legislative public. While not discussed at length in this chapter, the Internet and other forms of interactive new technology offer tremendous opportunities to forward the health care industry’s public relations mission. The Internet will allow for-profit health care organizations to reach specific niche and geographically distant audiences in a way never before possible. Future research should examine under what conditions interactive computer technology effectively replaces person-to-person communication or other forms of mediated communication in public relations efforts. Additionally, the potential of many theories (such as situational theory [Grunig & Hunt, 1984]) are greatest when messages can be individually tailored to a person’s beliefs and attitudes. The Internet enables corporations to design completely different messages for active, aware, and latent publics. This is because the technology is highly interactive and individual’s beliefs, concerns, and desires can be assessed and responses can be delivered, sometimes instantly. Because of the data-gathering capacity of the Internet, it will be possible for scholars and corporations to continually test and fine-tune the usefulness of different theories. New media technology also holds the promise of cost-effective corporate communication with publics by reducing the need for expensive printed materials and person-to-person contact.

552

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

Although the promise of the new media is great, these technologies also create concerns. Future public relations practice and research needs to fully explore such ethical concerns as patients’ privacy and care versus costs and what this might mean for health public relations. Future research should also focus on the integration of theories not previously considered in the domain of public relations. Testing combinations of different complementary theories should be conducted to discover the most effective ways in which to achieve organizational goals of increased health and increased profits. Public relations must also evolve in step with the changing face of health care. Heatherington, Ekachai, and Parkinson (2001) argued that the changing nature of the health care industry demands that public relations personnel continually educate themselves on health care management principles, focus on quality improvements, and seek ways to facilitate productive alliances among former competitors. We concur. Without a thorough understanding of the business of health care and how it is changing, public relations practitioners will not be effective at managing issues before they become major problems. Time and resources must be allotted for continuing education of both public relations managers and technicians. Additionally, public relations needs to be part of the decision-making team at the top of the organization. It is imperative that organizational decision makers be fully informed about the beliefs and propensities of the organization’s internal and external publics. Such understanding is key in order to succeed in continually improving the quality of health products and services. Public relations will be crucial for top management to enlist the support and cooperation among staff needed to successfully initiate quality improvement programs. Models such as SERVQUAL can provide guidance for managers and subordinates to work cooperatively in designing new quality initiatives that respond to the different dimensions of service. As Heath (1994) pointed out, direct contact with an organization’s employees often forms the most important and enduring images people have of an organization. It is vital that employees understand the larger picture and their role within that picture. As health care continues to become an increasingly intertwined network of products and services, public relations will be needed to facilitate ways in which former competitors can work together. As the costs of equipment and facilities go up and difficulty in finding enough qualified personnel increases, competition between competing organizations in a community makes less economic sense. Organizations will need to build strengths in specialized areas and facilitate patient access to other alliance organizations when necessary. Public relations will be key to creating an environment of trust and cooperation between organizations, not to mention the crucial role of working with key publics in order to educate them about the nature of these organizational alliances. Models such as public relations field dynamics can aid health care corporations by mapping the perceptions other organizations and publics have about the corporation. Such mapping can help identify friends, foes, and potential mediators and facilitate the design of communication campaigns strategies and tactics. Finally, higher education must be responsive to the continually changing needs of the health care industry. Just as the industry is becoming more complex, so must colleges and universities become more complex in order to effectively advance research and prepare students to join the health care industry. During recent years, some colleges and universities have begun to form ties between such diverse schools as business, communication, journalism, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, psychology, and social work. This needs to continue. Such interdisciplinary links will be critical in order to advance research and to fully prepare students, regardless of what position they assume in the industry.

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

553

REFERENCES Abernathy, A. M., & Butler, D. D. (1992). Advertising information: Services versus products. Journal of Retailing, 68(4), 398–419. Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, L. (1980). Understanding attitudes and predicting behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Allen, M. W., & Caillouet, R. H. (1994). Legitimate endeavors: Impression management strategies used by an organization in crisis. Communication Monographs, 61, 44–62. Bales, R. F., & Cohen, S. P. (1979). SYMLOG: System for the multiple level observation of groups. New York: The Free Press. Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundation of thought and action: A social cognitive approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Benoit, W. L. (1997). Image repair discourse and crisis communication. Public Relations Review, 23(2), 177–186. BusinessWorld, Philippines. (2000, September 29). Retrieved October 1, 2000, from LexisNexis online database. Chicago Sun Times. (2000, September 27). News section, p. 10. Retrieved October 1, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. Children’s Hospital of Boston. (2001, January 20). Retrieved January 20, 2001, from http://www.childrenshospital.org/services/. Clow, K. E., Tripp, C., & Kenny, J. T. (1996). The importance of service quality determinants in advertising a professional service: An exploratory study. Journal of Services Marketing, 10(2), 129–151. Cohen, S. L. (2000, May 2). Do nothing Congress risks our health. USA Today, p. 27a. Coombs, W. T. (1995). Choosing the right words: The development guidelines for the selection of the “appropriate” crisis-response strategies. Management Communication Quarterly, 8(4), 447–476. Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, S. J. (1996). Communication and attributions in a crisis: An experimental study in crisis communication. Journal of Public Relations Research, 8(4), 279– 295. Cutlip, S. (1997). Public relations history: From 17th to the 20th century: The antecedents. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cutlip, S., Center, A. H., & Broom, M. N. (2000). Effective public relations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Druckmiller, B. (1993). Crises provide insights on image: Preparations necessary to protect goodwill when times turn bad. Business Marketing, 40(8), 40. Du Pre, A. (2000). Communicating about health: Current issues and perspectives. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing. Easterbrook, G. (2000, March 20). Managing fine: How to love your HMO. New Republic, 222(12), 21–25. Festinger, L. A. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row Peterson. Fisher, W. R. (1987). Human communication as narration: Toward a philosophy of reason, value, and action. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Gelatin Drink May Reduce Arthritis Pain. (2000, September 25). USA Today, p. 9d. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1994). Growing up with television: The cultivation perspective. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (pp. 17–41). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Grove, S. J., Pickett, G. M., & Laband, D. N. (1995). An empirical examination of factual information among service advertisements. Service Industries Journal, 15(2), 216–233.

554

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

Grunig, J. E. (1989). Publics, audience, and market segments: Segmentation principles for campaigns. In C. T. Salmond (Ed.), Information campaigns: Balancing social values and social change (pp. 199–228). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Grunig, J. E., & Hunt, T. (1984). Managing public relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Hamilton, P. K. (1992). Grunig’s situational theory: A replication, application, and extension. Journal of Public Relations Research, 4(3), 123–150. Harris, G. (1999, October 18). After vaccine’s recall, regulators look for holes in the safety net. Wall Street Journal, p. 1b. Healthcare PR and Marketing News. (2000, May 11). News section, p. 9. Retrieved July 9, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. Heath, R. L. (1994). Management of corporate communication: From interpersonal contacts to external affairs. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Heatherington, L. T., Ekachai, D., & Parkinson, M. G. (2001). Public relations in the health care industry. In R. L. Heath (Ed.), Handbook of public relations (pp. 571–578). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hutton, J. G. (2001). Defining the relationship between public relations and marketing: Public relation’s most important challenge. In R. L. Heath (Ed.), Handbook of public relations (pp. 205–214). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Jackson, L. D., & Duffy, B. K. (1998). Health communication research: A guide to developments and directions. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Krantz, M., & Bjerke, D. (1997, May 12). The self-medication generation. Time, 149(19), p. 72. Lapinski, M. K., & Witte, K. (1998). Health communication campaigns. In L. D. Jackson & B. K. Duffy (Eds.), Health communication research: A guide to developments and directions (pp. 139–162). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Leichty, G., & Springston, J. K. (1993). Reconsidering public relations models. Public Relations Review, 19, 327–339. Leventhal, H., Meyer, D., & Nerenz, D. (1980). The common sense representation of illness danger. In S. Rachman (Ed.), Medical psychology. New York: Pergamon. Levinson, D. (1978). Seasons of a man’s life. New York: Knopf. Los Angeles Times. (2000, August 21). Health section, p. 5. Malone, J. (2000, September 3). Nursing homes go hat-in-hand to capital. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, p. P7. Managed Care Efforts That Resonate with Consumers. (2000, April 27). Healthcare PR & Marketing News. Retrieved October 1, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. McGuire, W. J. (1985). Attitudes and attitude change. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (3rd ed.). New York: Random House. MCIC Releases “Health Care and the Internet: Current Trends in Online Information Gathering.” (2000, June 7). PR Newswire. Retrieved July 18, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. Melani, D. (2000, October 31). While you wait . . . what to do until you get your flu shot. Denver Rocky Mountain News, Lifestyles section, p. 3d. Miller, A. (2000, January 16). Aetna US healthcare: Growing pains. Atlanta Journal Constitution, p. 1h. Mitchell, T. (1986). Coping with a corporate crisis. Canadian Business Review, 13(3), 17–20. Nelson, N. J. (1999). Purple carrots, margarine laced with wood pulp? Nutraceuticals move into the supermaket. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 91(9), 755–758. O’Connor, P. J. (1994, February 25). Report of Tylenol tampering probed in Bedford Park. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 23a.

24. HEALTH AS PROFIT

555

Palosky, C. S. (1995, November 8, final edition). Surgeon fights penalty. The Tampa Tribune, Sec. Florida/Metro, p. 6. Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1988). SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. Journal of Retailing, 64(1), 12–37. Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1991). Refinement and reassessment of the SERVQUAL scale. Journal of Retailing, 67(4), 420–450. Pear, R. (2000, June 23). In a test case on HMO’s patients both win and lose. New York Times, p. 12a. Petty, R., & Cacioppo, J. (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag. Philadelphia Inquirer. (1999, July 8). Retrieved July 18, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. Politics & Polity. (1999, July 8). Retrieved September 3, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, L. L. (1983). Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: Toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51, 390–395. Reginster, J. Y., Deroisy, R., Rovati, L. C., Lee, R. L., Lejeune, E., Bruyere, O., Giacovelli, G., Henrotin, Y., Dacre, J. E., & Gossett, C. (2001, January 27). Long-term effects of glucosamine sulphate on osteoarthritis progression: A randomised, placebo-controlled clinical trial. The Lancet, 357(9252), 54–66. Rogers, E. M., & Shoemaker, F. F. (1971). Communication of innovations: A cross-cultural approach (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press. Rosenstock, I. M. (1974). Historical origins of the health belief model. Health Education Monographs, 2, 328–335. St. Petersburg Times. Cancer Treatment Shows Promise. (2000, September 28). St. Petersburg Times, p. 3b. San Diego Union Tribune. (2000, September 12). News section, p. A-1. Seitel, F. P. (1993). The practice of public relations (5th ed.). New York: Macmillan. Springston, J. K. (1997a). Application of public relations theory to breast cancer screening: A worksite study. In J. Biberman & A. Alkhafaji (Eds.), Business research yearbook: Global business perspectives (pp. 762–766). Slippery Rock, AR: International Academy of Business Disciplines. Springston, J. K. (1997b). Assessing the group field. In J. Biberman & A. Alkhafaji (Eds.), Business research yearbook: Global business perspectives (pp. 767–771). Slippery Rock, AR: International Academy of Business Disciplines. Springston, J. K., & Keyton, J. (2001). Public relations field dynamics. In R. L. Heath (Ed.), Handbook of public relations (pp. 115–126). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Springston, J. K., Keyton, J., Leichty, G. B., & Metzger, J. (1992). Field dynamics and public relations theory: Toward the management of multiple publics. Journal of Public Relations Research, 4(2), 81–100. Stafford, M. R., & Day, E. (1995). Retail service advertising: The effects of appeal, medium, and service. Journal of Advertising, 24(1), 57–71. Tips Help Diagnose, Treat Celiac Disease. (2000, September 27). The Seattle Times, p. 3g. Tselikis, P. (1999). Are physicians in step with a new kind of care? Business & Health, 17(6), 46–50. USA Today. (1999, July 8). Retrieved July 17, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. USA Today. (2000, July 21). News section, p. 18a. Retrieved August 12, 2000, from LexisNexis online database.

556

SPRINGSTON AND LARISCY

Volz, D. (2000). The state of managed care. Marketing Health Services, p. 31. Retrieved September 5, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. Wellner, A. S. (1998). Eat, drink, and be healed. American Demographics, 20(3), 55–60. Werner, L. (1990, August). When crisis strikes use a message action plan. Public Relations Journal, 8, 30–35. Why only the best is good enough. (2000, September 23). The London Times, Features section. Retrieved September 26, 2000, from Lexis-Nexis online database. Wilcox, D. L., Ault, P. H., Agee, W. K., & Cameron, G. T. (2000). Public relations: Strategies and tactics. New York: Longman. Witte, K. (1992). Putting the fear back in fear appeals: The extended parallel process model. Communication Monographs, 59(4), 329–349. Zeisel, S. H. (1999). Regulation of “nutraceuticals.” Science, 285(5435), 1853–1854.

25 Popular Media and Health: Images, Effects, and Institutions Kimberly N. Kline Southern Illinois University Department of Speech Communication

Each year in the USA, the average person is likely to spend about 84 hours reading magazines, 165 hours reading newspapers, 480 hours accessing the Internet (Heath, 1997), and/or 1,248 hours watching television (TV Free America, 2000). The average American is likely to spend less than one hour per year in a doctor’s office.1

As the use of health, illness and medicine to attract audiences and advertising revenue escalates (Radley, Lupton, & Ritter, 1997), advertisement, entertainment, and news media are increasingly becoming saturated with health messages.2 Today most networks 1 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Woodwell, 2000), individuals visited a physician on average of 3.1 times in 1998 (p. 3) and the mean duration for visits at which the physician was seen was 18.8 minutes (p. 13). 2 For clarity, references to “the popular mass media” in this chapter refer to the domains of advertising, news, and entertainment and not to promotional messages. Frankly, this is a somewhat tenuous distinction. The term popular media is a conflation of the terms mass media and popular culture. Certainly, health promotion messages are delivered through mass media channels; but is this popular media? Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney (1998) distinguished between popular culture and mass culture by suggesting that the former “somehow speaks to people’s experience or . . . at least allows people the freedom to interpret the text to fit their experiences” while the latter is “assumed to come from the top down, given to the people whether they like it or not” (p. 38). Arguably, this would suggest that health promotion falls in the category of mass culture, not popular culture. However, Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney’s discussion implied dubious motives to the producers of mass culture, an attribution I do not wish to make to health promoters. Moreover, I believe a case could be made that people can and do interpret health promotion messages to fit their experiences. Essentially, my use of the term popular media as distinguished from promotional media presumes nothing other than the absence of communication identifiably and strategically designed for a definable health campaign goal.

557

558

KLINE

and newspapers have a correspondent who covers medicine and health as a regular beat (Grossberg, Wartella, & Whitney, 1998, p. 84), and health magazines are the second fastest growing category of magazines, escalating from 169 titles in 1988 to 494 titles in 1998 (Magazine Publishers of America, 2000). In May 2001, a quick search of the Internet using the search engine Yahoo with the term health turned up over 12,000 categories, 22,000 sites, and one million web pages. While a good number of these Web sites are created by health promotion specialists seeking to persuade individuals to engage in specific health-related behaviors, others may serve informative, advertising, and entertainment functions. Moreover, there has been no dearth of entertainment programming dedicated to medical dramatizations since “Medic” premiered in the 1950s. Because little doubt remains that the mass media serve as a powerful socializing agent (Croteau & Hoynes, 1997), it is crucial to understand how values, beliefs, and norms associated with health, illness, and medicine are affected by interaction with mass-mediated messages. In this chapter, I review extant research on health in the mass media in terms of images and themes, audience effects, and influential institutional processes. This literature review situates the answer to the question of the relationship between the mass media and health within a discussion of the theoretical and methodological issues that influence research on health in the mass media. HEALTH IMAGES IN THE POPULAR MASS MEDIA

The preponderance of research devoted to the role of the popular mass media in meaningmaking related to health, illness, and medicine uses different methodologies to assess the messages to which people are being exposed. Grounded in the assumption that the mass media have at least some cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral influence, this approach asks the question of what is being said in these depictions. It may seem odd at first to approach the puzzle of mass media influence by looking at messages rather than to individuals themselves. Remember, however, that individuals “bring into [a health seeking] interaction all of the personal knowledge and experiences that define them, including exposure to any number of news, entertainment, and commercial messages coming from sources that vary from television to print to Internet bulletins” (Parrott, 1996, p. 275). It follows that an assessment of the messages to which people are being exposed should help us understand at least some of the knowledge and experiences people have had with regard to health issues. Though newspaper and magazine articles are the texts most commonly considered, scholars interested in mass-mediated health messages have considered a wide range of discourses including pharmaceutical literature (Kaufert & Lock, 1997), books (Hayden, 1997; Markens, 1996), advertisements (Laurence & Weinhouse, 1994; Pratt & Pratt, 1996; Tsao, 1997), radio broadcasts (Miles, 1998), academic journals (Hyde, 1993) and textbooks (Rothblum, 1999), the Internet (McMillan, 1999), and various forms of “elite” culture (Lupton, 1994c, ch. 3). Thus, discourse can be broadly defined as “a patterned system of texts, messages, talk, dialogue or conversation which can both be identified in [textual and oral communication] and located in social structures” (Lupton, 1992, p. 145). Generally speaking, what distinguishes studies from one another is not so much the medium or domain (i.e., advertising, entertainment, news) under consideration, but rather the type of research question asked and the method used to answer the research question.

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

559

Though there are numerous specific methods that can be brought to bear on media texts, most of the extant research adopts either a content-analytic or interpretive/critical3 approach. In theory, these two approaches are generally treated as dichotomous with content analysis conceptualized as descriptive and quantitative and critical work conceptualized as explanatory and qualitative. In practice, however, the lines are often blurred. For example, describing the methodology she used in her book Decoding Abortion Rhetoric, Condit (1990) stated that she “first made a preliminary critical reading of the texts, drawing on standard procedures in rhetorical criticism” (p. 222). From that reading she determined 15 bases of comparison between and among the sets of texts and then she reread the texts using these bases as coding categories. However, she qualified, “this semiquantitative effort [was] not ‘content analysis’ but rather a more rigorous verification of initial critical insights” (p. 223). The remainder of this section is very generally organized around these two methodological approaches, placing my discussion of content-analytic research first, followed by a discussion of critical research to allow me to move from discussing more manifest mass media images to those that are more latent. CONTENT ANALYSIS AND THE INFORMATIONAL VALUE OF HEALTH MESSAGES

Content analysis is the systematic categorization of the symbolic meaning of messages in order to make inferences about phenomena of interest that are not directly observed (Krippendorff, 1980; see also Berelson, 1952, and Holsti, 1969). In particular, the goal of this method is to identify replicable and generalizable thematic categories as reflected in a particular discourse. Consequently, one of the defining characteristics of content analysis is that the thematic or coding categories to be considered are operationalized prior to the actual evaluation using the accepted standards of objectivity associated with scientific inquiry. Singleton, Straits, and Straits (1993) compared coding categories to the closedended questions in survey research. “Instead of giving the questions to respondents who provide answers,” they elucidate, “the content analyst applies them to a document and codes the appropriate category” (p. 382). Coding in this manner accommodates the assignation of mutually exclusive categories that, in turn, allows for quantification and statistical analysis. Assuming that appropriate sampling procedures have been followed, statistical analysis contributes to generalizability. For those interested in a more in-depth discussion of these types of methodological issues, in their article “Content Analysis Reexamined” Nandy and Sarvela (1997) provide a valuable summary punctuated by examples from health messages research. Given the nature of the method, content analyses tend to be more descriptive, summarizing apparent facts, rather than explanatory (attempting to clarify a given interpretation). Moreover, content analysts tend to look at the manifest or surface content of texts (Grossberg et al., 1998) because these elements are less subject to interpretive variation that might undermine reliability and generalizability. So, for example, when Auslander and Gold (1999) conducted a content analysis of disability terminology in Canadian and Israeli newspapers, they established that the use of a person’s disability as a noun (i.e., “the blind”) was disabling language while using the disability as an adjective (i.e., “deaf

3 Though a distinction can be made between interpretive and critical scholarship (detailed later in this chapter), I use the term critical scholarship as a blanket term.

560

KLINE

child”) or using a preposition to separate the person from the disability (i.e., “person with a disability”) was appropriate language (p. 1398). Because information would presumably be valuable only in as much as it is apparent to the reader, this method lends itself to assessing the information value of mass-mediated health discourse. It is essentially taken for granted that the mass media are a source of information for individuals. But what kind of information do they give us? On one hand, given our culture’s heavy emphasis on science as a source of knowledge, we typically think of information as a collection of facts or data derived from scientific study. Yet most people do not read publications like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) or the New England Journal of Medicine in order to access the original results of a scientific study (though these, too, are forms of mass media), relying instead on news sources or magazines to “translate” medical jargon into understandable language (Lupton & Tulloch, 1996; Parrott & Condit, 1996). On the other hand, information about health threats and health practices is not solely a product of scholarly or scientific research and people rarely make health-related decisions based purely on the pathology and prognosis of a particular health threat. Individuals also need information about institutional issues that may impede or expand choices. Again, however, individuals rarely have direct access to the activities of governments nor to the those of legal, corporate, and nonprofit entities, activities that will most likely impinge on health-related decision making. This information, too, must be rendered intelligible and accessible through mass-mediated sources. As important as the presentation of apparent facts about health issues, threats, or behaviors is, it is also the case that people do not make health decisions based exclusively on evidence-based reasoning. Rather, people look to other individuals for clues about appropriate and/or desirable health practices. In other words, the informational value of a discourse may also be influenced by the depiction of role models who provide “‘rules for living’ or implicit instructions on how to do something” (Grossberg et al., 1998, p. 150). Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977) suggests that people often learn by observing what other individuals do rather than by their own trial-and-error actions. Stiff (1994) pointed out that “though more rudimentary modes of learning are rooted in the positive and negative effects that behaviors produce, high-risk activities . . . may not afford participants the chance to recover from the negative effect of an error” (p. 238). Thus, observational learning provides information about the consequences that are associated with particular behaviors. Tones (1996) further intimated that “the normative impact or incidental effects of mass media are a particular concern for health promotion [because] although the presentation of various products or activities through mass media may not directly influence behavior, they may well ‘norm send’, i.e., suggest to people that particular unhealthy or healthy practices are common and acceptable” (p. 30). Notably, role models do not have to be “real” people; fictional characters can become “media role models, unobtrusively teaching the viewing public about [a] disease, especially the psychological and social difficulties it engenders” (Sharf & Freimuth, 1993, p. 145). Thus, we may tend to think of news as information, relegating the content of entertainment to fiction and advertisements to persuasion, but even entertainment and advertising provide information about health, illness, and medicine. As Sharf and Freimuth (1993) suggested, entertainment television is an unobtrusive source that provides people with health information in the form of narrative portrayals of illness (p. 141). Information, then, is a product of a variety of mass-mediated discussions and those who analyze mass media texts often do so to assess their information value in terms of relevance, accuracy, and sufficiency. Research projects asking such questions have typically responded well to content-analytic methods of textual analysis.

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

561

The most basic and obvious critique of the mass media was that it promoted products and behaviors that undermine health. Bolstering common knowledge that the mass media are blazoned with images of unhealthy products such as alcohol, tobacco, and fast foods, one content analysis of food advertisements in African American–oriented magazines demonstrated a surplus of alcoholic beverage advertisements—between 46% and 62% of over 1,700 ads in Ebony and Essence magazines—in contrast to a paucity of advertisements for fruits and vegetables—less than 3% of the ads in each magazine (Pratt & Pratt, 1996; see also Pratt, Pratt, Montague, Salazar, & Graves, 1996). More insightfully, though, most of the content-analytic research sought to assess the informational value of media messages about various health-related topics. Researchers who conducted content analyses of popular health media have consistently found that the information value of health messages was often seriously compromised by inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and omissions, as well as inappropriate role modeling. Inferior Information

Less common than might be assumed, some mass media research exposed factual inaccuracies in health information. For example, one study of breast cancer and mammography popular media articles found that, of the 113 citations to a scientific study, 60 were traceable to the original report and, in these 60 citations, 42 content-based inaccuracies were found (see also Carlson, Li, & Holm, 1997; Moyer, Greener, Beauvais, & Salovey, 1995). Another study (Gannon & Stevens, 1998) revealed numerous contradictions in the reporting of the side effects of Hormone Replacement Therapy for symptoms associated with menopause. Perhaps a more common finding than inaccuracy, however, was that mass-mediated health information was potentially misleading because of the manner in which the issue was framed. The concept of framing refers to the manner in which writers represent a particular story (see, for example, Andsager & Powers, 1999). As Wallack, Dorfman, Jernigan, & Themba (1993) pointed out, “Everything cannot be said about every issue in every story in the short space of a newspaper article or television broadcast. Certain things are included in the package, while other aspects are left out” (p. 68). The way in which certain aspects of issues were selected and emphasized in recounting led to a number of different types of framing dilemmas. One framing issue frequently commented upon was the incomplete coverage or avoidance of certain health topics. For example, when over-the-counter (OTC) drugs were advertised on television, information about potential harmful effects, drug performance, and drug quality was often provided; on the other hand, information about drug research, medical rationale, safety, and ingredients was typically neglected (Tsao, 1997). As the author of this study remonstrated, by leaving out relevant information, OTC drug ads focused “on the concern of what the drug will do for the consumer, rather than on the reasons why the drug should be ingested” (Tsao, 1997, p. 186). Likewise, information available via the Internet about female urinary incontinence was mostly correct, yet few sites provided comprehensive information (Sandvik, 1999). Though a number of studies had been published showing that oral contraceptives posed no increased risk of breast cancer nor did they protect against ovarian and endometrial cancer, major U.S. newspapers “essentially ignored these findings,” reporting instead on “inconclusive studies that emphasized the oral contraceptive–breast cancer link” (Lebow, 1999, p. 453). Possibly the greatest sin of omission, however, was the disregard for the health information needs of various sociodemographic groups. So, for example, accounts of illicit drug use during pregnancy ignored the informational needs of middle- and upper-class women (Kline, 1996); on the

562

KLINE

topic of smoking during pregnancy, the overlooked audience was young, poorly educated women (Condit, 1996). In an analysis of Spanish-language television coverage of health news, Subervi-V´elez (1999) discovered that on a scale from 0 to 9, with higher numbers indicating more Latino inclusiveness, the average score from six major cities was 1.33 (though he did note that most health stories included at least one reference indicating explicit relevance to the Latino community). In other cases, the coverage of a topic was not merely incomplete; it was avoided altogether. In one of the few studies to assess health representations in foreign language mass media produced in the United States, Vargas and dePyssler (1999) determined that U.S. Latino newspapers distributed in six major metropolitan cities barely touched on the subject of disease prevention or public health. Only 71 stories in their sample discussed these topics—the authors looked at nearly 2,400 stories! Additionally, these authors found that there was sparse coverage of economic, sociopolitical, and policy information needed to “help Latinos understand and act on structural matters that impact them as a group” (p. 197). Concurrently, Spanish-language television did not cover Latino advocacy groups (Subervi-V´elez, 1999). Ultimately, in cases where information was incomplete or absent, the problem was not so much that the information provided was inaccurate or even problematic, rather the problem was that additional information about the subject was needed in order for individuals to make truly informed health decisions. Misrepresentation (i.e., over- or underreporting) was especially commonplace when reporting about the prevalence of certain health threats. For instance, deaths from tobacco use and heart disease have been underrepresented in print news media while deaths from illicit drug use, motor vehicles, and toxic agents have been overrepresented (Frost, Frank, & Maiback, 1997). In U.S. women’s magazines, it was breast and skin cancers that received the greater proportion of reporting, with lung and colon cancers being neglected (Gerlach, Marino, & Hoffman-Goetz, 1997). In Canadian women’s magazines, the percentage of articles on breast, cervical, and skin cancers was higher than the actual death rate from these diseases, though the percentage of reports about lung cancer was much lower than the actual death rate (Hoffman-Goetz & MacDonald, 1999). In Spanish-language and bilingual newspapers, the lion’s share of reporting went to HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, and cancers with little reporting on cardiovascular/heart diseases, diabetes, drug/alcohol addiction, and obesity (Vargas & dePyssler, 1999). Another framing issue was the manner in which competing messages were juxtaposed against one another. To some extent, the presence of competing messages may be a function of too many opinions, all purporting to hold the key to good health. In their analysis of newspaper discussions of prenatal care, Daniels and Parrott (1996) found that one of the most significant problems with the discourse was competing “dos” and “don’ts” during pregnancy. But most of the time, the problem of competing messages was related to the presence of health-promoting discourse juxtaposed against health-denigrating messages. For example, with regard to the issue of smoking, between 1987 and 1994 African American women’s magazines included only 9 articles on tobacco-related cancers—yet these magazines had 1,477 tobacco advertisements (Hoffman-Goetz, Gerlach, Marino, & Mills, 1997)! Likewise, newspaper and magazine articles on passive smoking typically cited scientific studies that found that passive smoking is harmful, but these articles also implied research was controversial by routinely quoting “tobacco industry spokespersons discussing vague methodological faults with scientific studies” (Kennedy & Bero, 1999, p. 259). On the topic of obesity, Rothblum (1999) found that the mass media often reported that diets do not work or that obesity is genetic, suggesting that weight is not under personal control; these same articles would conclude that all an individual needed to do to control his or her weight was to maintain a stricter diet or to demonstrate more self-control.

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

563

Negative Role Models

In the past decade, there have been many studies (Terre, Drabman, & Speer, 1991; Turow & Coe, 1993) and published reviews of studies conducted to assess how health behaviors are depicted in the popular media (duPre, 2000; Neuendorf, 1990; Signorielli, 1998; Turow & Coe, 1993) as well as a singularly comprehensive review of research up to 1993, a book by Signorielli (1993) called Mass Media Images and Impact on Health. In general, this research revealed a number of similar themes. First, research indicated that characters on television shows and in movies consistently role model unhealthy behaviors. One common observation was that characters in popular shows tended to overeat and, more to the point, the foods they overate were high-calorie, high-sodium, and high-fat foods that did not meet established nutritional standards. Characters also tended to exhibit unhealthy eating habits such as snacking or eating on the go and eating for social reasons rather than sitting down for a regular meal. Strikingly, though eating habits that might contribute to weight gain and/or obesity were pervasive, people depicted in popular media tended to exhibit an ideal body type; that is, women were thin, men were muscular, and all were fat-free. Thus, though pathological dieting and exercise behaviors were not necessarily overtly role modeled, depictions set the stage for the barrage of dieting and muscle enhancement products (as well as many other products presumably designed to make a person more attractive). Expanding on critiques of ideal body type portrayals, Wilson and Blackhurst (1999) censured food advertisements in women’s magazines for using role models (especially fashion models and beautiful celebrities) to normalize body dissatisfaction in confluence with strategies that glorified thinness, set unrealistic and unobtainable standards of beauty, and encouraged rigid dieting. Their concern was that such depictions could “contribute to social norms that place girls and women at risk for the development of eating disorders” (p. 120). Another common observation was that behaviors like alcohol use and cigarette smoking were demonstrated by characters in health-threatening ways. For instance, alcoholic beverages were consumed more than any other beverage; characters “[drank] alcohol twice as many times as they [drank] coffee or tea, 14 times as frequently as soft drinks, and more than 15 times as frequently as water” (Signorielli, 1998, p. 104). Moreover, whereas some shows included dialogues that mentioned the harmful effects of drinking, in most shows characters rarely refused a drink or indicated disapproval of drinking. Mathios, Avery, and Shanahan (1998) reported that adolescents who drank alcohol were shown with negative personality traits; the problem was that adult characters who might serve as role models were depicted more positively—though still drinking. Similarly, though cigarette smoking was not common on television shows (unlike feature films wherein smoking was more frequent), Signorielli (1998) noted that the few characters who did smoke exhibited positive traits that might make them fairly attractive role models. McIntosh, Bazzini, Smith, and Wayne (1998) found that popular films depicted smokers as more romantically and sexually active and also as somewhat more intelligent than nonsmokers. Not only has media research revealed positive role modeling of health-threatening behaviors, but such representations tended to downplay possible negative effects as well. Representations of sexual behavior spotlighted individuals who had sexual encounters with multiple partners (generally considered risky) but rarely mentioned the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD) or unplanned pregnancy. Likewise, in the study by McIntosh et al. (1998) mentioned above, smokers were depicted as having positive traits, but films ignored negative consequences and correlates of smoking such as ill health, low socioeconomic status, and aggressive behavior. If any area of popular programming has shifted, however, it has been in the area of identifying negative outcomes of

564

KLINE

health-threatening behaviors, especially with regard to sexual behavior (duPre, 2000; Neuendorf, 1990; Signorielli, 1998) and alcohol use (Signorielli, 1998). In part, some of this shift may be attributable to the work of lobbyists who have proactively approached Hollywood producers with appeals to incorporate more health-conscious dialogues and storylines (see discussion below). Content analysis has been useful in pointing out the informational deficits and defects in a variety of media. However, many contemporary scholars of health-related popular mass media have expressed concern that content analysis is not well-suited to assess social, political, and economic influences on health, illness, and medical issues, nor does it accommodate attempts to address the ways in which health discourses constitute, reflect, and re-create cultural ideologies and hegemonies. For example, commenting on the sparse coverage of economic issues related to breast cancer in women’s magazines, Andsager and Powers (1999) lauded these magazines for, among other things, offering women information about how to reduce their risk for breast cancer and for encouraging women to engage in breast self-examinations. Given similar findings with regard to what was said, in my (Kline, 1999) critical analysis of popular media accounts of breast self-examination I interpreted the findings within the context of a hegemonic ideology that emphasized personal responsibility to the neglect of political, economic, and social influences and solutions. CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND THE IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY OF HEALTH MESSAGES

Most media analysts recognize that the mass media are not just suppliers of information but an institution that wields at least some power to influence emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. I have already alluded to the influential nature of role modeling in the mass media. More to the point, contemporary media scholars acknowledge that power of the mass media extends well beyond simple role modeling and into the realm of politics and ideology. Most contemporary scholars theorize that, in part, the mass media serve an agenda-setting function in which repeated coverage of certain issues in the mass media focuses attention on some issues and deflects attention away from others, effectively setting the agenda for public debate (McCombs, 1994). Hazelton (1997) explained that “By controlling the type and extent of information available on an issue, the media significantly influences the parameters within which points of view are solicited and possible solutions proposed” (p. 74). With regard to health and medicine specifically, Turow and Coe (1993) contended that “television’s major contribution to public perceptions of health lies in outlining the accepted and the contested options for professional health care and in repeating dramatically, through news and entertainment, lessons about for whom society should care, why, when, and how” (p. 130). They go on to conclude that, “It is to this shared national agenda that politicians most strongly feel a need to respond publicly when formulating public policy” (p. 130). So, for example, when representatives of the managed care industry claimed that legislative debate about the need for government regulation was largely due to overly negative media coverage, Brodie, Brady, and Altman (1998) set out to assess the merit of this claim by analyzing print and broadcast coverage of managed care. They found that the “vast majority of media coverage [was] neutral, but the most visible media sources—broadcast and special series—[were] more negative and focused on more graphic examples of problems” (p. 22), thus partially supporting the claim.

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

565

Perez and Dionisopoulos (1995) conducted an intensive rhetorical analysis of the Reagan administration’s response to the AIDS crisis that began during the first of his two terms, as well as the report issued by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop five years after the onset of the crisis. They concluded that throughout the crisis, former President Reagan and his administration treated the crisis as a political problem about which they chose to remain silent rather than a public health problem requiring action. As the authors pointed out, among other things “there was little visible effort in the form of committees or task forces to deal with AIDS,” “there was no mention of the disease or warnings concerning its dangers in any of the State of the Union Addresses delivered from 1981 to 1987” (p. 20), and “the First Lady’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign . . . made no mention of AIDS” (p. 21). However, the release of The Surgeon General’s Report on AIDS in 1986 “served to alter irreversibly the socio-political environment in which the AIDS crisis was discussed” (p. 30). In short, Koop’s report shifted the public discussion from AIDS as a political problem to AIDS as a public health crisis, raising the ante of AIDS as a social issue. As these examples demonstrate, by assessing the content of mass media, we may identify which issues are being promoted, the range of viewpoints depicted, and the solutions being proposed. Moreover, such a project allows us to consider the implications if public policy follows from these representations. Other media theorists conceptualize the mass media as having more substantial power; more substantial, that is, in the sense that it is more penetrating. In other words, the mass media (especially television) does not just set the agenda for which issues will receive public attention, the mass media constitutes, maintains, and perpetuates—that is, cultivates—dominant cultural ideologies (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994). Discourse does not describe the material world; rather, people use symbolic constructs to give meaning to their world. In this way, discourse reflects, constitutes, and perpetuates particular meanings or social understandings. Explaining the constructionist approach to the representation of meaning through language, Hall (1997) cautioned that “we must not confuse the material world, where things and people exist, and the symbolic practices and processes through which representation, meaning and language operate” (p. 25). More specifically, Lupton (2000) summarized the constructionist perspective with regard to health issues thus: For most social constructionists, the types of knowledges that are developed and brought to bear upon health, illness, and medical care may be regarded as assemblages of beliefs that are created through human interaction and preexisting meanings. This perspective contrasts with the traditional view of medicine, which sees disease as being located in the body as a physical object or physical state that can be objectively identified and treated as a physiological condition by scientific medical knowledge. (p. 50)

Essentially, meanings associated with health, illness, and medicine are not fixed and static entities waiting to be discovered and documented but are a function of the complex and dynamic personal and social values of all interactants. A critical perspective assumes that these “personal and societal values . . . must be considered and made explicit if illness and health-care problems are to be satisfactorily dealt with” (Conrad & Kern, 1990, p. 4). Though often used interchangeably, interpretive and critical approaches differ with regard to the intent of the analysis. Burrell and Morgan (1979) described the interpretive paradigm as “informed by a concern to understand the world as it is, to understand the fundamental nature of the social world at the level of subjective experience” (p. 28). Thus, for example, Hyde’s (1993) intensive deconstruction of an anonymous essay published in

566

KLINE

the Journal of the American Medical Association discerned a discourse that served to invite public discussion about the issue of euthanasia. Hyde concluded that “with the questions that it raises by way of its uncertainty and ambiguity, the story [in the essay] opens up a space for deliberation and calls for a response” (p. 216). Hyde thus provides a way of understanding this discourse without necessarily seeking to challenge the representations therein. On the other hand, Burrell and Morgan (1979) situated critical theory within a radical humanist paradigm noting that the approach has much in common with that of the interpretive paradigm, but that “its frame of reference is committed to a view of society which emphasizes the importance of overthrowing or transcending the limitations of existing social arrangements” (p. 32). Rather than trying to describe a discourse or to improve strategic communication, the goal of the critical scholar is to disrupt our beliefs about particular practices or institutions (Toth & Heath, 1992, p. 7). With regard to health and illness, Conrad and Kern (1990) divulged that “A critical perspective is one that does not consider the present fundamental organization of medicine as sacred and inviolable” (p. 4). More to the point, a critical methodology involves challenging present arrangements, identifying the ways that discursive choices perpetuate potentially oppressive power relations (Lupton, 1994d). Furthermore, such scholarship is meant to be confrontational (Toth & Heath, 1992) with the hope that the challenge will lead to positive transformation. A critical perspective, then, “examines what is, not as something given or static, but as something out of which change and growth can emerge” (Conrad & Kern, 1990, p. 4). Scholars interested in the political and ideological function of popular media often seek to identify the meanings and ideologies related to health, illness, and medicine that are fostered by the mass media; to explicate the way the media constitute and reflect meanings related to health, illness, and medicine; and to pinpoint the hegemonic arrangements that are instantiated by mass media representations. Answers to these types of questions have typically been sought using critical approaches to media analysis. Labeled discourse analysis, close-textual analysis, and rhetorical analysis, a critical approach to analyzing text is better thought of not as one particular method, but as a general approach to understanding human interaction that encompasses a number of different methods. The elements of the text to which the critic will attend may be elements suggested by formal methods (Brock, Scott, & Chesebro, 1990; Foss, 1996). One such strategy, metaphoric analysis, deserves specific mention given its ideological potency. Within an overview of the substantial literature on metaphors and health/illness discourse was Lupton’s (1994c) acknowledgment that “There is a reflexive relationship between metaphorical discourse applied to illness and disease: just as other concepts or things are used to describe disease, so is disease used as a metaphor” (p. 55). Thus, health and illness may be rendered meaningful through the use of metaphor, as when cancer is described as an invasion (Sontag, 1990), just as social issues may obtain meaning from health analogies (i.e., communism as cancer) (Lupton, 1994c, p. 55). More typically, the elements scrutinized are themes generated through numerous rereadings of the text. In contrast to Auslander and Gold’s (1999) content analysis of disability terminology (mentioned above), Allen and Nairn (1997) revealed that they approached their interpretive study of media depictions of mental illness by “closely reading and re-reading the articles” (p. 377). They go on to divulge that “no predetermined analytic categories were specified other than mental illness/sufferers of mental illness. All descriptions and characterizations of people with mental illness were noted in order to gain a detailed picture of how those suffering from such illnesses are depicted in these reports. Through this process, broad categories such as ‘dangerousness’ emerged. The analysts

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

567

then worked with the material in each broad category, to distinguish patterns of words, images and usage through which the effect is created” (Allen & Nairn, 1997, p. 377). Presumably, because they are reading texts intensively and with critical intent, researchers can notice themes or types of representation that are not obvious to the lay person. In other words, the critic is able to isolate what Hall (1997) refered to as the “preferred reading” of a text. Hall contended that “rather than a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ meaning, what we need to ask is, ‘Which of the many meanings in this image does the [media source] mean to privilege?’” (p. 228). So, for example, when Clarke (1999) described the process of assessing latent meanings in popular media about prostate cancer, she pointed out that it was important to notice the subtle associations made in the article, like the linking of prostate cancer with sports through frequent mentions of men noticing a prostate problem while showering after playing tennis or other sports. She also suggested that it was helpful to pay attention to the issues that were not discussed or “silences.” Thus, unlike portrayals of breast cancer, which have focused on personal issues, prostate cancer articles offered little discussion of personal issues “such as feelings about the self or emotional reactions to diagnosis” (Clarke, 1999, p. 65). In contrast to the content analyst’s primary goal of describing manifest content, critical scholars are looking for latent meanings submerged in the text. One of the ideological functions of a text is to make the “social seem ‘natural,’” advised Hazelton (1997), enticing the reader “by an apparent ‘obviousness’ and ‘naturalness’, to step into the reading position constructed in the text” (p. 76). The project of the critic, then, is to turn a discriminating eye toward identifying the discursive strategies not obvious—that is, those that are latent. Moreover, critical scholars often point out that their goal is to meet neither the standards of generalizability nor replicability; there is no attempt to meet the standards of objectivity. In fact, the hallmark of critical work is its subjective nature. That is, because the point of this approach is to prompt individuals to challenge the obvious thinking about what a given text means, original and unique interpretations are essential and privileged. This does not mean, however, that critical scholarship is idiosyncratic. The goal of critical analyses is to provide a well-reasoned argument for a particular understanding of the text, an argument grounded in textual and contextual evidence. It is incumbent, then, on the researcher to craft a clear and robust persuasive argument in favor of his or her chosen method and findings. Health-Related Ideological Themes

A common thread in critical analysis was the identification of the ideological themes that are constituted, maintained, and perpetuated by health discourses. These themes included the professionalizing and technologizing of health care whereby the contemporary medical establishment laid claim to legitimate power in the realm of health and illness, the medicalization of the body in order to expand the purview of medical establishment control, the individualization of health and illness, which fostered condemnation of those who succumbed to a health threat, and the moralization of illness, which allowed illness sufferers to be stigmatized based on their disease. Overall, research suggests that mass media portrayals are, at best, inappropriate and unethical and, at worst, socially, mentally, and physically threatening. Professionalization. So well-accepted are contemporary medical practices that most people forget that such practices are relatively new and that throughout history various cultures have relied on what we today generally refer to as alternative, lay, or folk remedies

568

KLINE

(i.e., herbalism, homoepathy, acupuncture, etc.). Moreover, as we have become more entrenched in the biomedical paradigm congruent with contemporary medical practice (in spite of pressure from many health promoters and practitioners to acknowledge a more biopsychosocial perspective), an ideology of uncertainty reduction has pervaded health and illness discourse (Babrow & Kline, 2000). For example, popular discourse about breast self-examination “commonly suggests that women can use the procedure to detect cancer, that such exams can detect cancer in its early stages, and that detecting it in early stages reduces the threat of breast cancer, and hence that BSE reduces uncertainties associated with breast cancer” (p. 1806). In short, disease processes are thought to be understandable with certainty and amenable to definitive diagnoses and cures—diagnoses and cures provided by legitimate medical authorities. Analysts distressed that the preeminence of medical authority constitutes a medical hegemony (see Foucalt, 1973) have focused a number of their studies on the way in which representations legitimize the authority of practitioners schooled in institutionally accepted medical practices. Thus, a common indictment was that “purported medical-based knowledge [was] inevitably framed as authoritative and definitive—as timeless truth” (Cheek, 1997, p. 195). In particular, Kilgore (1996) maintained that articles about cancers of the reproductive system “cast medical treatment as a kind of ‘magic’—an amazing miracle that solves an unsolvable problem” (p. 252). Critics were troubled with the tendency to cite purported experts rather than those who have suffered from a particular problem, activists, or health care providers who might offer less mainstream explanations (see also Andsager & Smiley, 1998; Powers, 1999). Likewise, some scholars lamented the reliance on a biomedical paradigm with its corollary emphasis on technological and pharmacological solutions to health problems. Often noted was the conspicuous technologizing of pregnancy and childbirth (Beaulieu & Lippman, 1995; Daniels & Parrott, 1996; Sterk, 1996). Also suggested as contributing to the professionalization of health provision was the mass media’s disregard of folk remedies. In their analysis of Latino newspapers, Vargas and dePyssler (1999) “probed for the presence of editorial content about folk or alternative medicines” (p. 198), finding that surprisingly few stories (10/2,386) related to folk medicine. The authors’ interest in folk medicine coverage was prompted by public arguments that such practices impede Latino health, not to see if these important cultural practices were being fairly and consistently discussed. In other words, most media analysts maintained that representations encourage a distinction between “traditional” versus “alternative” medical practices, helping to confer legitimacy to the former. In response to arguments that the mass media contribute significantly to the maintenance of a medical hegemony, Gabe and Bury (1996) countered that this medical dominance has been, in fact, undermined by the ubiquity of the mass media because the media “provide a platform for experts to express their conflicting points of view” (p. 455). It may be that the media cite primarily medical experts with regard to an issue, but “divisions and conflicts once hidden within medicine are now likely to surface” effectively shattering any dominant image of a unified medical establishment. Medicalization. While the concept of professionalization suggests that the domain of health care has been claimed by an elite collective of medical professionals, the concept of medicalization suggests that the medical institution strives to broaden its reach. As one of the first social theorists to comment on the concept of medicalization, Zola (1972) defined the term as “making medicine and the labels ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’ relevant to an ever increasing part of human existence” (p. 487). Distressed that medical care has been

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

569

portrayed as overwhelmingly appropriate and nonpolitical (i.e., where governmental and corporate interests are not implicated), Zola censoriously notes that “If anything can be shown in some way to affect the workings of the body and to a lesser extent the mind, then it can be labeled an ‘illness’ itself or jurisdictionally ‘a medical problem’” (p. 495). Taking Zola’s lead, a number of media analysts have sought to recount the rhetorical strategies used to extend the reach of medicalization. Reviewing contemporary pharmaceutical literature, Kaufert and Lock (1997) found that menopausal women were shown as “smiling, glowing with fitness, with well-maintained teeth, hair and skin . . . sometimes suggest[ing] a discrete but well-enjoyed sexuality” (p. 84). Notably, these images were used to sell hormone treatments, suggesting that the normal process of menopause is a pathological state requiring medical intervention. Similarly, the authors of a study that assessed depictions of menopause in popular magazine articles claimed that, among other rhetorical strategies, “the use of experts from physician-run menopause clinics shift[ed] the attitude of these articles toward the medicalization of menopause” (Carlson et al., 1997, p. 562; see also Kalbfleish, Bonnell, & Harris, 1996). Most of the studies that critiqued medicalizing discourse referred to the need to pathologize women’s normal bodily processes in order to claim medical jurisdiction. For instance, Chrisler and Levy (1990) found that magazine coverage of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) stereotyped women suffering from PMS as maladjusted and as exhibiting abnormal behavior, a finding later corroborated by Markens (1996) in her analysis of popular magazines and self-help books. More recently, Gannon and Stevens (1998) reported that popular press articles between 1981 and 1994 about menopause were “consistent with a patriarchal ideology in which women are determined by their biology (hormones); the experience that transforms women from being fertile and ‘sexy’ to being infertile and elegantly aged, is labeled sick, bad, and abnormal” (p. 12). Critiques of the medicalization of normal bodily processes tend to assign blame to a nebulous medical establishment, though Markens (1996) describes the manner in which narrative personal accounts of women’s experiences with PMS have “figure[d] prominently in the rhetorical legitimation of PMS as a medical phenomenon” (p. 42). The goal of her contention is not to suggest that women’s experiences should be denigrated or ignored, but rather to suggest that feminist activists hoping to encourage social acknowledgment of women’s biological experiences keep in mind that mass media portrayals often portray only some of women’s experiences. That is, “processes of mediation and selection affect how PMS is described; consequently, this affects medical classification, as well as medical and lay understandings, of the relation between women’s bodies and women’s experiences” (p. 55). Hodgetts and Chamberlain (1999) analyzed two health documentaries in response to claims that popular discourses no longer foster medicalization. They realized that depictions of lay people (i.e., patients) questioning doctors or treatments’ effectiveness may have invoked challenges to medicalization. The authors contended that the challenges are neutralized with a variety of rhetorical strategies, so that the medicalized perspective remains dominant. Clarke (1991) asserted in her study of popular representations of cancer, heart disease, and AIDS that health policy is based on one of three models—the medical model, the lifestyle model, or the political model. Clarke posited that “to the extent that medical and life-style models are promoted, political economy models are not” and that “individual, medically based action is likely to be taken rather than collective social action, which means that social structural inequities will not be improved” (Clarke, 1991, p. 304). In short, continued attention to and dependence on medical models for addressing health and illness issues deflects attention from other strategies for resolution.

570

KLINE

Individual versus Societal Orientation. Castigating health promotion activities, Becker (1986) alleged that “the most disturbing aspect of the contemporary health promotion movement [is] its tendency to locate the responsibility for the cause and the cure of health problems in the individual” (p. 18). With regard to breast cancer prevention, Yadlon (1997) described the manner in which the media emphasized two controllable risk factors, diet and reproduction, over those that were not controllable such as family history, age, and the onset of menses and menopause. She argued that breast cancer discourse, because it “tacitly (and sometimes not so tacitly) implies that the way to prevent the disease is to follow dominant codes of femininity” (p. 648), is doubly guilt producing, implying that women are a) responsible for developing breast cancer and b) responsible for not acting in a feminine manner. In other words, “one contracts breast cancer because one has not made the ‘proper’ dietary and reproductive choices” (p. 648). In fact, based on the research, the charge of “victim-blaming” was especially prevalent in discussion of female cancer depictions (Kilgore, 1996; Kline, 1999). In part, the concern with an individualizing approach is that it may reinforce the castigation of individuals for health problems over which they have little or no control. For example, Rothblum’s (1999) analysis of 20 undergraduate abnormal psychology textbooks revealed that, in addition to suggesting that weight loss treatments were effective and that the health risks associated with obesity were well-accepted (premises Rothblum rejects), textbook authors consistently implied (or stated outright) that overweight individuals were responsible for their weight problem. Troubled that such victim-blaming contributed to the stigmatization of people who are overweight, she pointed out that young women, the predominant readers of these texts, are the most likely group of individuals to be (pathologically) concerned with their weight. Moreover, she admonished, such representations undermine the possibility of a paradigm shift in medical research that might contribute to appropriate and effective strategies for dealing with obesity. Becker’s (1986) impassioned challenge to traditional health care promotion activities reflects a common concern that focusing on the individual deflects attention from other ways of approaching (i.e., defining, preventing, diagnosing, treating, etc.) health issues. “This ‘life style’ approach” Becker contended, “enables us to ignore the more difficult, but at least equally important, problem of the social environment, which both creates some life styles and inhibits the initiation and/or maintenance of others” (p. 19; see also Kline, 1999). Thus, in her critique of the “lifestyle” approach evidenced in news accounts of the cholesterol debate, Lupton (1994b) chidingly remarked that: despite the opportunity presented by the controversial nature of the Finnish study for news media actors to construct a critical approach to the didactic nature and individualistic focus of health promotion discourses centering on lifestyle change, and to draw attention to the possible structural reasons leading to individuals developing coronary heart disease, the debate about cholesterol was overwhelmingly framed within the narrow bounds of an arcane ‘medical controversy’ and struggle over medical legitimacy rather than a political issue concerning the state’s responsibility for challenging the vested interests supporting ill-health” (p. 337).

More proactively, Dorfman and Wallack (1993) champion the use of counterads to shift “attention from the person to the attending social, political, and physical environment” (p. 717). Moralization of Disease. Becker (1986) also alleged that the “individualresponsibility approach has helped to establish ‘health’ as the New Morality by which

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

571

character and moral worth are judged” (p. 19). Insofar as diseases are thought to be biological threats that exist independently of the body (unlike illness that is typically understood as the subjective experience of a disease), diseases are not generally regarded as subject to ethical evaluation. Yet numerous critical studies have illustrated the manner in which “diseases are given meanings and carry attributions in the media” (Clarke, 1992, p. 115). So, for example, cancer might be associated with the forfeiture of the moral self by the invasion of an evil predator, a heart attack described as an “objective, morally neutral event” (Clarke, 1992, p. 115) and AIDS portrayed as “morally repugnant” (Clarke, 1992, p. 117). Clarke is not the only one to notice the apparent negative morality associated with the HIV/AIDS issue. Gwyn (1999) compared the morality associated with different diseases, describing how a brief spate of articles about necrotizing fasciitis (often referred to as a flesh-eating bacteria) utilized a military metaphor in a manner paradoxical to the way in which this same metaphor had been used to frame discussions of HIV/AIDS. He observed that the “representation of the HIV virus [sic], as an invasive, alien and murderous entity can only impart upon its sufferers, or ‘carriers’ (and note the implicit moral rebuke in the term) the stigma of alien and destructive intent.” Further, he reasoned, because defense against such a monstrous enemy is justified and obligatory, the military metaphor “provokes the cry for institutionalized marginalization and repression” against the “perceived ‘carriers’ of the virus” (p. 337). Yet even though the press wholeheartedly embraced the military metaphor when discussing the outbreak of necrotizing fasciitis, “patients were not subject to any of the accusations of complicity reserved for people with HIV/AIDS, and blame for the outbreak was deflected” to government agencies (p. 338). Yet another examination of HIV/AIDS revealed that negative moral attributions were accomplished by vigorous coverage of a situation where an HIV positive physician had unknowingly had contact with a number of pregnant patients (Brown, Chapman, & Lupton, 1996). Though “expert consensus held that the women were at ‘infinitesimal risk’ of acquiring HIV. . . the news media’s framing of risk [had] more to do with its reproduction of moral outrage components than with ‘scientific’ notions of calculable risk” (p. 1685). A more recent account (Lupton, 1999) indicated that moral judgments of those with HIV/AIDS were based primarily on how they acted once infected rather than on how they became infected in the first place. Obviously, these negative moral attributions have significant social ramifications, especially for victims of HIV/AIDS. It is also the case that negative moral attributions can have very pragmatic public health effects if, as Lupton (1994a) argued in another study, condoms acquire the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS though mass media depictions associating the two. On a different topic and using a different approach to assess the morality associated with a particular disease, Lantz and Booth (1998) contrasted the manner in which images of breast cancer were associated with article text. They found that articles tended to include alarming statistics regarding incidence trends, a core list of risk factors, and dramatic stories about and/or pictures of young women; the implication was that “nontraditional women experience pathological repercussions within their bodies and, in turn, may be responsible for our current epidemic of breast cancer” (p. 916). The efforts of critical scholars are commendable for bringing to light latent ideological and hegemonic forces at work in mass-mediated discourse. Yet (and I admit my own complicity here) there has been a tendency for critical scholars to dichotomize the relevant players in these situations. It seems that critical research consistently posits a world wherein it is “us” against “them”— individuals against the establishment. Challenges to the status quo are eminently necessary for any type of positive social change; however, positioning players as always oppositional

572

KLINE

deflects attention away from the ways in which people in a “culturally diverse, materially differentiated, plurivocal democracy” go about negotiating concordance (Condit, 1994, p. 215). POPULAR MASS MEDIA AUDIENCES

Though it is reasonable and valid for researchers to “investigate media content as a gauge of social norms, values, and the interests of society in general” (Croteau & Hoynes, 1997, p. 136), it is also the case that these are inferential assessments of potential effects on both society and the individual. Media audiences are not merely passive dupes, powerless in the grip of a media monster; rather audiences are active interpreters of texts. In order to assess audience influence of popular media, some researchers try to tap audience perceptions directly. Brodie, Kjellson, Hoff, and Parker (1999) used a telephone survey to assess the perceived effectiveness and relevance of various media as sources of health information and found that African Americans and Latinos felt that the media failed to cover culturally relevant health topics and under- or misrepresented minorities (Brodie et al., 1999). Lupton and Tulloch (1996) also questioned media audience members about their perceptions. In their study, teenagers reported valuing differently the HIV/AIDS-related content of various media representations. For these teenagers, television conveyed the visual dimension of HIV/AIDS as well as the “shock-horror” tactics of health promotion; television drama, news, documentaries, and magazines depicted biographical and fictional personalized narratives; print media provided detail; and print and radio provided anonymity for the viewer/listener. In a slightly different approach to questioning audience members, Backstrom and Robins (1998) surveyed/interviewed state health departments, state or substate regional hospital associations, and the chairs of state House and Senate health committees to assess member perceptions of AIDS media reports and media impact on policymaking. State health departments were perceived to be the leading policymakers, then elected leaders. “AIDS policy makers rated media as only moderately influential in setting AIDS policy, but this was at least partly because the media generally adopted the approach to controlling the disease that health processionals advocated” (p. 67). Similarly, Walsh-Childers (1994) surveyed journalists, policymakers, and health advocates to assess their perceptions of newspaper coverage’s impact on public policy regarding related to health care reform. Another strategy used to get at the probabilistic effects of popular media messages in the “real world” are correlational studies. Researchers seek to infer a relationship between media content and measurable health or health policy outcomes. “Such comparisons are not meant to imply that television [or other media] should mirror reality,” cautions (Signorielli 1993, p. 4; Neuendorf, 1990). “Rather, these comparisons tell us how the [media] world deviates from reality and helps us ascertain what consequences these deviations might have for action, thinking, and policy,” she concluded (Signorielli, 1993, p. 4). For example, when Hertog and Fan (1995) correlated newspaper coverage of the likelihood of HIV transmittal via sneezing, toilets, or mosquitos and other insects with public’s beliefs as measured by the National Health Interview Survey, they found that news content predicted public opinion. They concluded that “the behavioral impact of change in public beliefs is hard to assess, but concurrent with a reduction in fear was a greater acceptance of HIV+ people in work and school environments, and an increased willingness to spend scarce social resources in an attempt to prevent further harm and to aid the afflicted” (Hertog & Fan, 1995, p. 562). Like Backstrom and Robins (1998) and Walsh-Childers (1994), Yanovitzky and Bennett (1999) were concerned with media effects on public policy. However, concerned that

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

573

previous media effects research had considered only the possible effects of media attention to health issues on the public and policy agendas and not on actual behavior, Yanovitzky and Bennett (1999) sought to evaluate “the effects of nondeliberate health information in the mass media on health behavior” (p. 431). In their study, Yanovitzky and Bennett (1999) used time series regression to assess the impact of news coverage on anti–drunk driving proposed legislation. The authors noted the number of news items published in the New York Times and the Washington Post that directly addressed drunk driving from January 1978 to December 1996 and then correlated media coverage with blood alcohol levels for drivers involved in a fatal traffic accident and the number of drunk driving–related bills introduced in the U.S. Congress. They found that media attention did not account for behavior change when policy response was controlled for; rather, media attention was correlated with policy response, which, in turn, was correlated with drunk driving behavior. Overall, the limited research focused on the audiences of popular mass media seems to indicate that the mass media does impinge on health, illness, and medically oriented understandings and behaviors. Still, if it is the case that popular mass media has great potential to advance the cause of health promotion, judging by the popular media research it is a potential that has yet to be fully realized. Despite the intuitive appeal of popular mass media as a venue for advancing health, any efforts to commandeer the mass media for health promotional use will encounter significant institutional obstacles. INSTITUTIONAL PROCESSES AND COMPETING AGENDAS: ENTERTAINMENT AND HEALTH

The relationship between the popular mass media and health promotion is fraught with conflicting priorities (Wallack, 1990). Each domain—journalism, entertainment, and advertising—is characterized by certain problems and possibilities. Since Jeffrey K. Springston and Ruth Ann Weaver Lariscy in this volume examine the realm of public relations, I address the institutional issues that impinge on health representations in entertainment media. It stands to reason that if entertainment media can have a negative influence on health behaviors, it should also be able to have a positive influence. That is the premise on which health promoters who advocate entertainment-education are banking. Entertainment-education “is the process of purposely designing and implementing a media message both to entertain and to educate, in order to increase audience members’ knowledge about an educational issue, create favorable attitudes, and change overt behavior” (Singhal & Rogers, 1999, p. 9). As Glik et al. (1998) elucidated, “entertainment education favors a storytelling approach to health awareness campaigns, in contrast to the dissemination of specific messages or points of view through advertising, news programs, or documentaries” (p. 264). Singhal and Rogers (1999) aver that “entertainment programs generally obtain high ratings and are popular with sponsors” and, therefore, the “entertainment-education strategy . . . provides an opportunity for an instructional message to pay for itself and fulfill commercial and social interests” (p. 9; also Montgomery, 1990; Rogers, 1996). In their book Entertainment-Education: A Communication Strategy for Social Change, Singhal and Rogers (1999) detail numerous successful international entertainmenteducation efforts including the Peruvian soap opera Simplemente Mar´ıa, the Mexican soap operas of Miquel Sabido, the Indian soap opera Hum Log, as well as shorter discussions of other programming efforts in Great Britain, Jamaica, Kenya, and Tanzania. Their discussion of entertainment-education programming in the United States, though brief, mentions Maude (one of the first sitcoms to address a social issue when 47-year-old Maude decided to

574

KLINE

obtain an abortion), the Harvard Alcohol Project for Designated Drivers (which prompted 77 prime-time programs to promote the designated-driver concept), Sesame Street (which introduced numerous prosocial messages to children aged 2 to 5), and the two series Canc´ıon de la Raza and Que Pasa, U.S.A. (which addressed social issues relevant to Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans, respectively). As alluded to earlier in this chapter, the study by Sharf and Freimuth (1993) discussed the potential for positive role modeling in fictional media accounts. In their analysis of the episodes from television show thirtysomething wherein a main character suffered from ovarian cancer, the authors found that some of “the most powerful messages” included “the idea that cancer is a disease of the family rather than of an individual” and the “destigmatization of individuals with cancer” (p. 157). Similarly, Marcus (2000) recounted that after a breast cancer experience was dramatized on a 1994 episode of General Hospital, the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Information Service operators were able to confirm that 207 callers were responding to the public service announcement (PSA) that followed the program. More recently, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), teamed with the California Department of Health Services, Immunization Branch, lobbying television programming gatekeepers to incorporate pro-immunization messages in prime-time television shows (Glik, 1998). By the end of 1997, 13 shows including ER, High Incident, Seventh Heaven, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Guiding Light, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Step by Step, Goode Behavior, and Days of Our Lives had incorporated immunization segments; Savannah, The John Laroquette Show, Nick Freno, and Chicago Hope displayed immunization posters on their set (Glik et al., 1998). In an article describing the UCLA immunization project, Glik et al. (1998) discussed a number of the entertainment industry constraints they faced noting that “to gain access to decision makers, it is necessary to know something about the structure and operation of the television production industry” (p. 265). Most obviously, it is difficult for health promoters to access production organizations that “are designed to keep outsiders from contacting show decision makers (producers, directors, and writers) and popular personalities (actors)” (p. 266). They noted that most unsolicited advice and inquiries are unwelcome given tight production schedules and proprietary interest in the creative process. On the other hand, Breed and DeFoe (1982), who worked on a similar project addressing the issue of alcohol consumption, called attention to the regular use of consultants by television executives, elaborating that research about alcohol use and abuse was of particular interest to show creators who had a vested interest in achieving some sense of verisimilitude. For both of these projects, the authors indicated that once gatekeepers were reached through extensive networking, project representatives were able to appeal to social consciousness and the need for new material. Having addressed the logistics of negotiating opportunities to introduce prohealth messages in entertainment programming, the larger issue health promoters face is coming up with prosocial storylines or character scripts that appeal to show producers. Glik et al. (1998) explained that four criteria are important for this storytelling medium: story ideas need to be based on true stories and their impact on real people in order to establish authenticity, must have entertainment value, have to fit into the context of the programs, and need to focus on characters and their relationships. Yet these are precisely the narrative elements that Wallack argued undercuts the potential for integrating prosocial messages in entertainment programming. “Television takes social and health issues and reduces them to personal emotional dramas,” contended Wallack (1990, p. 45). This may contribute to victim-blaming (as discussed above) and, as Wallack (1990) cautioned, may deflect attention from larger social, political, and economic influences, thereby limiting understanding

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

575

of causes and solutions of health problems. Consequently, attempts to utilize entertainment media to forward public health agendas should be tempered by the realization that such activities might exacerbate existing problems. FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH IN POPULAR MEDIA AND HEALTH

As this chapter has illustrated, there is considerable interest regarding the relationship between the popular media and our understandings of health issues. Numerous scholars have detailed the informational and ideological shortcomings of the popular media; others have advocated the strategic use of popular programming to advance public health agendas. All agree that the pervasiveness and influence of the popular mass media is not to be ignored. Scholars, then, must continue the project of identifying the manner in which discourse impinges on the meanings and behaviors related to health and illness, employing a variety of methodologies and perspectives. For instance, it is important that scholars continue delineating the symbolic content of media messages because “locating the repeated biases in modes of delivering messages may assist media consumers in becoming media literate, granting the skills necessary to ‘read’ health care messages in a critical and productive fashion” (Parrott & Condit, 1996, p. 7). This may include both content analyses and critical/interpretive analyses, but scholars should also consider using methodologies or multiple methodologies that accommodate more extended and intensive analyses of the complex systemic influences of and on health discourses. In my own work on the issue of breast self-examination (BSE), I have found that neither content analysis nor critical examination alone are sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of the BSE issue; rather, content analysis identified significant shortcomings in the persuasive arguments and concomitant evidence provided to women (Kline & Mattson, 2000), whereas critical analysis revealed a paternalistic and disempowering framework for presenting persuasive appeals (Kline, 1999). Taken together, the findings from these studies suggest that not only does the discourse of BSE require increased attention to the information provided, but also the way this information is framed and presented to the public needs substantial revision. Scholars need to identify strategies for getting this knowledge out of academe and to the consumer. However, because the onus for effective and ethical use of the popular media as an informational and ideological resource may be largely on consumers, consumers need to develop critical skills and they need to access a variety of media (Parrott & Condit, 1996, p. 7). As more than one study indicated, various media report issues differently (Andsager & Powers, 1999; Turow & Coe, 1993). In the end, it is incumbent upon scholars and lay audiences alike to attend to the information and ideologies represented in mass media portrayals of health issues. In addition to pursuing research that focuses on the textual elements of popular media representations, scholars must address the manner in which these discourses affect the lived experiences of audience members. Certainly, there is no dearth of literature devoted to audience effects research with regard to health. However, the lion’s share of this literature is concerned with audience effects as related to strategic communications, perhaps because these studies are conducted as part of larger campaign projects making identification of causal relationships more viable. As Mohr (1992) explained, “impact analysis is a comparison of what did happen after implementing the program with what would have happened had the program had not been implemented” (p. 2). This presumes that there is a clear sense of where the audience stood before the intervention, of what the intervention

576

KLINE

consisted, and where the audience stood after the intervention—most importantly, it assumes that a causal relationship may be inferred and that other confounding variables may be controlled. As Lindlof and Grodin (1990) observed with regard to studying the audiences of popular media, “how can the researcher cover the action when the action cannot be readily predicted, even by the participants, or is subtly embedded in larger topics or routines?” (p. 14). They suggest the use of in-depth interviews to tap the varied interpretations audiences can bring to a text. Finally, scholars of popular health discourse must strive to develop theories that can be used not only to describe discursive situations, but also to predict possible responses to health discourses and to explain the relationships between health discourse, people, and society. Ultimately, theoretical projects should contribute to prescriptions of more ethical and effective approaches to addressing health issues in the popular media. Thus far, the primary focus of extant research on popular health discourse has been on describing discourses specific to a particular health issue (e.g., smoking, diet, HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, etc.). Yet, for most scholars concerned with health discourse, the ultimate goal is to prompt improvement of the discourse, whether such improvement refers to increasing the informational value or the persuasiveness with regard to individual behavior and social/public policy changes, or to emend ideological instantiations constituted by the discourse. Therefore, research projects should begin to synthesize the approaches and concepts generated from diverse studies to develop broader, more systematic explanations for the observations being made. As scholars begin to develop these theories, they should do so with a keen awareness of the potential for uniting theory and praxis not only to promote better health, but also to promote better health discourses. REFERENCES Allen, R., & Nairn, R. G. (1997). Media depictions of mental illness: An analysis of the use of dangerousness. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 31(3), 375–381. Andsager, J. L., & Powers, A. (1999). Social or economic concerns: How news and women’s magazines framed breast cancer in the 1990s. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 76(3), 531–550. Andsager, J., & Smiley, L. (1998). Evaluating the public information: Shaping news coverage of the silicone implant controversy. Public Relations Review, 24(2), 183–201. Auslander, G. K., & Gold, N. (1999). Disability terminology in the media: A comparison of newspaper reports in Canada and Israel. Social Science & Medicine, 48(10), 1395–1405. Babrow, A., & Kline, K. N. (2000). From “reducing” to “coping with” uncertainty: Reconceptualizing the central challenge in breast self-exams. Social Science and Medicine, 51, 1805–1816. Backstrom, C. H., & Robins, L. S. (1998). The media and AIDS: Health elite perspectives of coverage. Journal of Health & Social Policy, 9(3), 45–69. Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Beaulieu, A., & Lippman, A. (1995). “Everything you need to know”: How women’s magazines structure prenatal diagnosis for women over 35. Women & Health, 23(3), 59–74. Becker, M. H. (1986). The tyranny of health promotion. Public Health Reviews, 14, 15–25. Berelson, B. (1952). Content analysis in communication research. New York: Free Press. Breed, W., & DeFoe, J. R. D. (1982). Effecting media change: The role of cooperative consultation on alcohol topics. Journal of Communication, 32(2), 88–99. Brock, B. L., Scott, R. L., & Chesebro, J. W. (1990). Methods of rhetorical criticism: A twentieth-century perspective (3rd ed.). Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univesity Press.

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

577

Brodie, M., Brady, L. A., & Altman, D. E. (1998). Media coverage of managed care: Is there a negative bias? Health Affairs, 17(1), 9–25. Brodie, M., Kjellson, N., Hoff, T., & Parker, M. (1999). Perceptions of Latinos, African Americans, and Whites on media as a health information source. The Howard Journal of Communications, 10(3), 147–167. Brown, J., Chapman, S., & Lupton, D. (1996). Infinitesimal risk as public health crisis: News media coverage of a doctor-patient HIV contact tracing investigation. Social Science & Medicine, 43(12), 1685–1695. Burrell, G., & Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis: Elements of the sociology of corporate life. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Carlson, E. S., Li, S., & Holm, K. (1997). An analysis of menopause in the popular press. Health Care for Women International, 18(6), 557–564. Cheek, J. (1997). (Con)textualizing toxic shock syndrome: Selected media representations of the emergence of a health phenomenon 1979–1995. Health, 1(2), 183–203. Chrisler, J. C., & Levy, K. B. (1990). The media construct a menstrual monster: A content analysis of PMS articles in the popular press, 16(2), 89–104. Clarke, J. N. (1991). Media portrayal of disease from the medical, political economy, and life-style perspectives. Qualitative Health Research, 1(3), 287–308. Clarke, J. N. (1992). Cancer, heart disease, and AIDS: What do the media tell us about these diseases? Health Communication, 4(2), 105–120. Clarke, J. N. (1999). Prostate cancer’s hegemonic masculinity in select print mass media depictions (1974–1995). Health Communication, 11(1), 59–74. Condit, C. M. (1990). Decoding abortion rhetoric: Communicating social change. Urbana: University of Illinois. Condit, C. M. (1994). Hegemony in a mass-mediated society: Concordance about reproductive technologies. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 11(3), 205–230. Condit, D. M. (1996). Tugging at pregnant consumers: Competing ‘Smoke!’ ‘Don’t Smoke!’ media messages and their messengers. In R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Conrad, P., & Kern, R. (1990). The sociology of health and Illness: Critical perspectives (3rd ed.). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Croteau, D., & Hoynes, W. (1997). Media/Society: Industries, images, and audiences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Daniels, M. J., & Parrott, R. L. (1996). Prenatal care from the woman’s perspective: A thematic analysis of the newspaper media. In R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dorfman, L., & Wallack, L. (1993). Advertising health: The case for counter-ads. Public Health Reports, 108(6), 716–726. duPre, A. (2000). Communicating about health: Current issues and perspectives. London: Mayfield. Foss, S. K. (1996). Rhetorical criticism: Exploration and practice (2nd ed.). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Foucalt, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. New York: Pantheon. Frost, K., Frank, E., & Maiback, E. (1997). Relative risk in the news media: A quantification of misrepresentation. American Journal of Public Health, 87(5), 842–845. Gabe, J., & Bury, M. (1996). Halcion nights: A sociological account of a medical controversy. Sociology, 30(3), 447–469. Gannon, L., & Stevens, J. (1998). Portraits of menopause in the mass media. Women & Health, 27(3), 1–15.

578

KLINE

Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1994). Growing up with television: The cultivation perspective. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gerlach, K. K., Marino, C., & Hoffman-Goetz, L. (1997). Cancer coverage in women’s magazines: What information are women receiving? Journal of Cancer Education, 12(4), 240–244. Glik, D., Berkanovic, E., Stone, K., Ibarra, L., Jones, M. C., Rosen, B., Schreibman, M., Gordon, L., Minassian, L., & Richards, D. (1998). Health education goes Hollywood: Working with prime-time and daytime enterainment television for immunization promotion. Journal of Health Communication, 3, 263–282. Grossberg, L., Wartella, E., & Whitney, D. C. (1998). MediaMaking: Mass media in a popular culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gwyn, R. (1999). “Killer bugs,” “silly buggers” and “politically correct pals”: Competing discourses in health scare reporting. Health, 3(3), 335–345. Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hayden, S. (1997). Re-claiming bodies of knowledge: An exploration of the relationsip between feminist theorizing and feminine style in the rhetoric of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Western Journal of Communication, 61(2), 127–163. Hazelton, M. (1997). Reporting mental health: A discourse analysis of mental health-related news in two Australian newspapers. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 6(2), 73–89. Heath, R. P. (1997, March). In so many words: How technology reshapes the reading habit. American Demographics. [Online]. Available: http://www.demographics.com. Hertog, J. K., & Fan, D. P. (1995). The impact of press coverage on social beliefs: The case of HIV transmission. Communication Research, 22(5), 545–574. Hodgetts, D., & Chamberlain, K. (1999). Medicalization and the depiction of lay people in television health documentary. Health, 3(3), 317–333. Hoffman-Goetz, L., Gerlach, K. K., Marino, C., & Mills, S. L. (1997). Cancer coverage and tobacco advertising in African-American women’s popular magazines. Journal of Community Health, 22(4), 261–270. Hoffman-Goetz, L., & MacDonald, M. (1999). Cancer coverage in mass-circulating Canadian women’s magazines. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 90(1), 55–59. Holsti, O. R. (1969). Content analysis for the social sciences and humanities. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Hyde, M. J. (1993). Medicine, rhetoric, and euthanasia: A case study in the workings of a postmodern discourse. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79(2), 201–224. Kalbfleish, P. J., Bonnell, K. H., & Harris, T. M. (1996). Media portrayals of women’s menstrual health issues. In R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kaufert, P. A., & Lock, M. (1997). Medicalization of women’s third age. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynecology, 18(2), 81–86. Kennedy, G. E., & Bero, L. A. (1999). Print media coverage of research on passive smoking. Tobacco Control, 8(3), 254–260. Kilgore, M. (1996). Magic, moralism, and marginalization: Media coverage of cervical, ovarian, and uterine cancer. In R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kline, K. N. (1996). The drama of in utero drug exposure: Fetus takes first billing. In R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

579

Kline, K. N. (1999). Reading and re-forming breast self-examination discourse: Claiming missed opportunities for empowerment. Journal of Health Communication, 4, 119–141. Kline, K. N., & Mattson, M. (2000). Breast self-examination pamphlets: A content analysis grounded in fear appeal research. Health Communication, 12(1), 1–21. Krippendorff, K. (1980). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Lantz, P. M., & Booth, K. M. (1998). The social construction of the breast cancer epidemic. Social Science & Medicine, 46(7), 907–918. Laurence, L., & Weinhouse, B. (1994). Outrageous practices. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Lebow, M. A. (1999). The pill and the press: Reporting risk. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 93(3), 453–456. Lindlof, T. R., & Grodin, D. (1990). When media use can’t be observed: Some problems and tactics of collaborative audience research. Journal of Communication, 40(4), 8–28. Lupton, D. (1992). Discourse analysis: A new methodology for understanding the ideologies of health and illness. Australian Journal of Public Health, 16(2), 145–150. Lupton, D. (1994a). The condom in the age of AIDS: Newly respectable or still a dirty word? A discourse analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 4(3), 304–320. Lupton, D. (1994b). “The great debate about cholesterol”: Medical controversy and the news media. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 30(3), 334–339. Lupton, D. (1994c). Medicine as culture: Illness, disease, and the body in western societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lupton, D. (1994d). Toward the development of critical health communication praxis. Health Communication, 6(1), 55–67. Lupton, D. (1999). Archetypes of infection: People with HIV/AIDS in the australian press in the mid 1990s. Sociology of Health & Illness, 21(1), 37–53. Lupton, D. (2000). The social construction of medicine and the body. In G. L. Albrecht, R. Fitzpatrick, & S. C. Scrimshaw (Eds.), The handbook of social studies in health and medicine (pp. 50–63). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lupton, D., & Tulloch, J. (1996). “Bringing home the reality of it”: Senior school students’ responses to mass media portrayals of HIV/AIDS. Australian Journal of Communication, 23(1), 31–45. Magazine Publishers of America. (2000). Growth of magazines by category. Magazine Publishers of America Web site. [Online]. Available: http://www.magazine.org/resources/ fact sheets/ed4 8 99.html. Marcus, P. M. (2000). Television as a venue for cancer education: The general hospital experience. Journal of Cancer Education, 14(1), 4. Markens, S. (1996). The problematic of “experience”: A political and cultural critique of PMS. Gender & Society, 10(1), 42–58. Mathios, A., Avery, R., Bisogni, C., & Shanahan, J. (1998). Alcohol portrayal on primetime television: Manifest and latent messages. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 59(3), 305–310. McCombs, M. (1994). News influence on our pictures of the world. In J. Bryant & D. Zillman (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McIntosh, W. D., Bazzini, D. G., Smith, S. M., & Wayne, S. M. (1998). Who smokes in Hollywood? Characteristics of smokers in popular films from 1940 to 1989. Addictive Behaviors, 23(3), 395–398. McMillan, S. J. (1999). Health communication and the Internet: Relations between interactive characteristics of the medium and site creators, content, and purpose. Health Communication, 11(4), 375–390.

580

KLINE

Miles, A. (1998). Radio and the commodification of natural medicine in Ecuador. Social Science & Medicine, 47(12), 2127–2137. Mohr, L. B. (1992). Impact analysis for program evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Montgomery, K. C. (1990). Promoting health through entertainment television. In C. K. Atkin & L. Wallack (Eds.), Mass communication and public health: Complexities and conflicts (pp. 114–128). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Moyer, A., Greener, S., Beauvais, J., & Salovey, P. (1995). Accuracy of health research reported in the popular press: Breast cancer and mammography. Health Communication, 7(2), 147–161. Nandy, B. R., & Sarvela, P. D. (1997). Content analysis reexamined: A relevant research method for health education. American Journal of Health Behavior, 21(3), 222–234. Neuendorf, K. A. (1990). Health images in the mass media. In E. B. Ray & L. Donohew (Eds.), Communication and health: Systems and applications (pp. 111–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Parrott, R. (1996). Advocate or adversary?: The self-reflexive roles of media messages for health. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 13, 266–278. Parrott, R., & Condit, C. (Eds.). (1996). Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Perez, T. L., & Dionisopoulos, G. N. (1995). Presidential silence, C. Everett Koop, and the Surgeon General’s Report on AIDS. Communication Studies, 46, 1–2. Powers, A. (1999). Newspaper coverage of the breast implant controversy. Women & Health, 30(2), 83–98. Pratt, C. A., & Pratt, C. B. (1996). Nutrition advertisements in consumer magazines: Health implications for African Americans. Journal of Black Studies, 26(4), 504–523. Pratt, C. A., Pratt, C. B., Montague, S. N., Salazar, J. C., & Graves, M. C. (1996). Do popular magazines promote weight-control messages? Implications of weight-control advertisements for the health of African American women. Howard Journal of Communication, 7(4), 349–364. Radley, A., Lupton, D., & Ritter, C. (1997). Health: An invitation and introduction. Health, 1(1), 5–21. Rogers, E. M. (1996). The field of health communication today: An up-to-date report. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 15–23. Rothblum, E. D. (1999). Contradictions and confounds in coverage of obesity: Psychology journals, textbooks, and the media. Journal of Social Issues, 55(2), 355–369. Sandvik, H. (1999). Health information and interaction on the internet: A survey of female urinary incontinence. BMJ, 319(7201), 29–32. Sharf, B. F., & Freimuth, V. S. (1993). The construction of illness on entertainment television: Coping with cancer on thirtysomething. Health Communication, 5(3), 141–160. Signorielli, N. (1993). Mass media images and impact on health. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Signorielli, N. (1998). Health images on Television. In L. D. Jackson (Ed.), Health communication research: A guide to developments and directions (pp. 163–179). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Singhal, A., & Rogers, E. M. (1999). Entertainment-education: A communication strategy for social change. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Singleton, R. A., Straits, B. C., & Straits, M. M. (1993). Approaches to social research. New York: Oxford. Sontag, S. (1990). Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors (1st Anchor Books edition ed.). New York: Anchor Books. Sterk, H. M. (1996). Contemporary birthing practices: Technology over humanity? In

25. MEDIA AND HEALTH

581

R. L. Parrott & C. M. Condit (Eds.), Evaluating women’s health messages: A resource book. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stiff, J. B. (1994). Persuasive communication. New York: Guilford. Subervi-V´elez, F. A. (1999). Spanish-language television coverage of health news. The Howard Journal of Communications, 10(3), 207–228. Terre, L., Drabman, R. S., & Speer, P. (1991). Health-relevant behaviors in media. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 21(16), 1303–1319. Tones, K. (1996). Models of mass media: Hypodermic, aerosol or agent provocateur? Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 3(1), 29–37. Toth, E. L., & Heath, R. L. (Eds.). (1992). Rhetorical and critical approaches to public relations. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tsao, J. C. (1997). Informational and symbolic content of over-the-counter drug advertising on television. Journal of Drug Education, 27(2), 173–197. Turow, J., & Coe, L. (1993). Curing television’s ills: The portrayal of health care. In B. C. Thornton & G. L. Kreps (Eds.), Perspectives on health communication (pp. 130–145). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. TV Free America. (2000). Television statistics and sources. [Online]. Available: http://www.tvfa.org/stats.html. Vargas, L. C., & dePyssler, B. J. (1999). U.S. Latino newspapers as health communication resources: A content analysis. The Howard Journal of Communications, 10(3), 189–205. Wallack, L. (1990). Mass media and health promotion: Promise, problem, and challenge. In C. K. Atkin & L. Wallack (Eds.), Mass communication and public health: Complexities and conflicts. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Wallack, L., Dorfman, L., Jernigan, D., & Themba, M. (1993). Media advocacy and public health: Power for prevention. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Walsh-Childers, K. (1994). Newspaper influence on health policy development. Newspaper Research Journal, 15(3), 89–104. Wilson, N. L., & Blackhurst, A. E. (1999). Food advertising and eating disorders: Marketing body dissatisfaction, the drive for thinness, and dieting in women’s magazines. Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development, 38(2), 111–122. Woodwell, D. A. (2000, May 19). National ambulatory medical care survey: 1998 summary. Vital and Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Advance Data #315). Yadlon, S. (1997). Skinny women and good mothers: The rhetoric of risk, control, and culpability in the production of knowledge about breast cancer. Feminist Studies, 23(3), 645–677. Yanovitzky, I., & Bennett, C. (1999). Media attention, institutional response, and health behavior change: The cse of drunk driving, 1978–1996. Communication Research, 26(4), 429–453. Zola, I. K. (1972). Medicine as an institution of social control. The Sociological Review, 20(4), 487–504.

26 Accessing, Understanding, and Applying Health Communication Messages: The Challenge of Health Literacy Jay M. Bernhardt Emory University

Kenzie A. Cameron The University of Georgia

The public today has greater access to health information than at any previous time in human history. Every day, people are inundated, even bombarded, with an abundance of health information. Health care professionals provide advice, pharmacists dispense printed instructions, health educators distribute brochures, television and radio news shows broadcast stories about peoples’ health and well-being, newspapers offer coverage of the latest findings from medical research, and the Internet delivers nearly unlimited information on any and every health topic. What does this assortment of health information have in common? It is all likely to be ineffective, and potentially harmful, if the receivers of the information do not possess a high enough level of health literacy to access the information, understand what is being communicated, and appropriately apply it to their own lives. The need for high health literacy is particularly paramount as the responsibility for health decisions continues to shift from practitioners to consumers in the modern era of managed care (Root & Stableford, 1999). HEALTH LITERACY DEFINED

The concept of literacy has traditionally been described as one’s ability to read and write. With few exceptions, literacy was considered a skill reserved for the privileged, the educated, and for members of religious orders (Manguel, 1996). Lack of literacy skills was, and is, a major contributor to social inequalities and was often used by those in power as a means of protecting their status and position. For example, states such as South Carolina passed strict laws forbidding all blacks, whether slaves or free men, to be taught to read, and these laws remained in effect until the middle of the 19th century (Manguel, 1996). In subsequent generations, it became apparent that reading and writing skills by themselves were necessary but not sufficient for functioning and succeeding in society. As a

583

584

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

result, the concept of literacy moved beyond merely reading and writing to include skills such as problem solving and reasoning. In 1991, the National Literacy Act (of the United States) defined literacy as “an individual’s ability to read, write, and speak in English, and compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve one’s goals, and develop one’s knowledge and potential” (United States Congress, 1991). In the 1990s, health care professionals began defining and discussing a new form of literacy—health literacy—that was thought to have profound effects on people’s health. The American Medical Association’s (AMA) Ad Hoc Committee on Health Literacy defined functional health literacy as “the ability to read and comprehend prescription bottles, appointment slips, and the other essential health-related materials required to successfully function as a patient” (AMA, 1999, p. 552). Several other definitions of health literacy were developed that focused on the ability of patients to read treatment-related instructions, informed consent forms, health education materials, and insurance applications (Parker, Williams, Baker, & Nurss, 1996; Tuckson, 2000). These definitions reflect the fact that much of the early research on health literacy has been conducted by physicians and other health care providers and therefore has focused on clinical settings and situations. A more comprehensive definition of health literacy was developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which defined health literacy as “the cognitive and social skills which determine the motivation and ability of individuals to gain access to, understand and use information in ways which promote and maintain good health” (Nutbeam, 1998, p. 10). WHO added that one who has adequate health literacy has achieved the necessary “level of knowledge, personal skills and confidence to take action to improve personal and community health by changing personal lifestyles and living conditions” (Nutbeam, 1998, p. 10). The Healthy People 2010 report similarly defined health literacy as “the capacity to obtain, interpret, and understand basic health information and services and the competence to use such information and services to enhance health” (Department of Health and Human Services, 2000). Unlike the clinically-oriented definitions, these comprehensive definitions suggest that individuals must possess specific cognitive abilities and a range of social skills in order to have an appropriate level of health literacy. Doak, Doak, Friedell, and Meade (1998) described the cognitive abilities necessary for literacy as the ability to interpret word meanings, have vocabulary fluency, find meanings for uncommon words, systematically scan visuals to find key concepts, and separate key points from details. In contrast, they described people without such abilities as those who take words literally, listen and read slowly, sound out letters in words, skip uncommon words, have difficulty finding key concepts, and focus on details without prioritizing them (Doak et al., 1998). Another important cognitive ability related to health literacy is being able to understand and interpret numbers. This concept, known as numeracy, has been defined as having “some facility with basic probability and numerical concepts” (Schwartz, Woloshin, Black, & Welch, 1997, p. 966). A person who has adequate numeracy, for example, is “one who would expect to be able to cope with the practical, numerical situations encountered in their everyday life” (Haylock, 1987, p. 16). Not surprisingly, a connection has been found between reading literacy and numeracy, such that persons with low literacy levels also tend to have low numeracy levels (Wade & Moore, 1998). Research indicates that many people lack adequate numeracy ability and, as a result, do not accurately receive quantitative information that is presented to them by their

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

585

health care providers (Schwartz et al., 1997). In addition, one study has suggested that some health care providers may also have numeracy difficulties (Estrada, Barnes, Collins, & Byrd, 1999). Because a great deal of health information is expressed in quantitative formats (e.g., dosage information, relative risk), it is necessary to develop effective means of effectively communicating and receiving quantitative information (Rothman & Kiviniemi, 1999; Schwartz et al., 1997). Media literacy also is highly important for health literacy because health information is delivered through many different media channels. Media literacy is defined in various ways, ranging from “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and produce communication in a variety of media forms” (Aspen Institute Leadership Forum, 1992, as cited in Zettl, 1998, p. 81) to being able to “develop an informal and critical understanding of the nature of mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these techniques” (Center for Advanced Technology, 1997, as cited in Zettl, 1998, p. 81). In addition, having high media literacy can be viewed as possessing media savvy by being able to assess the true value of information presented in the media (Austin & Johnson, 1997). People low in media literacy ability may be less likely to resist inaccurate or unhealthy media portrayals and messages (Austin & Johnson, 1997), which could lead them to believe inaccurate information and to adopt unhealthy behaviors. One who has successfully developed media literacy will be a better, more critical consumer of the media, able to discern the validity and relative worth of information presented through this medium (Brecklin & Hoffman, 1998; Irving, DuPen, & Berel, 1998). A new requisite health literacy ability is computer literacy. A great deal of health information, both useful and detrimental, is available on the Internet, and health information has become one of the most commonly searched topics on the Internet (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2000). Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus on what it means to be computer literate (Harvey, 1983; Higdon, 1995). Early definitions of computer literacy focused on the ability to use computer hardware and software and the ability to program a computer (Higdon, 1995). Other definitions suggest ethical, responsible, and effective use of computers as indicators of computer literacy (Wolfe, 1992). Although there may not be agreement on the exact definition of computer literacy, it is well recognized by scholars and society that using computers is a ubiquitous social phenomenon. People who lack adequate computer literacy are likely to have profound barriers in their ability to access many important health information and messages, let alone understand or apply these messages to their own lives. Abilities in reading literacy, numeracy, media literacy, and computer literacy represent the cognitive aspects of health literacy that are necessary for people to access, process, understand, and critically analyze health information and instructions. These aptitudes include innate abilities as well as knowledge and skills that can be learned and practiced. Complementing these abilities are social skills that also are necessary to attain adequate, or “functional,” health literacy (Nurss, Parker, Williams, & Baker, 1993; Nutbeam, 1998). An important social skill that is related to health literacy is the ability to interact and communicate effectively with health care providers or health care system representatives (i.e., insurance agencies, health management organizations, etc.). Such interaction and communication skills are predicated on one’s ability to clearly and accurately express physical, mental, and emotional states to health care providers. Other important communication and social skills can include communicating under pressure, when badly hurt or facing a life-threatening condition, or asserting control and authority when communicating with people in powerful positions. These social skills can affect people’s ability to access and understand information and also can have a large

586

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

influence on whether information that is received and understood is actually adopted or applied. THE PREVALENCE OF LOW HEALTH LITERACY

In 1992, the United States Department of Education conducted the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) to profile the English literacy of American adults and the relationship between literacy levels and the performance of tasks encountered in everyday life (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993; U.S. Department of Education, 1993). More than 26,000 adults were surveyed, including a nationally representative sample of more than 13,000 adults, and the results were analyzed for three dimensions of literacy: prose (understanding written text), document (finding information within text), and quantitative literacy (or numeracy). For each dimension, people were placed in one of five literacy levels that ranged from extremely low (level one) to extremely high (level five). Overall, the survey found that a great deal of Americans have significant problems with basic literacy. The results of the NALS revealed that between 21% and 23% of Americans, or 40 to 44 million adults in 1992, demonstrated literacy ability at the lowest level of proficiencies (U.S. Department of Education, 1993). People at this level read at a fifth-grade level or lower, if they could read at all. The next lowest level of literacy proficiency was comprised of 25% to 28% of Americans, or about 50 million adults. Their literacy ability was slightly higher but still quite limited. Adults in the lowest two literacy levels, which represented nearly half of all adults in the United States, experienced significant problems with everyday tasks that required higher reading levels and problem-solving skills (U.S. Department of Education, 1993). Of those people in the lowest literacy level, 62% had terminated their education before completing high school, 33% were age 65 or older, and 25% were immigrants who may have still been learning to speak and read English (U.S. Department of Education, 1993). Adults in the bottom two literacy levels were more likely to be older, unemployed or earning lower incomes, living in poverty, and were less educated than adults in the higher literacy levels. They also were more likely to be African American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Hispanic, or Asian/Pacific Islander. Importantly, many adults in these lowest literacy levels either did not understand or did not admit that they had a problem with their literacy. About three fourths of the adults at the lowest literacy level and 93% to 97% of adults at the second lowest level described themselves as able to read or write English “well” or “very well” (U.S. Department of Education, 1993). Although the number of people with low literacy is alarmingly high, the number of people with low health literacy is probably even higher because health literacy is contextspecific ability (AMA, 1999). In other words, people who cannot read at all will certainly not be able to read health-related words, yet those who can read everyday words with some difficulty are likely to have significant difficulty reading, understanding, and acting upon health-related messages and instructions. It is estimated that low health literacy affects approximately 90 million Americans (AMA, 2000). Most of the research assessing the prevalence of low health literacy has used crosssectional studies conducted with different populations in varying locations, but often with patients at large hospitals. One of the first studies to specifically assess health literacy levels was conducted by Williams et al. (1995), who administered a cross-sectional survey and the “Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults” (TOFHLA) to 2,659 patients in two large urban public hospitals. They found that 35% of the English speakers and 62% of the Spanish speakers had “inadequate” levels of health literacy, which the researchers

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

587

defined as the inability of “patients to complete basic reading and numeracy tasks required to function in the health care setting” (Williams et al., 1995, p. 1678). They also found that 60% of the participants could not understand a standard informed consent document, 42% could not comprehend directions for taking medicine on an empty stomach, and 26% could not understand information about when a next doctor’s appointment was scheduled. Another cross-sectional study that was conducted with 3,260 English- and Spanishspeaking adult patients at four locations of a health maintenance organization found that 24% of the English speakers and 34% of the Spanish speakers had “inadequate” health literacy skills, and an additional 10% of English speakers and 20% of Spanish speakers had “marginal” health literacy skills (Gazmararian, Baker et al., 1999). The research also found that having low health literacy was associated with being older, having completed less school, having a blue collar work history, having a cognitive impairment, and being from minority racial or ethnic groups. Although native-born whites in the United Stated have low health literacy in greater numbers, the rates of low health literacy are disproportionately higher among ethnic minorities, immigrants, and the poor (Allen, 2000; McArdle, 2000). THE IMPACT OF LOW HEALTH LITERACY

People’s inability to access, understand, and apply health information to their own lives can have a significant negative impact on their health and well-being. Specific areas found to be associated with or predicted by low health literacy include increased feelings of shame (Brez & Taylor, 1997), poor patient/provider communication (Parker, Baker, Williams, & Nurss, 1995), reduced levels of health knowledge (Williams et al., 1998), poor health behaviors and treatment adherence (Kalichman, Ramachandran, & Catz, 1999), adverse health care outcomes (Gazmararian et al., 1999), and increased individual and societal health care costs (Baker, Parker, Williams, & Clark, 1998). These relationships suggest possible steps in a causal path from low health literacy among individuals to increased morbidity, mortality, and health care costs. Shame, Stigma, and Denial

Many people with low health literacy are ashamed of their predicament and undertake efforts to hide it (AMA, 1999). One study at a large urban hospital, for example, found that only two thirds of people with low health literacy admitted that they have trouble reading and understanding health-related materials (Parikh, Parker, Nurss, Baker, & Williams, 1996). Therefore, one third of the people with low health literacy denied that they have a problem. Of those who did acknowledge that they have low health literacy, more than two thirds reported that they never told their spouses or children about their problem, and approximately 40% admitted feeling shame over their lack of literacy ability. The researchers concluded that low health literacy carries serious stigma and can foster feelings of fear, inadequacy, and low self-esteem. One consequence of these perceptions is that some people may avoid or underutilize the health care system when they are ill to avoid being discovered or embarrassed by their low health literacy (Parikh et al., 1996). Interviews with people who have low levels of health literacy have revealed similar sentiments. One young woman with low health literacy stated, “I don’t tell anybody or say anything to anybody [about my illiteracy], they might think I’m a bad person” (Brez & Taylor, 1997, p. 1043). Other people expressed concern about being “vulnerable” or appearing “stupid” to others, especially in medical settings like hospitals. One person

588

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

stated, “It’s hard to put into words the feeling, the fear that someone else will find out [about my low health literacy, so] I’d pretend to look good” (Brez & Taylor, 1997, p. 1043). When considering the feelings of people with low levels of literacy, L. Doak astutely observed, “people would rather tell you they have a venereal disease than that they can’t read” (Jenks, 1992, p. 1069). Poor Patient/Provider Communication

Low health literacy can be a significant barrier to effective patient/provider communication. People with poor health literacy skills have been found to be less capable of describing their condition to medical personnel than people with higher health literacy (Roter, 2000). One reason for this failure to communicate is that people with low health literacy may be uncertain or unaware of the amount of information they should share, or they may not recognize the need to disclose such information. Furthermore, many people with low health literacy do not disclose their literacy status to their provider because they do not see their literacy level as relevant to their health (Roter, 2000). Another consequence of low health literacy on patient/provider communication is that people with inadequate health literacy are at increased risk of being diagnosed incorrectly. If people are unable to clearly communicate their medical problems, their health care providers may be drawing conclusions on limited or flawed information. Furthermore, the results of medical tests or evaluations, and treatment decisions based on those results, may be invalid if the tests required verbal or written input from patients with inadequate health literacy. For example, Mayeaux et al. (1995) found that some people with low health literacy scored as though they were suffering from mental dementia on a Mini-Mental State Examination, even though they were not. The researchers hypothesized that people with low health literacy recorded low scores on the examination because of their inability to complete the self-administered test. A number of studies have found that people with low health literacy have difficulty understanding health information and instructions, which can lead people to ignore disease warning signs, misuse medications, fail to comply with treatment regimens, incorrectly manage a disease, or fail to get needed care within an appropriate period of time (Parker et al., 1995; Williams, Baker, Parker, & Nurss, 1998). For example, in a study of people with diabetes mellitus, Williams and colleagues (1998) found that only 50% of those with low health literacy were able to recognize the symptoms of hypoglycemia, as opposed to 94% of those with adequate health literacy. Similarly, Roter (2000) found that a higher percentage of people with low health literacy (33%) than those with adequate health literacy (9%) indicated that they were not able to understand the information presented to them by medical personnel. Other studies have found that people with low health literacy also have difficulty understanding discharge instructions provided to them by their health care providers (Parker et al., 1996; AMA, 1999). Limited Knowledge and Understanding

Several studies have found that low health literacy is related to or predicts lower levels of knowledge about diagnoses and diagnostic tests, as well as knowledge about the purpose of medications (Parker et al., 1996). One cross-sectional study, for example, examined the relationship between reading ability and knowledge about mammography among 445 women age 40 or older from two outpatient clinics (Davis et al., 1996). The researchers found that 39% of women with low health literacy did not know why women get mammograms, compared with only 12% of women with high health literacy. Further

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

589

questioning of the women with low health literacy who stated that they did know about mammograms revealed that they actually did not know. Another cross-sectional study of people with hypertension and diabetes at two urban public hospitals found that people with lower health literacy had less knowledge than people with higher health literacy about their disease, important lifestyle modifications, and disease self-management (Williams et al., 1998). Reading level was found to be the strongest predictor of hypertension knowledge after adjusting for length of disease, education, and age. Low health literacy also has been found to lead to increased misperceptions about health and medicine. For example, Olson, Blank, Cardinal, Hopf, and Chalmers (1996) found that people with low health literacy often did not understand the biological causes of symptoms and often held unrealistic expectations of the medications prescribed to address their medical condition. Many people with low health literacy believed that the medications would achieve an immediate reversal or correction of the disease and many were not able to comprehend the need for long-term treatment. Other studies have found that people with low health literacy were five times more likely to misinterpret pharmaceutical prescriptions than people with high health literacy (Allen, 2000) and frequently did not comprehend the instructions given to them by their practitioner (Weiss et al., 1994). Such misunderstandings are particularly dangerous among people with chronic illnesses that need to be managed over time. Unhealthy Behaviors and Poor Treatment Adherence

Low health literacy has been found to be associated with performing unhealthy behaviors and having poor adherence to treatments. For example, in a cross-sectional survey on contraception knowledge and behaviors and health literacy administered to 406 women age 19–45 from two health maintenance organizations, researchers found that women with lower health literacy were more likely to use less-recommended birth control methods such as IUD, rhythm, douching, or levonorgestrel implants than higher health literacy women (Gazmararian, Parker, & Baker, 1999). They also found that women with lower health literacy were more than four times as likely to have incorrect knowledge about getting pregnant than women with higher health literacy. Noncompliance with treatment regimens has been found to reach levels of 50–90% of the general population (Burgoon, 1995). One study on health, education, and literacy levels among African American men and women who are HIV positive found that education and health literacy were positively associated with HIV treatment adherence (Kalichman et al., 1999). The researchers speculated that this relationship is the result of confusion over medications among populations with lower literacy levels. Parker and colleagues (1996) similarly hypothesized that noncompliance among those with low health literacy is not intentional but rather is the result of poor comprehension of medical instructions. Adverse Health Outcomes

Because low health literacy is associated with shame and denial, poor patient/provider communication, lack of knowledge, and unsafe health behaviors, it is not surprising that studies have found that low health literacy also is related to poorer health and adverse health outcomes. One study on literacy and health status of patients at two large urban public hospitals, for example, found that people with low health literacy were more than two times as likely to report their health to be poor than people with adequate health literacy (Baker, Parker, Williams, Clark, & Nurss, 1997). Similarly, Gazmararian et al. (1999)

590

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

found that people who indicated that their overall health was either fair or poor were twice as likely to have low health literacy than those people who indicated that their health was good or excellent. Other studies have found similar relationships between low health literacy and increased morbidity. Howard-Pitney, Winkleby, Albright, Bruce, and Fortmann (1997) found that cardiovascular disease outcomes were significantly worse among those with low levels of health literacy, and Weiss et al. (1992) found that low health literacy has a negative effect on health outcomes even when education and poverty level are controlled. Brez and Taylor (1997) estimated that the 30% of Canadians who have low levels of health literacy are in poorer health than those who are functionally literate. Increased Health Care Costs and Hospitalization Rates

Although people with low health literacy may personally experience the adverse effects of their situation, it is the rest of society that bears much of the financial burden for the increased costs of caring for people with low health literacy. The excess costs caused by people with low health literacy have been estimated to be $8 to $15 billion annually for hospital costs and $130 to $173 billion for all direct and indirect costs (Allen, 2000). Another estimate by the National Academy on an Aging Society suggests that between $35 and $73 billion is “wasted” each year because of low health literacy (Kilker, 2000). One reason for this excess cost is that people with low health literacy have higher rates of hospitalization than do those with higher health literacy (McArdle, 2000). Marwick (1997) found that people with low health literacy had a 52% increased risk of hospitalization compared to those with adequate health literacy. His research suggests that the overall costs of this increased hospitalization have run into the billions of dollars. A two-year longitudinal study of the health literacy levels among almost 1,000 emergency room patients found that people with low health literacy were two times as likely to be hospitalized as those with higher health literacy (Baker et al., 1998). The authors hypothesized that, compared to people with higher health literacy, people with low health literacy may engage in more high-risk behaviors and have less understanding of prescription instruction, resulting in their higher hospitalization rates. One of the authors noted that they have found a 52% increase in the odds of hospitalization for people with low health literacy, even after adjusting for age, gender, socioeconomic status, health status, and regular source of care (Williams, 2000). A number of other studies also have found low health literacy to be associated with increased health care costs (AMA, 1999). Interpretation of research conducted by Weiss and his colleagues (1994) revealed that Medicaid patients with low health literacy had significantly higher health care costs compared to an overall sample of Medicaid patients (AMA, 1999). It was reported that people who read at grade levels 0–2 had health care costs averaging $12,974 per year, whereas the annual average for the overall sample was $2,969 (AMA, 1999). In addition, Medicaid patients with inadequate health literacy reported annual health care costs of $5,251 compared to yearly costs of $4,338 reported by those with eighth-grade or better reading levels (Jenks, 1992). The results are not necessarily as clear as they seem. Weiss et al. (1994) had conducted a study of 402 randomly selected Medicaid patients in Arizona and found no relationship between low reading levels and increased health care costs. The authors hypothesized that low health literacy may lower health care costs in the short term because people with low health literacy may underuse health care resources. This hypothesis was consistent with a study that found that low health literacy was a contributing factor to the underutilization of

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

591

mammograms (Davis et al., 1996). It is important to note, however, that underutilization of services may produce lower short-term health care costs, but the long-term costs arising from illnesses and injuries that are untreated or with delayed treatment can be staggering. One explanation of the seemingly contradictory findings was suggested in Jenks (1992): that low literacy is not necessarily the cause of the high costs of medical care, but that low literacy may be an indication of separation from society as a whole and may thus be part of a more complex equation. ASSESSING HEALTH LITERACY LEVELS

Unlike reading literacy, health literacy is context specific and includes aspects of reading literacy and numeracy, as well as media literacy and computer literacy. Existing approaches and instruments used to assess health literacy, however, are essentially limited to assessing health-related reading literacy and health-related numeracy. These assessment approaches include informal and formal techniques that vary in the extent to which they are sensitive to health communication and clinical constraints, such as time available and expertise required for administration. Informal assessments of health literacy often are conducted using open-ended questions asked by a health care practitioner (e.g., “What grade level have you completed?” “Do you understand what you have read?”). Although these questions may provide a very rough estimate of one’s literacy abilities, the questions themselves may not be answered accurately or honestly because of feelings of shame or denial. In particular, the simple but often asked question, “Do you understand?” may actually hinder, rather than help, the search for health literacy levels (Williams, 2000). When asked this question, most people will answer in the affirmative even if they do not understand the messages or instructions they just received. This reaction may be due to sensitivities about the power differential between patient and practitioner or because of concerns about the stigma of admitting low literacy. Therefore, questions such as these may be asked in good faith as an attempt to determine literacy or understanding but the merits of this approach are limited and perhaps is flawed. Another commonly used informal assessment is to ask people to read the label on a prescription bottle in order to ensure that they can comprehend the proper dosage and frequency (AMA, 1999). A different simple technique to assess whether someone can read is to hand the person a brochure or some piece of text that is upside down. If the person does not recognize that the written material is upside down, this indicates to the provider that he or she may be unable to read the written material (Williams, 2000). There are many formal approaches that can be used to assess health literacy that involve administering surveys, interviews, or tests. These assessments can be separated into three categories: word recognition tests, tests of comprehension, and assessments of Spanish literacy. An inherent limitation of each of these formal tests is that the person being evaluated is aware that his or her health literacy level is being tested, and people with low health literacy levels, therefore, may be reluctant to participate or answer honestly for fear of being discovered (Lee, 1999). In addition, these tests often are time consuming and only test health-related reading levels. There are four word recognition tests that have been used within a health framework: the Wide-Range Achievement Test (WRAT-3) (Jastak & Wilkinson, 1993), the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM) (Davis et al., 1993; Murphy, Davis, Decker, & Jackson, 1993), the Slosson Oral Reading Test-Revised (SORT-R) (Slosson, 1990), and the Medical terminology Achievement Reading Test (MART) (Hanson-Divers, 1997). Each of these tests can be administered in two to five minutes.

592

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

When word recognition tests are administered, individuals are asked to read aloud words that are presented to them on a piece of paper. Usually the words are related to health and medical care and vary in level of difficulty, beginning with simple words and becoming more difficult and complex. The test is complete when the subject is no longer able to correctly pronounce words. Although this format allows the evaluator to assess health-related reading ability, it does not measure comprehension or interpretation of the words read. The validity of this test is based upon the assumption that if an individual cannot pronounce a word, it is unlikely that she or he will be able to understand its meaning. The REALM and SORT-R have shown high criterion validity as well as high testretest reliability (Slosson, 1990; Jastak & Wilkinson, 1993; Davis et al., 1993; Davis, Michielutte, Askov, Williams, & Weiss, 1998). Although the WRAT-3 and the MART instruct people to read words aloud, the MART also allows people to present explanations for why they are unable to read the words (e.g., failing eyesight, difficulty reading due to small print). Because the MART allows people to give excuses and explanations, it is believed to be less threatening to patients with low literacy levels (Hanson-Divers, 1997). Health literacy tests that attempt to measure actual comprehension of words and written passages include the Cloze technique (National Cancer Institute, 1994; Davis et al., 1998), in which individuals fill in the missing words in a written passage; the Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (TOFHLA) (Nurss et al., 1993; Parker et al., 1995), which utilizes an approach similar to the Cloze technique; and the S-TOFHLA, a shortened version of the original TOFHLA (Baker, Williams, Parker, Gazmararian, & Nurss, 1999; Gazmarian, Baker et al., 1999). Both TOFHLA and S-TOFHLA also measure numeracy by asking respondents to interpret information on a prescription bottle, test results, and schedule times on appointment slips (Parker et al., 1995). TOFHLA and S-TOFHLA have been found to have excellent internal reliability (Parker et al., 1995; Davis, Fredrickson et al., 1998; Baker et al., 1999). Three other instruments have been developed specifically for Spanish-speaking populations. The TOFHLA-S is a Spanish version of the TOFHLA test described above and provides good internal consistency, reliability, and content validity (Parker et al., 1995). A short version of the Spanish TOFHLA has also been developed (Baker et al., 1999; Gazmarian, Baker et al., 1999), as has the Instrumento Para Diagnosticar Lecturas (IDL, Instrument for Diagnosis of Reading) (Blanchard, Garcia, & Carter, 1989). A common limitation of the different health literacy assessment tools is that while many measure the ability to read health-related words or passages, few measure the degree of comprehension or the likelihood of correct application. For example, word recognition tests measure access but not comprehension and do not address the issue of numeracy at all. Although tests that include assessments of numeracy are an improvement over word recognition tests, they often take more time than is possible in a health care setting. Similarly, most shortened versions (e.g., S-TOFHLA) still require over ten minutes to administer, which may be too long for many clinical and community settings. Other assessment techniques must be used to measure health literacy in a way that measures message access, comprehension and application of health information. For example, techniques such as the “teach back” and “show me” approaches can address comprehension (AMA, 1999). These approaches involve having the health care provider ask the patient to explain in words or to physically demonstrate how to follow the provider’s instructions. This method may be less threatening to low health literacy patients because the provider is suggesting that he or she may not have communicated clearly rather than blaming the patient for not listening or understanding. Furthermore, the World Health Organization suggests that health literacy approaches should not only consider access, comprehension,

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

593

and application of health messages and instructions, but also the motivation to act on the information (Nutbeam, 1998). ADDRESSING HEALTH LITERACY THROUGH HEALTH COMMUNICATION

People with low health literacy may be in greater need of health promotion and disease prevention efforts than people with high literacy because low health literacy can contribute to perceptions of shame and stigma, poor patient/provider communication, limited health knowledge, and adverse health outcomes. Unfortunately, it is challenging to administer health communication interventions with people who have low health literacy because their limited literacy abilities make it difficult for them to access, understand, and apply many health communication messages. Therefore, the target audience’s health literacy characteristics, needs, and barriers must be considered when developing, implementing, and evaluating health communication programs if these programs are to be successful. Know Your Audience

The entire field of health communication is predicated on the assumption that health communicators get to know a great deal about their target audience and that this information informs their approach. Education level, unfortunately, is not an acceptable proxy for health literacy as many studies have found significant discrepancies in these two constructs (Doak et al., 1998; French & Larrabee, 1999). Therefore, one of the first steps in developing a health communication intervention should be to explore and assess the health literacy levels of the target audience by administering one of the aforementioned scales, a newly developed instrument, or through the use of an appropriate qualitative assessment strategy. Data on target audience health literacy levels can inform decisions related to audience segmentation, message development, channel selections, and many other intervention aspects. Regarding audience segmentation, for example, it is likely that people in a target population with low health literacy will require an entirely different health communication approach than those with higher health literacy levels. The low health literacy segment may be more reachable with interpersonal and multimedia channels than with printed materials. In addition, receiver barriers such as stigma and denial must be considered when developing and delivering messages to this segment. Health communication professionals must then decide whether to develop and implement different approaches for each audience segment, with correspondingly different health materials, or to focus exclusively on one target audience segment. Another important health communication construct that should be assessed during formative research is culture. Culture has been defined as “learned, nonrandom, systematic behavior that is transmitted from person to person and from generation to generation” (Stein & Rowe, 1989, p. 4). People’s culture and health literacy may interact in such a way to influence whether people pay attention to health communication messages and whether they apply the messages to their own beliefs and behaviors. For example, different cultures may have different preferred sources of health information and some may perceive written messages or printed communication channels as irrelevant or inappropriate. One way to address this concern is for health communication professionals to work with members of the targeted culture to identify potential culture-specific health communication barriers. In addition, health communicators should develop their own cultural competence, which should contribute to “effectively working with the cultural context of

594

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

an individual or community from a diverse cultural or ethnic background” (CampinhaBacote, 1994). Kreps and Kunimoto (1994) suggested several ways to improve multicultural health communication, including reading about other cultures, learning new languages, attending multicultural events, spending time with members of other cultures, and becoming aware that people have different perceptions of reality, especially related to health issues. Printed Health Communication Materials

Reaching people with low health literacy is especially difficult when using printed health communication materials, the most common approach for patient education on disease processes, medical management, and self-care instructions (Williams et al., 1998). Many studies have examined printed health materials designed for specific diseases or conditions and have determined that most printed materials are written at reading levels that are higher than many of the people for whom the materials were intended (Doak et al., 1998; Dollahite, Thompson, & McNew, 1996; Hearth-Holmes et al., 1997; Williams, 2000). This common mismatch between the health literacy ability of a target population and the reading level of many printed health materials has been described as the “core issue in health literacy” (Root & Stableford, 1999). Research by Doak et al. (1998), for example, examined the reading level of different printed materials on cancer and found that the overall average reading level of the materials was at the tenth grade, whereas the average adult in the United States reads at an eighthgrade level. A different study of 209 printed pamphlets on diet and health found that 68% of the pamphlets were written at a ninth-grade level or higher and only 11% percent were written at sixth-grade levels or lower (Dollahite et al., 1996). Similarly, Hearth-Holmes et al. (1997) found that common educational materials used with people who have lupus (a chronic auto-immune disease) were written at levels that ranged from the seventhto the fifteenth-grade level, despite the fact that lupus patients had an average reading level between seventh- and eighth-grade and that 20% of patients were reading below the seventh-grade level. This problem is not limited to educational materials. One hospital, for example, discovered that the informed consent form it was using with patients was written at a nineteenth-grade level, far higher than the comprehension level of most of their literate patients (Williams, 2000). Although printed materials may not be the best health communication medium for reaching people with low health literacy, several studies have found that it is possible to create printed materials that are accessible to low health literacy populations. Davis, Fredrickson et al., (1998) conducted a randomized trial to test effects and likeability of different printed pamphlets that discussed immunizations. The researchers found that simplifying the materials increased their appeal but did not raise their comprehension level. Improved comprehension of the materials was achieved by adding instructional graphics to the materials. Ngoh and Shepherd (1997) reached a similar conclusion in their study on the use of visual aids. They found that visual aids could help selected audiences to improve their comprehension of the information and compliance with treatment recommendations. Doak et al. (1998) suggested a number of strategies for effectively presenting printed health information to people with low health literacy: only give advice that is immediately essential; divide the information into easy-to-understand parts; include visual images with each information part; put all information in the appropriate context; make instructions interactive; offer visual examples; use testimonials; and tailor the messages. Other important

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

595

recommendations include using active voice and conversational style; using bullets to organize information; using content that is friendly, appealing, and culturally appropriate, including summaries of important information; defining medical terms and adding pronunciation keys, using ample margins and “white space” to reduce eye strain; using both upper and lower case letters; and using a 12–14 point font size (Buck, 1998; National Cancer Institute, 1994; Root & Stableford, 1999). A common perception about people with low literacy is that they receive regular assistance on their literacy-related needs from family or friends. However, this perception may be inaccurate. A study examining diabetes patient education materials found that many people with low literacy levels did not receive any reading-related help or support from others (Jacobson, 2000). Less than one fourth of people with the lowest level of literacy indicated that they received help with everyday reading problems from family or friends, and less than 15% of people with the second lowest literacy level reported receiving reading help from family or friends. Therefore, health communication professionals cannot assume that people with low health literacy will have the printed messages they are unable to read “translated” to them once they get home. Another question that must be considered when developing printed materials for a target audience that includes people of both low and high health literacy levels is whether to create different materials for people at each health literacy level or one material that is written at the lowest literacy level but still intended to reach everyone. There is some disagreement among experts regarding whether the latter approach is worthwhile. For example, Plimpton and Root (1994) have argued that using printed material designed for people with low health literacy can be appropriate for everyone regardless of literacy level. Conversely, Wallace (1998) believes that people are smarter than the experts think and that it would be both a mistake and insulting to “dumb down” materials. He instead suggests that materials should be presented at a variety of levels. Interpersonal Health Communication

Interpersonal health communication channels may encounter fewer barriers than printed health communication when targeting people with low health literacy. However, there still are several important considerations that should inform the health communication process to ensure that health messages are accessed, understood, and appropriately applied. First and foremost, when engaged in an interpersonal interaction, the receiver’s health literacy level should be assessed so that the health communicator can appropriately adapt his or her communication style. Although it is not possible always to administer a formal survey instrument or use an informal technique to assess health literacy, health communicators can be on the lookout for low health literacy warning signs. Such signs can include taking a long time to sign one’s name or signing with an “X,” using surrogates to complete written tasks, asking to bring paperwork home to return at a later time, consistently asking for instructions and information to be repeated, and complaining of eyesight difficulties when given something to read (Macario, Emmons, Sorensen, Hunt, & Rudd, 1998). Nonverbal receiver cues such as nodding or making eye contact can indicate that the receiver understands the message, and a lack of these cues may suggest low understanding. Health communicators also can use nonverbal cues to encourage receiver understanding. People with low health literacy may be more likely to respond to a communicator who encourages participation by appearing interested, uses touch to comfort or indicate immediacy, and attends to nonverbal communication (du Pre, 2000).

596

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

Another health literacy barrier that is encountered when people enter the health care system is exposure to medical terms and jargon that are unclear or unfamiliar. This problem is frequently experienced when one is first diagnosed with an illness or condition and commonly occurs regardless of one’s health literacy level. Freimuth, Stein, and Kearn (1993) noted that such difficulties exist when communicating information about a cancer diagnosis in terms that patients can comprehend. When coupled with problems of health literacy, this health communication challenge assumes an even greater importance because it is crucial for people to be able to understand their diagnosis and treatment options and participate in the decision-making process regarding their treatment. People with low health literacy may have increased difficulty in such interpersonal interactions due in part to their limited health-related vocabulary and in part to the complexity of engaging in two-way discussions about what may be an intimidating and anxietyprovoking health care context (Roter, 2000). The difference in power between health care providers and patients, both real and perceived, is significant and can have profound effects on the communication exchange (du Pre, 2000), causing some patients to not ask questions or seek clarifications for misunderstood instructions. Physicians tend to communicate more assertively than patients (Street & Buller, 1987, 1988), and patients often assume a passive communication position, thus they do not provide complete answers or ask their own questions (Frankel, 1984). Similarly, some patients may remain silent when they disagree with the physician (Street, 1990, 1992), and people with low health literacy may not ask questions or express their confusion because they do not want to feel embarrassed if the practitioner becomes impatient or frustrated (Lee, 1999). Health communication professionals, therefore, must be particularly sensitive to receivers with low health literacy skills and should not assume that a lack of questions signifies agreement or comprehension. Multimedia Health Communication

Because people with low health literacy have difficulty reading and understanding printed and interpersonal health communication, other media channels may be more suited for these audiences. Many health literacy experts have recommended that health communication interventions, especially between patients and providers, use communication channels and approaches, other than written communication, that can be more readily accessed by people with limited reading skills (French & Larrabee, 1999; Gazmararian, Parker et al., 1999). Some recommended approaches include videotaped presentations (Davis et al., 1996; Kalichman, Ramachandran, & Catz, 1999; Williams et al., 1995), pictorial guides (Kalichman, Catz, & Ramachandran, 1999), and verbal peer education (Davis et al., 1996). However, the health communication medium that may offer the greatest potential for delivering health messages to people with low health literacy in a manner that is accessible, understandable, and applicable is through “eHealth” or technology-based programes. Computer-based health communication can be delivered using stand-alone computer programs that run on single computers (e.g., kiosks, CD-ROM programs) or via information available on the Internet that can be accessed from individual computers (e.g., World Wide Web, chat rooms). One strength of this communication medium is that health messages can be delivered to receivers through multiple communication channels such as text, graphics, photos, animations, audio, and video. These nontext channels may be more accessable and understandable by people with low health literacy than text-based messages alone. Several studies have used computer-based health communication systems featuring

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

597

audio and video components that complement on-screen text and graphics and have found these systems to be an effective means of communicating with people who have low literacy skills (Campbell, Honess-Morreale, Farrell, Carbone, & Brasure, 1999; Turner, Ku, Rogers, Lindberg, Pleck, & Sonenstein, 1998). Another strength of computer-based health communication is that programs can be designed to present information that is “tailored” to each receiver’s characteristics, needs, and preferences. Tailored health communication involves surveying individuals on predetermined psychosocial and communication constructs and then using computers to generate and deliver health communication messages that are individually matched to each person’s unique characteristics, preferences, and needs. Tailored health communication messages have been used effectively for many public health issues including diet (Campbell, Bernhardt et al., 1999), physical activity (Bull, Kreuter, & Scharff, 1999), cancer screening (Skinner, Strecher, & Hospers, 1994), and smoking cessation (Strecher et al., 1994). Computer-based tailoring can be an effective health communication approach for people with low health literacy because programs can be designed to tailor both message content and delivery format (Bernhardt, 2001). People with low health literacy can receive messages that are matched to their specific health literacy level along dimensions such as reading level, knowledge of medical jargon, native language, culture, and so on. In addition, these programs can confirm receiver understanding by asking review questions or giving short quizzes. An additional strength of computer-based health communication for people with low health literacy is that many studies have found that people tend to be much more comfortable and willing to disclose sensitive or controversial information to a computer-based survey than to a human interviewer or via a paper and pencil survey (Locke et al., 1992; Turner et al., 1998). This strength may be particularly useful when assessing levels of health literacy because people with low health literacy may have less opportunity to deny their status to a computer program and less motivation to hide their status out of fear of embarrassment. In addition, delivering low-literacy health messages by computer may be perceived as more private and confidential, again reducing people’s feelings of shame. A major challenge of computer-based health communication that remains, however, is lack of experience with and access to computers among many people who have low health literacy. Health communication programs must make extensive efforts to address these barriers if computer-based health communication programs are to reach those with the greatest need. For example, computer interfaces can be designed so that people with little or no computer experience can use them. Rather than using a keyboard or a mouse for inputting data, people can use a touch screen or keypad that is similar to that on a telephone or automated teller machine, which many people are familiar with regardless of literacy level. Studies have found that most people who have never used a computer report that they are comfortable using these kinds of computer interfaces (Bernhardt et al., 2001). Despite the rapid growth rate of computer and Internet users in the United States, it remains unlikely that large number of people with low literacy levels will soon get computer access at their homes or places of work. Therefore, other approaches to improving computer access need to be considered. One such approach is the creation of free or low-cost Internet public access points, which involves the installation and maintenance of computers in places such as schools, libraries, post offices, churches, laundromats, cyber-cafes, or free-standing computer centers (Eng et al., 1998). Another factor of this disparity of access, known as the “digital divide,” is that some people with low health literacy may choose to not use computers or the Internet because

598

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

they cannot find Internet sites that meet their literacy needs. A study by The Children’s Partnership found that existing content on the World Wide Web does not meet the content needs of many underserved communities (Lazaras & Mora, 2000). The researchers strongly recommend that there needs to be more of the following on the Internet: localoriented content about employment, education, and business development opportunities; information that is less text-oriented and more accessible to those with lower literacy skills; information that is available in multiple languages; and information that is created by underserved communities themselves and that is culturally inclusive and appropriate. Health communication professionals should use these four recommendations as a checklist when developing Web-based programs for people with low health literacy.

Increasing Levels of Health Literacy

An entirely different health communication approach for reaching people with low health literacy is to use health communication efforts to help increase people’s health literacy skills. Healthy People 2010 includes this task as a national goal, specifically to “Improve the health literacy of persons with low or marginal literacy skills” (Department of Health and Human Services, 2000, pp. 11–15). Although this task may be considerably more difficult than developing easy-to-read materials, there are many compelling reasons to pursue this goal, including those presented by the American Medical Association (1999): consumers with low health literacy cannot be “empowered consumers” in the American market-driven health care system; patients will not receive adequate care if they do not understand the instructions of their health care professionals; health care providers and hospitals may be legally liable for the adverse outcomes of patients who did not understand important health information; the inability of people with low health literacy to properly manage their health results in substantial but avoidable costs for the U.S. health care system; and health literacy problems are more common in Medicare, Medicaid, and uninsured populations. Because people with low health literacy may perceive themselves as lacking power, increasing health literacy has the potential also to increase self-efficacy (Parker et al., 1996). Doak et al. (1998) predicted that enhancing health literacy can lead to worthwhile gains in information compliance, recall, and satisfaction. Although very little research has been conducted that explores health communication interventions that seek to raise health literacy levels, the topic of health literacy has become much more prominent in recent years due to the awareness raised by such groups as the AMA’s (1999) Ad Hoc Committee on Health Literacy for the Council on Scientific Affairs and the efforts of Pfizer, Inc. (2000). Additional research will be needed to develop and evaluate health communication strategies and approaches that can effectively increase peoples’ health literacy. Health communication researchers and professionals should work closely with experts in other forms of literacy promotion such as reading literacy, numeracy, media literacy, and computer literacy to build on existing knowledge and expertise. Furthermore, nontraditional medical partners may be essential collaborators in these pursuits. Olson and colleagues (1996), for example, demonstrated that pharmacists could be effective health communicators for people who have low health literacy. Working with adult reading educators, a pharmacist-based program was implemented that interviewed people to ensure that they understood the instructions for their prescription medications. They found that prescription drug users achieved a more open and trusting relationship with their pharmacist, in general, and the pharmacists became more aware of issues related to low literacy patients.

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

599

FUTURE HEALTH LITERACY RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

Although there are many existing programs that address the continuing challenge of low reading literacy, the problem of low health literacy remains largely unresolved. Future research and practice on health literacy and health communication should focus on the three main categories of literacy-related barriers to effective health communication: access to, understanding of, and application of health information. The five recommendations below are areas where more research, practice, and advocacy are needed to expand knowledge and reduce the adverse effects of living with low health literacy. First, additional attention needs to be focused on the lack of physical access to health information among people with low health literacy. Because they have less access to health care providers, traditional sources of media, and computers, people with low health literacy are at risk of being on the wrong side of the “knowledge gap” (McQuail & Windahl, 1993) as it continues to widen into a knowledge chasm. Furthermore, people lacking access to these media and messages are likely to miss countless educational, economic, and healthrelated opportunities. Health communication research is needed to explore alternative channels for delivering vital health information to people with low health literacy in a format they can access and understand. In addition, extensive efforts must be made to address the underlying conditions that perpetuate these knowledge and access gaps in the first place. Second, existing scales for measuring health literacy are not adequate because many take too long to administer and most overly emphasize reading medical terms and understanding medical jargon instead of asking questions to assess other crucial elements of health literacy. In particular, comprehensive health literacy scales should include assessments of physical access to health information, native language literacy, numeracy, media literacy, computer literacy, and cultural factors that can affect message access, comprehension, and application. Information technology now makes it possible to develop and administer a comprehensive health literacy scale that can be completed quickly and inexpensively, and that is accessible to people regardless of their literacy level. Third, health communication researchers should synthesize the findings from existing research on delivering written messages to people with low health literacy and should conduct additional basic and applied research to complement and supplement existing research. The goal of this synthesis and additional research should be to develop uniform standards or “best practice” recommendations that are rooted in health communication theory and empirical findings. These best practice recommendations should be applicable not only to health materials printed on paper but also to other text-laden health materials including web pages and other electronic media. Fourth, additional health communication research is needed to explore the application of computer-based tailoring techniques to people with low health literacy. Messages can be individually tailored to users’ native language, reading level, and familiarity with medical jargon, as well as their culture, source preferences, level of involvement in the health issue, text size, color preferences, and any other variables that would make messages more accessible, comprehendible, and applicable. Both basic and applied research will be needed to determine which variables are most appropriate and cost-effective for tailored interventions with populations with mixed levels of health literacy. Finally, health communication interventions should explore ways to increase health literacy levels in individuals and communities. One approach to this challenge is to review the literature and work with experts and groups from other disciplines that have focused on literacy issues in order to learn what has been successful and what has not. Further, health

600

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

communication interventions should focus not only on individuals with low health literacy but also on other people involved in their lives. Interventions that focus on increasing the accurate information that friends and family members have may indirectly increase the amount of accurate information that low literacy patients receive. Taking advantage of multiple education environments throughout the community also may serve to make the entire community, as well as individuals, more informed. CONCLUSION

Healthy People 2010 states, “Closing the gap in health literacy is an issue of fundamental fairness and equity and is essential to reduce health disparities” (Department of Health and Human Services, 2000). The issue of health literacy is one that has been overlooked for far too long in the area of health communication. If people are unable to access, understand, and apply the health-related information they receive from individuals and media sources, then whether the “best” message reaches the population is no longer an important question. Rather, the question becomes much more basic: whether a message, any message, is reaching the population. Research efforts on the challenge of increasing people’s health literacy levels are not only needed—they are overdue. This chapter has attempted to provide an overview of health literacy and explore how health communication, and health communication researchers, can and should address health literacy barriers. By providing a background of the concept of literacy, and indicating how the concept of literacy has evolved, from reading literacy to numeracy, media literacy, computer literacy, health literacy, and so on, this chapter demonstrates how tightly woven the concept of health literacy is to attaining access, comprehension, and assistance regarding one’s health. The prevalence and impact of low health literacy was detailed, and existing health literacy measurements were reviewed. The suggestions for addressing health literacy inadequacies through health communication, as well as those suggested for future research, are only the start to what is likely to be an exciting, rewarding, and necessary venture for health communication professionals to follow. REFERENCES Allen, C. E. (2000, May). Literacy essential to health. The nations’ health. Washington, DC: American Public Health Association. American Medical Association, Ad Hoc Committee on Health Literacy for the Council on Scientific Affairs. (1999). Health literacy: Report of the Council of Scientific Affairs. Journal of the American Medical Association, 281, 552–557. American Medical Association. (2000). Facts about health literacy. Retrieved on March 1, 2001, from http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/article/3215-3308.html. Austin, E. W., & Johnson, K. K. (1997). Immediate and delayed effects of media literacy training on third graders’ decision making for alcohol. Health Communication, 9, 323–349. Baker, D. W., Parker, R. M., Williams, M. V., & Clark, W. S. (1998). Health literacy and the risk of hospital admission. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 13, 791. Baker, D. W., Parker, R. M., Williams, M. V., Clark, W. S., & Nurss, J. (1997). The relationship of patient reading ability to self-reported health and use of health services. American Journal of Public Health, 87, 1027–1030. Baker, D. W., Williams, M. V., Parker, R. M., Gazmararian, J. A., & Nurss, J. (1999). Development of a brief test to measure functional health literacy. Patient Education and Counseling, 38, 33–42.

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

601

Bernhardt, J. M., Strecher, V. J., Bishop, K., Potts, P., Madison, E. M., & Thorp, J. (2001). Handheld computer-assisted self-interviews: User comfort level and preferences. American Journal of Health Behavior, 25, 557–563. Bernhardt, J. M. (2001). Tailoring messages and design in a web-based skin cancer prevention intervention. International Electronic Journal of Health Education, 4, 290–297. Blanchard, J. S., Garcia, H. S., & Carter, R. M. (1989). Instrumento para diagnosticar lecturas (Espanol-English): Instrument for the diagnosis of reading. Dubuque, IA: Kendall-Hunt. Brecklin, T., & Hoffman, G. (1998). Using general semantics as the theoretical foundation for teaching media literacy. In S. P. Kodish & R. P. Holston (Eds.), Developing sanity in human affairs (pp. 313–319). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Brez, S. M., & Taylor, M. (1997). Assessing literacy for patient teaching: Perspectives of adults with low literacy skills. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 25, 1040–1047. Buck, M. L. (1998). Providing patients with written medication information. Annals of Pharmacotherapy, 32, 962–969. Bull, F. C., Kreuter, M. W., & Scharff, D. P. (1999). Effects of tailored, personalized, and general materials on physical activity. Patient Education and Counseling, 36, 181–192. Burgoon, M. (1995). Communication between physicians and patients: Methods for gaining compliance. In L. K. Fuller & L. M. Shilling (Eds.), Communicating about communicable diseases (pp. 225–241). Amherst, MA: HRD Press. Campbell, M. K., Bernhardt, J. M., Waldmiller, M., Jackson, B., Potenziani, D., Weathers, B., & Demissie, S. (1999). Varying the message source in computer-tailored nutrition education. Patient Education and Counseling, 36, 157–169. Campbell, M. K., Honess-Morreale, L., Farrell, D., Carbone, E., & Brasure, M. (1999). A tailored multimedia nutrition education pilot program for low-income women receiving food assistance. Health Education Research, 14, 257–267. Campinha-Bacote, J. (1994). Cultural competence in psychiatric mental health nursing: A conceptual model. Nursing Clinics of North America, 29(1), 8–11. Davis, T. C., Arnold, C., Berkel, H. J., Nandy, I., Jackson, R. H., & Glass, J. (1996). Knowledge and attitude on screening mammography among low-literate, low-income women. Cancer, 78, 1912–1920. Davis, T. C., Fredrickson, D. D., Arnold, C., Murphy, P. W., Herbst, M., & Bocchini, J. A. (1998). A polio immunization pamphlet with increased appeal and simplified language does not improve comprehension to an acceptable level. Patient Education and Counseling, 33, 25–37. Davis, T. C., Long, S. W., Jackson, R. H., Mayeaux, E. J., George, R. B., Murphy, P. W., & Crouch, M. A. (1993). Rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine: A shortened screening instrument. Family Medicine, 25, 391–395. Davis, T. C., Michielutte, R., Askov, E. N., Williams, M. V., & Weiss, B. D. (1998). Practical assessment of adult literacy in health care. Health Education and Behavior, 25, 613–624. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (2000). Healthy people 2010. Retrieved on March 1, 2001, from http:// www.healthypeople.gov. Doak, C. C., Doak, L. G., Friedell, G. H., & Meade, C. D. (1998). Improving comprehension for cancer patients with low literacy skills: Strategies for clinicians. CA - A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 48, 151–162. Dollahite, J., Thompson, C., & McNew, R. (1996). Readability of printed sources of diet and health information. Patient Education and Counseling, 27, 123–134. Du Pre, A. (2000). Communicating about health: Current issues and perspectives. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing.

602

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

Eng, T. R., Maxfield, A., Patrick, K., Deering, M. J., Ratzan, S. C., & Gustafson, D. H. (1998). Access to health information and support: A public highway or a private road? Journal of the American Medical Association, 280, 1371–1375. Estrada, C., Barnes, V., Collins, C., & Byrd, J. C. (1999). Letter to the editor: Health literacy and numeracy. Journal of the American Medical Association, 282, 527. Frankel, R. M. (1984). From sentence to sequence: Understanding the medical encounter through microinteractional analysis. Discourse Processes, 7, 135–170. Freimuth, V. S., Stein, J. A., & Kearn, T. J. (1993). Talking with the public about cancer: The cancer information service. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Case studies in health communication (pp. 277–289). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. French, K. S., & Larrabee, J. H. (1999). Relationships among educational material readability, client literacy, perceived beneficence, and perceived quality. Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 13(6), 68–82. Gazmararian, J. A., Baker, D. W., Williams, M. V., Parker, R. M., Scott, T. L., Green, D. C., Fehrenbach, S. N., Ren, J., & Koplan, J. P. (1999). Health literacy among Medicare enrollees in a managed care organization. Journal of the American Medical Association, 281, 545–551. Gazmararian, J. A., Parker, R. M., & Baker, D. W. (1999). Reading skills and family planning knowledge and practices in a low-income managed-care population. Obstetrics and Gynecology, 93, 239–244. Hanson-Divers, E. C. (1997). Developing a medical achievement reading test to evaluate patient literacy skills: A preliminary study. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 8, 56–69. Harvey, B. (1983). Stop saying “computer literacy!” Classroom Computer News, 3, 56– 57. Haylock, D. W. (1987). Towards numeracy. Support for Learning, 2, 13–17. Hearth-Holmes, M., Murphy, P. W., Davis, T. C., Nandy, I., Elder, C. G., Broadwell, L. H., & Wolf, R. E. (1997). Literacy in patients with chronic disease: Systemic lupus erthematosus and the reading level of patient education materials. Journal of Rheumatology, 24, 2335– 2339. Higdon, J. (1995). The evolution of computer literacy for preservice teachers. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved on October 5, 2000, from http:// www.coe.uh.edu/insite/elec pub/html1995/092.htm. Howard-Pitney, B., Winkleby, M. A., Albright, C. L., Bruce, B., & Fortmann, S. P. (1997). The Stanford nutrition action program: A dietary fat intervention for low-literacy adults. American Journal of Public Health, 87, 1971–1976. Irving, L. M., DuPen, J., & Berel, S. (1998). A media literacy program for high school females. Eating Disorders, 6, 119–131. Jacobson, K. L. (2000, August). A member survey to assess health literacy and preferences for diabetes patient education materials. Paper presented at the meeting of the Georgia Public Health Association and the Georgia Federation of Professional Health Educators, Athens, GA. Jastak, S., & Wilkinson, G. S. (1993). Wide range achievement test-revised 3. Wilmington, DE: Jastak Associates. Jenks, S. (1992). Researchers link low literacy to high health care costs. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 84, 1068–1069. Kalichman, S. C., Catz, S., & Ramachandran, B. (1999). Barriers to HIV/AIDS treatment and treatment adherence among African-American adults with disadvantaged education. Journal of the National Medical Association, 91, 439–446.

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

603

Kalichman, S. C., Ramachandran, B., & Catz, S. (1999). Adherence to combination antiretroviral therapies in HIV patients of low health literacy. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 14, 267–273. Kilker, K. M. (2000). Considering health literacy. Washington, DC: Center for Medicare Education. Retrieved on October 6, 2000, from http://www.agingsociety.org/considering.pdf. Kirsch, I., Jungeblut, A., Jenkins, L., & Kolstad, A. (1993). Adult literacy in America: A first look at the results of the National Adult Literacy Survey. Washington, DC: Department of Education, National Center for Education Studies. Kreps, G. L., & Kunimoto, E. N. (1994). Effective communication in multicultural health care settings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lazaras, W., & Mora, F. (2000). Online content for low income and underserved Americans: The digital divide’s new frontier. The Children’s Partnership. Retrieved July 11, 2000, from http://www.childrenspartnership.org/pub/low income/. Lee, P. P. (1999). Why literacy matters: Links between reading ability and health. Archives of Ophthalmology, 117, 100–103. Locke, S. E., Kowaloff, H. B., Hoff, R. G., Safran, C., Popovsky, M. A., Cotton, D. J., Finkelstein, D. M., Page, P. L., & Slack, W. V. (1992). Computer interview for screening blood donors for risk of HIV transmission. Journal of the American Medical Association, 268, 1301–1305. Macario, E., Emmons, K. M., Sorensen, G., Hunt, M. K., & Rudd, R. E. (1998). Factors influencing nutrition education for patients with low literacy skills. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 98, 559–564. Manguel, A. (1996). A history of reading. Hammersmith, London: HarperCollins. Marwick, C. (1997). Patients’ lack of literacy may contribute to billions of dollars in higher hospital costs. Journal of the American Medical Association, 278, 971–972. Mayeaux, E. J., Davis, T. C., Jackson, R. H., Henry, D., Patton, P., Slay, L., & Sentell, T. (1995). Literacy and self-reported educational levels in relation to mini-mental state examination scores. Family Medicine, 27, 658–662. McArdle, F. B. (2000). Public policy and public health: Making the connection. In Health literacy: Advancing public policy (pp. 13–17). New York: Pfizer Inc. McQuail, D., & Windahl, S. (1993). Communication models for the study of mass communications (2nd ed.). New York: Longman. Murphy, P. W., Davis, T. C., Decker, B. C., & Jackson, R. H. (1993). Rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine: Using a novel reading recognition test. Journal of Reading, 37(2), 124–130. National Cancer Institute. (1994). Clear & simple: Developing effective print materials for low-literate readers. NIH Publication No. 95-3594. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Ngoh, L. N., & Shepherd, M. D. (1997). Design, development, and evaluation of visual aids for communicating prescription drug instructions to non-literate patients in rural Cameroon. Patient Education and Counseling, 30, 257–270. Nurss, J. R., Parker, R. M., Williams, M. V., & Baker, D. M. (1993). Test of functional health literacy in adults: Technical report. Atlanta: Center for the Study of Adult Literacy, Georgia State University. Nutbeam, D. (1998). Health promotion glossary. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. Retrieved on January 15, 2000, from http://www.who.int/hpr/docs/glossary.pdf. Olson, R. M., Blank, D., Cardinal, E., Hopf, G., & Chalmers, R. K. (1996). Understanding medication-related needs of low-literacy patients. Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, NS36, 424–429.

604

BERNHARDT AND CAMERON

Parikh, N. S., Parker, R. M., Nurss, J. R., Baker, D. W., & Williams, M. V. (1996). Shame and health literacy: The unspoken connection. Patient Education and Counseling, 27, 33–39. Parker, R., Baker, D., Williams, M., & Nurss, J. (1995). The test of functional health literacy in adults (TOFHLA): A new instrument for measuring patients’ literacy skills. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 10, 537–545. Parker, R., Williams, M., Baker, D., & Nurss, J. (1996). Literacy and contraception: exploring the link. Obstetrics and Gynecology, 88(3 Suppl.), 72S–77S. Pew Internet & American Life Project. (2000). The online health care revolution: How the web helps Americans take better care of themselves. Retrieved on February 1, 2001, from http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/. Pfizer Inc. (2000). Health literacy: Advancing public policy. New York: Pfizer Inc. Plimpton, S., & Root, J. (1994). Materials and strategies that work in low literacy health communication. Public Health Reports, 109, 86–92. Root, J., & Stableford, S. (1999). Easy-to-read consumer communications: A missing link in Medicaid managed care. Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, 24, 1–26. Roter, D. L. (2000). The outpatient medical encounter and elderly patients. Clinics in Geriatric Medicine, 16, 95–107. Rothman, A. J., & Kiviniemi, M. T. (1999). Treating people with information: An analysis and review of approaches to communicating health risk information. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 25, 44–51. Schwartz, L. M., Woloshin, S., Black, W. C., & Welch, H. G. (1997). The role of numeracy in understanding the benefit of screening mammography. Annals of Internal Medicine, 127, 966–972. Skinner, C. S., Strecher, V. J., & Hospers, H. (1994). Physician recommendations for mammography: Do tailored messages make a difference? American Journal of Public Health, 84, 43–49. Slosson, R. J. L. (1990). Slosson oral reading tests-revised. East Aurora, NY: Slosson Educational Publishers. Stein, P. L., & Rowe, B. M. (1989). Physical anthropology (4th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Strecher, V. J., Kreuter, M. W., Den Boer, D. J., Kobrin, S., Hospers, H. J., & Skinner, C. S. (1994). The effects of computer-tailored smoking cessation messages in family practice settings. Journal of Family Practice, 39, 262–270. Street, R. L. Jr. (1990). Dentist-patient communication: A review and commentary. In D. O’Hair & G. L. Kreps (Eds.), Applied communication theory and research (pp. 331–351). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Street, R. L., Jr. (1992). Analyzing communication in medical consultations. Medical Care, 30, 976–988. Street, R. L., Jr., & Buller, D. B. (1987). Nonverbal response patterns in physician-patient interactions: A functional analysis. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 11, 234–253. Street, R. L., Jr., & Buller, D. B. (1988). Patients’ characteristics affecting physician-patient nonverbal communication. Human Communication Research, 15, 60–91. Tuckson, R. V. (2000). National conference on health literacy: Keynote address. In Health literacy: Advancing public policy (pp. 1–5). New York: Pfizer Inc. Turner, C. F., Ku, L., Rogers, S. M., Lindberg, L., Pleck, J., & Sonenstein, F. (1998). Adolescent sexual behavior, drug use, and violence: Increased reporting with computer survey technology. Science, 280, 867–873. U.S. Congress. (1991). National Literacy Act of 1991. Public Law 102-73. U.S. Department of Education. (1993). Adult literacy in America: A first look at the findings of the national adult literacy survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved on July 15, 2000, from http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/Report2/rep15-01.htm.

26. THE CHALLENGE OF HEALTH LITERACY

605

Wade, B., & Moore, M. (1998). An early start with books: Literacy and mathematical evidence from a longitudinal study. Educational Review, 50, 135–145. Wallace, D. J. (1998). Don’t dumb down lupus patient literature! (Letter to editor). Journal of Rheumatology, 25, 1649. Weiss, B. D., Blanchard, J. S., McGee, D. L., Hart, G., Warren, B., Burgoon, M., & Smith, K. J. (1994). Illiteracy among medicaid recipients and its relationship to health care costs. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 5(2), 99–111. Weiss, B. D., Hart, G., McGee, D. L., & D’Estelle, S. (1992). Health status of illiterate adults: Relation between literacy and health status among persons with low literacy skills. Journal of the American Board of Family Practice, 5, 257–264. Williams, M. V. (2000, August). Adult literacy and health literacy: The link to health communication. Paper presented at the meeting of the Georgia Public Health Association and the Georgia Federation of Professional Health Educators, Athens, GA. Williams, M. V., Baker, D. W., Parker, R. M., & Nurss, J. R. (1998). Relationship of functional health literacy to patients’ knowledge of their chronic disease. Annals of Internal Medicine, 158, 166–172. Williams, M. V., Parker, R. M., Baker, D. W., Parikh, N. S., Pitkin, K., Coates, W. C., & Nurss, J. R. (1995). Inadequate functional health literacy among patients at two public hospitals. Journal of the American Medical Association, 274, 1677–1682. Wolfe, H. W. (1992). Computer literacy for the 1990s. Journal of Information Systems Education Online, 4(1). Retrieved on March 1, 2000, from http://gise.org/JISE/Vol1-5/ COMPUTE1.htm. Zettl, H. (1998). Contextual media aesthetics as the basis for media literacy. Journal of Communication, 48, 81–95.

VI Lessons and Challenges from the Field Alicia M. Dorsey Texas A&M University System Health Science Center

As Teresa L. Thompson wrote in the introduction to this volume, our purpose in compiling the chapters for this handbook was to provide a summary of some of “what we know to date about communication processes as they relate to health and health care.” However, the editors recognized that a handbook such as this one—purporting to survey the important emergent issues in health communication—should not only include a summary of the theoretical and empirical advances, but must also acknowledge the implications of these emergent issues for health communication practitioners. In 1992, two authors in the present volume (Clifford W. Scherer and Napoleon K. Juanillo) contributed a chapter to the fifteenth volume of the Communication Yearbook entitled “Bridging Theory and Praxis: Reexamining Public Health Communication.” In this chapter the authors examined the implications of different theoretical approaches to health communication for communication planning and strategy. That same year, interestingly, Burdine and McLeroy (1992) wrote an article entitled “Practitioners’ Use of Theory: Examples from a Workgroup.” Here the authors argue for the importance of actively engaging practitioners in a dialog between academicians and practitioners in order to reach a mutual understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in health promotion. A decade later, as the editors were outlining the contents of the first Handbook of Health Communication, we were committed to continue facilitating and encouraging such a dialog in order to understand more completely the intricate relationship between communication practices and health. To that end, three chapters in the final section of the present volume are designed to continue this dialog. Over the years a number of prominent health communication scholars have left academic positions to pursue private-sector positions conducting largescale health communication research for federal agencies. Still others have remained in academe but have dedicated themselves to engaging actively in collaborative research with practitioners outside of the academic setting. Both voices and experiences are represented in this final section.

607

608

PART VI: LESSONS AND CHALLENGES FROM THE FIELD

Gary L. Kreps, a long-standing health communication scholar, left the academic setting to become the Chief of the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch, Behavioral Research Program, the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). His chapter outlines several opportunities to merge health communication inquiry and shape public health policy and practice. He specifically highlights NCI initiatives supporting health communication research and outreach initiatives focusing on enhancing public health. Tim Edgar, Vicki Freimuth, and Sharon Hammond also contributed a chapter to the present volume, summarizing many of the lessons they have learned “in the field” through their efforts to design and evaluate the effectiveness of a variety of national health promotion campaigns. Edgar and Hammond have long been research contractors (with Westat) who direct campaign design through conducting formative, process, and outcome evaluations for the government, although Edgar has recently returned to an academic position. Freimuth, also a long-standing and noted scholar in the discipline, left academe to become the Associate Director for Communication at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The chapter written by these scholar/practitioners highlights a number of lessons they have learned firsthand as they set about trying to put into action many of the principles of our discipline. Roxanne Parrott demonstrates a commitment to being an active participant in the dialog between academicians and practitioners through her collaborative research endeavors. As evidence of this commitment, Parrott and her coauthor for the chapter included in this section, Carol Steiner (Director of the Cancer Control Program, Georgia Department of Human Resources), were the recipients of a Linkage Award in 1999, awarded by the Council on Linkages between Academia and Public Health Practice in Washington, DC. This honor is awarded to representatives of public health agencies and institutions of higher learning who are seen as exemplars of true collaborations between the two domains. In their chapter in this section of the handbook, they provide numerous insights into the value and challenges of such collaborative efforts. The three chapters to follow provide invaluable lessons regarding the practice of health communication, provided by individuals truly “in the field.” Including these chapters written by these particular individuals is our attempt to facilitate the continuation of the critical dialog between academics and practitioners called for a decade ago. Finally, in addition to our commitment to continuing this dialog in some way through the chapters presented in this final section of the Handbook, we were also keenly aware of the vast array of unique ethical issues to which health communication researchers and practitioners alike must attend. Thus, we have included a final chapter by Nurit Guttman examining many of these ethical issues embedded in health communication interventions. She maintains that any communication activity designed to promote individuals’ health or change health-related behavior has numerous ethical issues that must be identified and addressed explicitly. She concludes her chapter by advancing a number of challenges that must be addressed by the health communication scholars and practitioners of the 21st century. REFERENCE Burdine, J. N., & McLeroy, K. (1992). Practitioners’ Use of Theory: Examples from a Workgroup. Health Education Quarterly, 19(3), 331–340. Scherer, C. W., & Juanillo, N. K. (1992). Bridging theory and praxis: re-examining public health communication. In S. A. Deetz (ed.), Communication Yearbook 15. Newbury Park: Sage publ. (312–345).

27 Opportunities for Health Communication Scholarship to Shape Public Health Policy and Practice: Examples from the National Cancer Institute Gary L. Kreps National Cancer Institute

COMMUNICATION AND PUBLIC HEALTH

Health communication is a central process that performs essential functions in the delivery of health care and the promotion of public health. The United States Department of Health and Human Services highlights the powerful influences of communication on public health in the important publication Healthy People 2010: Objectives for Improving Health (1999), with a chapter dedicated to health communication (chapter 11). The chapter describes the breadth of influence that communication can have on health, explaining: health communication can contribute to all aspects of disease prevention and health promotion and is relevant in a number of contexts, including (1) health professional-patient relations; (2) individuals’ exposure to, search for, and use of health information; (3) individuals’ adherence to clinical recommendations and regimens; (4) the construction of public health messages and campaigns; (5) the dissemination of individual and population health risk information, that is, risk communication; (6) images of health in the mass media and the culture at large; (7) the education of consumers about how to gain access to the public health and health care systems; and (8) the development of tele-health applications. (pp. 11–13)

It is a very exciting time for health communication inquiry, and communication is a potentially propitious area for public health research and intervention. A large body of health communication literature has demonstrated the powerful influences of communication interventions on a broad range of health behaviors and health outcomes. For example, Kreps and O’Hair (1995) reported a series of studies showing the influences of intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, organizational, and societal communications on health knowledge, behaviors, and outcomes. Similarly, Greenfield,

609

610

KREPS

Kaplan, and Ware (1985) demonstrated the positive influences of increased patient communicative involvement in treatment on desired health outcomes. Dearing and colleagues (1996) illustrated the positive influences of social marketing and diffusion-based strategies in encouraging at-risk populations to adopt important prevention behaviors. Large-scale longitudinal communication intervention programs, such as the Stanford Five City Heart Health Program and the Minnesota Heart Health communication program, demonstrate the influences of these campaigns on promoting adoption of lifestyle changes to prevent cardiovascular disease and reducing gaps in public health knowledge (Flora, Maccoby, & Farquhar, 1989; Pavlik et al., 1993). A growing body of empirical evidence demonstrates that strategic communications efforts have produced direct positive influences on the adoption of cancer prevention behaviors in diverse populations (Arciti et al., 1994; Bastuji-Garin, Grob, Grognard, Grosjean, & Guillaume, 1999; Buller et al., 1999; Gelb, Boutwell, & Cummings, 1994; Korhonen, Uutela, Korhonen, H., & Puska, 1998; Lipkus, Lyna, & Rimer, 1999; Miller, Geller, Wood, Lew, & Koh, 1999; Pierce, Macaskill, & Hill, 1990; Stephenson & Witte, 1998; Ziant, 1993). Strong evidence also demonstrates that cancer communications efforts can promote adoption of important cancer detection and screening behaviors (Byles & Sanson-Fisher, 1996; Christofolini et al., 1993; Hoffmann et al., 1993). There is growing support in particular for the use of tailored communications efforts to promote cancer prevention and control behaviors (Lipkus et al., 1999; Rakowski et al., 1998; Rimer et al., 1999; Rimer & Glassman, 1998; Skinner, Strecher, & Hospers, 1994). Research on the treatment end of the cancer control continuum underscores the importance of interpersonal communication interventions in providing cancer patients and their families with needed social support and promoting psychosocial adaptation (Daugherty, 1999; Fallowfield & Jenkins, 1999; Fogarty, Curbow, Wingard, McDonnell, & Somerfield, 1999; Gamble, 1998; Kilpatrick, Kritjanson, Tataryn, & Fraser, 1998; Larsson, Widmark Peterson, Lampic, von Essen, & Sjoden, 1998; Roberts, Cox, Reintgen et al., 1994; Samarel, Fawcett, Davis, & Ryan, 1998; van der Kam, Branger, van Bemmel & Mayboom-de Jong, 1998). Informational and educational interventions have been shown to improve cancer patients’ emotional and functional adjustment, as well as their adherence to therapy (Meyer & Mark, 1995). Physician-patient communication and patient involvement in decision making also affect cancer patients’ subsequent quality of life (Andersen & Urban, 1999; Roter, 2000). In the community treatment setting, communication needs and styles may differ dependent on the age of the patient (Ganz, 1997; Turk-Charles, Meyerowitz, & Gatz, 1997), gender of the patient or provider (Hall, Irish, Roter, et al., 1994; Roter, Lipkin, & Korsgaard, 1991), or nature of the information being conveyed (Fox, Siu, & Stein, 1994; Verhoef, White, & Doll, 1999). Many scholars have called for increased concerted study of the ways communication can advance public health goals, especially with the application of media and new communication technologies to health promotion (Cassell, Jackson, & Cheuvront, 1998; Chamberlain, 1996; Clark, 1992; Eng & Gustafson, 1999; Eng et al., 1998; Ferguson, 1996; Lieberman, 1992; Slack, 1997; Smaglik et al., 1998; Street, 1996; Street, Gold, & Manning, 1997; Winnett & Wallack, 1996). Health informatics (the use of new computerbased communications technologies for processing and disseminating health information) has emerged as an important area for health communication inquiry as access to information via the Internet grows at a rapid pace (Eng & Gustafson, 1999; National Technology Infrastructure Administration (NTIA), 1999). This is particularly relevant to cancer communications research, where the demand for accurate and up-to-date health information is very high (Johnson, 1997).

27. PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY AND PRACTICE

611

THE PROMISE OF HEALTH COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP FOR INFLUENCING PUBLIC HEALTH

The centrality of communication in health care/promotion revolves around the interdependent processes of creating, gathering, and sharing relevant “health information” (Kreps, 2001). Health information is the key resource in health care and health promotion because it is used to guide strategic health behaviors, treatments, and decisions (Kreps, 1988; Kreps, Bonaguro, & Query, 1998). Communication is the process by which health care consumers gather information about relevant health risks and treatment options. Communication is a primary tool used by health care providers to gather diagnostic information from and provide treatment information to their clients. This powerful process enables interdependent members of health care teams to share relevant information to facilitate collaboration and cooperation in the delivery of health care. Communication is a primary mechanism available to health organizations for providing influential information in public education campaigns to influence health behaviors and health care practices. It is also the primary process by which information about advances in treatment are disseminated from the health care research to health care practice communities. Communication is the process used to evaluate bioethical issues and weigh consequences in making complex health care decisions. Moreover, communication is the social process used to convey relevant health information to the key audiences (consumers, providers, researchers, policymakers, etc.) that desperately need such information to accomplish their goals. The communication process is complex and the quality of communication in health care and health promotion depends upon careful analysis and strategic use of communication processes. Health communication inquiry has developed to help demystify the complexity of the multifaceted roles performed by communication in health care and health promotion. Such inquiry is conducted to increase knowledge about the influences of communication on health outcomes and direct the knowledge gained toward helping participants in the modern health care system use communication strategically to accomplish their health goals. In this chapter I argue that the centrality of communication to public health suggests that health communication scholars have the great potential to help shape public health policy and practices that help optimize strategic and effective use of communication in health care and health promotion activities. Unfortunately, although there has been great growth and development within health communication inquiry, the potential for major influences from the field on public health policies and practices remains largely unfulfilled (Kreps, Bonaguro, & Query, 1998). Health communication scholars have not always recognized the opportunities available to them for influencing public policy and have not often taken the initiative to bring communication knowledge to bear on public health practices (Sharf, 1999). This chapter examines several new opportunities available to employ health communication inquiry to shape public health policies and practices. It maps out emerging programs that apply health communication scholarship to major public health interventions and describes new health communication research and outreach initiatives being introduced at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to enhance public health. While this portrayal of new NCI initiatives is not intended as a comprehensive review of all opportunities available to health communication scholars, these new initiatives are reflective of some of the most significant prospects available for conducting important health communication research that can make a real difference in society.

612

KREPS

FUNDING FOR COMMUNICATION RESEARCH TO PROMOTE PUBLIC HEALTH

A powerful avenue for enhancing the role of health communication scholarship in public health practice and policy is to increase research support for important and influential health communication research from major health agencies and organizations. With increased research funding, communication researchers can conduct influential large-scale studies, gain access to major health care centers and research populations, and present their research in influential public forums. Support for health communication research can elevate recognition for this rich area of inquiry and enable health communication researchers to address important public health issues in comprehensive ways. In the past, communication research was not a major focus area for large-scale research funding at the national and international levels, with far greater emphasis placed by the funding agencies on basic biochemical sciences and clinical investigations of treatment modalities. However, as the funding agencies have placed greater prominence in recent years on health promotion/education, risk prevention, behavior change, health services, and quality of life issues in public health, behavioral research has begun to make inroads across many of the major public and private health research funding agencies. In fact, there is a great opportunity at this point in time to increase support for health communication research and interventions. Health communication scholars need to seize this window of opportunity now, while the window is open. Health communication scholars should make the most of new opportunities for health communication research. To do so, they must learn about the organizations that support health communication research and learn how to compete successfully for research funding. Health communication scholars have to develop greater understanding of the culture of funded research to compete alongside researchers from other disciplines, such as public health, psychology, medicine, and sociology, that have a longer history of successfully seeking support for behavioral research in health care/promotion. The process of learning about the funded research culture has been aided by several prominent health communication scholars who have taken the initiative to learn about and actively participate in the research funding process. These pioneering health communication scholars should serve as important mentors for others who would also like to conduct large-scale funded health communication research. A number of senior university faculty (such as Everett Rogers, Robert Hornik, Kim Witte, John Finnegan, Roxanne Parrot, Lou Donohew, June Flora, David Johnson, Sam Becker, Michael Burgoon, and many others) have shown that health communication research is fundable by establishing impressive track records as successful health communication grantees. Several other prominent health communication scholars (such as Vicki Freimuth, Barbara Rimer, Steve Booth-Butterfield, Judith McDivitt, K. (Vish) Viswanath, Bob Croyle, and Marty Fishbein) have worked from the inside to establish important programs of support for health communication research by leaving the academy and working for major funding agencies. Still other pioneering communication scholars (such as Ed Maibach, Tim Edgar, Sharon Hammond, Craig LeFebvre, Eric Zook, and Bill Elwood) have helped to establish the credibility of large-scale funded health communication research by leaving the academy to work with prestigious private research organizations that conduct funded health communication research. The more health communication scholars are able to actively participate in the funded research culture, the more new opportunities will develop for conducting health communication research that can influence public health policies and practices.

27. PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY AND PRACTICE

613

THE NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE’S INVESTMENT IN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

In an unprecedented large-scale program for applying communication research to the promotion of public health, the NCI, the largest institute of the National Institutes of Health, recently identified cancer communications as one of its scientific priorities for cancer research and outreach (1999), identifying cancer communications as an area of “extraordinary opportunity.” (For more information about the National Cancer Institute’s “Extraordinary Opportunity in Cancer Communications” see: http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/eocc/.) This major investment in communication research is particularly important because the NCI is a very influential federal agency, often a trailblazer and opinion-leader for other agencies. The NCI’s emphasis on health communication research and outreach is likely to stimulate additional health communication investment and partnerships with many other public and private health organizations. The NCI has designed and begun implementing a comprehensive research and outreach strategy for introducing powerful new communication initiatives that promise to expand health communication knowledge and influence public health policies and practices. Responsibility for developing many of these new research and outreach initiatives rests with the new Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch (HCIRB), a part of NCI’s Behavioral Research Program within the Division of Cancer Control and Populations Sciences that is dedicated to research about the influences of communication and informatics (computer-mediated communications) in cancer prevention and control. The introduction of the HCIRB coincides with and complements the NCI’s identification of cancer communications as an area of extraordinary opportunity and institutional investment. (For more information about the National Cancer Institute’s Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch please see: http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/hcirb/.) CURRENT NCI HEALTH COMMUNICATION INITIATIVES

In support of the NCI scientific priority in cancer communications, the HCIRB has helped introduce several exciting new health communication research and outreach initiatives that promise to influence public health policies and practices. These new initiatives include the following projects. Digital Divide Pilot Projects

In conjunction with the NCI Cancer Information Service (CIS), this program lays the groundwork for the CIS network to form collaborative partnerships with researchers, technology experts, and organizations serving underserved populations in need of relevant cancer information. The NCI recently awarded close to $1 million to help develop research and development projects to increase understanding and help to narrow the digital divide that exists among many underserved populations in accessing and utilizing cancer information on the Internet. The awards are an effort of NCI’s Cancer Information Service to test new strategies aimed at increasing cancer communications in underserved communities. The digital divide has been identified as a special problem in health care that can lead to disparities in care. Many studies show that certain ethnic minorities and low-income, less-educated populations suffer a disproportionate cancer burden and have limited access to electronic information about health. However, too little is known about certain groups’ interest in and use of cancer information tools. These

614

KREPS

funded projects attempt to increase understanding of why barriers to information and knowledge exist, and the data gleaned from these pilot projects is used to design programs that can lead to better health care decisions and adherence to recommended health behaviors. The following four pilot projects will serve as models for larger scale efforts: CIS New York State (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York) is working with a consortium of nonprofit and private-sector organizations, including the Urban League, Harlem YMCA Cyberlab, and the Bell Atlantic Technology Education Center, to make basic cancer information accessible in community computer centers located in Harlem, New York (See Slevin Perocchia & Rapkin, 2001, for an overview of this demonstration research project.) CIS North Central and Mid-West Regions (University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, and Karmanos Cancer Center, Michigan) will expand the CHESS Program (Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System) that puts personal computers and Web-based support resources into the homes of low-income breast cancer patients. The program will reach rural women in Wisconsin and urban African American women in Detroit. (See Gustafson, Julesberg, Stengle, McTavish, & Hawkins, 2001, for an overview of this demonstration research project.) CIS New England Region (Yale Cancer Center, Connecticut) will work with Head Start in inner-city New Haven to bring computer skills and access to cancer information to Head Start workers and the parents of the children they serve. The goals are to determine what cancer information is most useful to the community and to leave a legacy of computer access in the Head Start center and in the homes of Head Start families. (See Salovey, Mowad, Pizarro, & Edlund, 2001, for an overview of this demonstration research project.) CIS Mid-South Region (Markey Cancer Center, Kentucky, and the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Louisiane) will introduce computer technology at meal sites in 10 senior centers in low-income areas of Louisiana with a goal of understanding which technologies are most accepted by the population and of providing cancer information in a format that is useful to senior citizens. (See Wilbright et al., 2001; an overview of this demonstration research project.) (For more information about the National Cancer Institute’s Digital Divide Pilot Projects please see: http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/eocc/ddpp.html.) Health Information National Trends Survey

The HCIRB is planning administration of the first wave of the biennial Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) in 2003 to examine the American public’s access to and use of cancer information. This representative national survey will establish important baseline data about cancer communication practices and preferences across the United States. The survey will clarify our understanding of the public’s perceived needs for relevant cancer information, their current usage of cancer information, and the impact of that information on their lives. The survey will provide NCI with a comprehensive assessment of the American public’s current access and use of information about cancer, cancer care, and cancer prevention. It will identify the specific cancer information topics the American public is most concerned about and specify important directions necessary for effective national dissemination of cancer information. In addition, data will be collected about public perceptions about cancer risks as related to particular hazards (e.g., smoking), and perceptions about specific risks for particular cancers (e.g., breast cancer). The survey will identify public preferences for specific cancer information channels and sources, as well as the relationships between

27. PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY AND PRACTICE

615

cancer information access and cancer-related health beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, such as engaging in cancer-screening behaviors. The data gathered in the surveys will be used to identify the information needs of different key audiences for cancer communication to help target cancer information dissemination efforts. It will provide insights into the key determinants of public information usage about cancer as well as how knowledge, risk perceptions, and other relevant characteristics affect use of cancer communications and how these are related to health behaviors. The surveys will assess public communication channel preferences, the sources for cancer information that different groups of Americans judge to be most credible, and the messages these groups find to be most compelling. The surveys will also provide us with important evaluation data about the relative impact of the NCI’s and other health promotion organizations’ information dissemination programs and services. (For more information about the National Cancer Institute’s Health Information National Trends Survey please see http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/hcirb/hints.html.) Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research

The HCIRB is in the process of establishing national Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communication Research (CECCRs). The focus of these research units will include, but is not limited to, cancer risk communication and development of new tools, products, and methods to enhance cancer information dissemination. Centers of Excellence will be established at institutions that have made or will make a strong institutional commitment to the organization and conduct of interdisciplinary programs of cancer communication research. It is planned that these centers will provide the essential infrastructure needed to facilitate rapid advances in knowledge about cancer communication, including the development of new theories of health and cancer communication that are appropriate to underserved populations, development of evidence-based strategies and tools for cancer communication, training of tomorrow’s health communication scientists, and promotion of collaboration with government agencies, advocacy groups, industry, and commercial endeavors. We also hope the centers will spur the development of new evaluation methods especially for the new interactive health communication technologies. The centers will be population-based information delivery test beds that encourage and facilitate theoretical and applied health communication research. They will conduct basic and applied research to answer fundamental questions and develop strategies to improve the penetration, efficacy, effectiveness, and dissemination of relevant cancer information. They will answer questions about the mechanisms by which cancer messages exert influence, including the mediators of cancer risk communication and the most effective channels to use. Such research will also assess the impact of culture, increase understanding of how people search for and use cancer information, identify optimal formats for communicating cancer risks to different populations, examine how to integrate cancer communications into the continuum of cancer care, disseminate best practices, communicate uncertainty about risks, and reduce disparities in demand for, access to, and use of cancer communication. Centers of Excellence should also respond to important practical issues, such as helping people respond to cancer scares, developing tailoring engines with current libraries of evidence-based messages for use by center participants and affiliates, and introducing tested research products quickly into the public domain. Studies may focus on one-to-one communication, mass media, new media, or combinations thereof and should examine current NCI cancer communication systems, such as the CIS, CancerNet, the NCI designated Cancer Centers, and other existing systems.

616

KREPS

The centers interdisciplinary scientific staff, representing different areas of expertise, will collaborate on projects to promote understanding and improvements in cancer communication. Each Center of Excellence must also provide career development opportunities for new and established investigators who wish to pursue active research careers in interdisciplinary cancer communication research; provide developmental funds for innovative pilot projects; and participate with other Centers of Excellence on a regular basis to share information, assess scientific progress in the field, identify new research opportunities, promote discovery, and resolve areas of scientific controversy. Each Center of Excellence and the network of CECCRs are expected to conduct research that will lead to major scientific advances in knowledge about cancer communication and to inform public health efforts to prevent specific forms of cancer decrease cancer mortality and generally reduce the burden of cancer in society. (For more information about the National Cancer Institute’s Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communication Research please see http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/communicationcenters/.) The Multimedia Technology/Health Communication Grants Program

The HCIRB supports Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) grants as part of its Multimedia Technology/Health Communication (MT/HC) Grant Program. This program encourages small businesses and nonprofit collaborators to create innovative approaches for translating cancer research into practice by developing and applying a wide array of media technology interventions, programs, systems, networks, or products needed by health care professionals and/or the public that will reduce the risks of cancer, provide treatment options, or address the needs of cancer survivors. The MT/HC grants support the development of novel health communication products and technologies for introduction into markets where they can help provide relevant health information to key populations. For example, these grants have been used to promote the use of media technology to translate cancer research into information that educates primary care providers and the public about cancer risk reduction activities and health promotion of cancer survivors. They have been used to promote creative and appropriate uses of computer or Web applications, expert systems, advanced telephone technologies, videotext, cable or broadcast television, radio, virtual reality, animation, or imaging to inform or educate target populations. These grants have also helped to promote education and training in the use of media technology to help different individuals and groups translate science and research into practical communication applications. (For more information about this research program see http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/hcirb/sbir/.) The Cancer Information Service Research Consortium

The Cancer Information Service Research Consortium (CISRC) is an innovative multiinitiative program that supports health communication field research projects utilizing the NCI Cancer Information Service network as a laboratory for examining new strategies for disseminating cancer information, reaching diverse audiences, and influencing important health behaviors. The goal of the CISRC is to expand knowledge about new cancer communication strategies and processes, while innovating the health communication policies and practices of the CIS by providing evidence-based health communication strategies for disseminating cancer information, influencing relevant cancer behaviors (e.g., risk

27. PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY AND PRACTICE

617

assessment, decision making, screening and detection, clinical trial accrual, and adjustment to cancer), and generally meeting the public’s need for accurate cancer information. CISRC projects are described by Morra (1998) and Rimer, Marcus, Bettinghaus, Cummings, & Warnecke (1998). The Health Communication Intervention Research Program

The Health Communication Intervention Research Program is a targeted group of health communication field research projects funded by the NCI and administered by the HCIRB. In this grant program seven multiyear research projects are studying innovative strategies for communicating cancer information to diverse high-risk populations. Researchers are evaluating new health communication design and delivery strategies, such as message tailoring, message framing, and Internet-delivered health messages to promote cancer screening, risk assessment, and behavior changes (such as dietary, exercise, and smoking interventions) across several different cancer sites and stages in the continuum of cancer care (prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship, end of life). While these research projects are still in progress, there is great promise that they will lead to important new knowledge about cancer communications and applications for cancer prevention and control. Kreps and Viswanath (2001) provided an overview of the seven research projects that comprise the National Cancer Institute’s Health Communication Intervention Research Program, which are fully described in a recent special issue of the scholarly journal, Family and Community Health (Elder, 2001). The Making Quality Count for Consumers and Patients Research Program

The NCI and the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) jointly sponsored a new research funding initiative as part of an interagency agreement in support of the DHHS Secretary’s broad-ranging “Quality of Care” initiative. The research program supported by NCI and administered by the HCIRB as part of this initiative is currently developing and testing materials that help consumers interpret and understand health risks. To understand the important health risks they face and whether they can do anything to reduce these risks, people need data that is intrinsically quantitative and probabilistic. Unfortunately, there is evidence that people have trouble with the basic skills required to understand such data: working with probabilities, recognizing the additional information needed to give probability meaning, and making basic assessments about data quality. The study involves development of new educational materials that will cover what to look for in statements about risk, how to put cancer risk and treatment benefit in perspective, how to make sense of changes in risk, and quality of evidence. The new materials are designed to facilitate the communication of data by putting risk into context. Three basic risk communication tools will be developed and evaluated to supplement the tutorial, cancer risk charts—tables containing age-specific mortality rates for a range of diseases plus all-cause mortality; prevention benefit charts—tables presenting the mortality benefit of various preventive strategies; and standard disease summary templates—a standard format to present information about a specific disease. This study addresses an important topic and could be the groundwork for a body of research on consumer understanding of health statistics. It has the potential to demonstrate an inexpensive and effective method

618

KREPS

for improving people’s ability to understand and interpret probability data about their health. HRSA-NCI Cancer Health Disparity Collaborative

The Health Disparity Collaborative is a cooperative research program recently established between NCI and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). HRSA helps provide health resources for medically underserved populations, supporting a nationwide network of 643 community and migrant health centers and 144 primary care programs for the homeless and residents of public housing, and serving 8.7 million Americans each year through its Bureau of Primary Health Care (BPHC) and its supported health centers. With more than 700 grantees and 3,000 sites, these community-based health centers combine primary, preventive, and public health care and enabling services without regard to ability to pay. Users of health centers are predominately uninsured and minority, low-income, Medicaid beneficiaries. BPHC and NCI jointly propose to develop and implement a Cancer Health Disparity Collaborative to improve the quality of cancer care provided to these underserved populations. Other relevant federal agencies (e.g., CDC) would be encouraged to participate. The Cancer Care Collaborative will be one of HRSA’s innovative Health Disparity Collaboratives, originally launched in 1999 by the BPHC and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to help set a standard of excellence for clinical practice. Health centers participating in the collaboratives receive training in best practices, support for information systems, and dollars for infrastructure, as well as ongoing assistance in carrying out continuous improvement in patient care. The proposed Cancer Collaborative would focus, initially, on cancer screening and follow-up, establishing evidence-based guidelines for practitioners at a sample of 10 BPHC clinics. Screening interventions could focus not only on breast and cervical cancer (already a priority in many centers), but also on colorectal and other cancer sites. This program is designed to provide excellent opportunities for health communication and other behavioral researchers to influence public health policies and practices in community health centers across the nation. Unsolicited Health Communication Grant Applications

The HCIRB is actively supporting development of a vibrant program of grant-funded health communication research programs that are not formally solicited with targeted program announcements or requests for applications. These unsolicited grant applications are investigator-initiated research projects that reflect current and emerging health communication research interests. The branch is supporting a broad range of funding mechanisms for these unsolicited grant applications, including P01 (program project grants), R01 (research project grants), R03 (small research grants), and R21 (exploratory/innovative research grants). Health communication scholars are being invited to participate in review of grant applications to facilitate informed review of health communication research proposals. The HCIRB unsolicited research portfolio is now supporting innovative research concerning a broad range of topics, including provider/consumer relations, new communication technology interventions for health promotion, health risk communication, Internet-based dissemination of health information, and Web-based health risk assessment and prevention

27. PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY AND PRACTICE

619

counseling. Unsolicited grant applications provide health communication scholars with a wonderful opportunity to gain support for rigorous and important health communication inquiry. The National Cancer Institute’s Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch is involved in developing several new research initiatives to complement the programs described above. The plan is to establish a broad range of communication research projects that examine the powerful role of human and mediated communication in cancer prevention and control across many important settings, with different relevant populations, across key communication channels and media. The cancer communications research program will encompass interpersonal, group, organizational, societal levels of communication, and include examinations of a broad range of communication delivery systems, including mass media and new media. There is much to learn about the process of communication in health care, and especially in cancer prevention and control. The National Cancer Institute’s initiatives provide a rich model for stimulating investigation, building new knowledge, and guiding health communication policy and intervention. CONCLUSION

Health communication scholars have the potential to significantly influence public health policies and practices with their research and intervention work. For example, health communication research can inform health care practice guidelines, health professional accreditation standards, and the development/implementation of health promotion interventions (see Kreps, 2003; Kreps & Chapelsky Massimilla, 2002). There is now wide recognition by health care providers, consumers, administrators, researchers, and educators of the important roles performed by communication in public health. Health communication research is in high demand, as evidenced by the NCI’s major investment in health communication research. However, communication scholars must take their scholarship seriously as important research and development activities directed toward refining public health policies and practices. They must learn about and participate in seeking funding for their research efforts so they can conduct large-scale rigorous field studies that will generate influential data. Communication scholars must endeavor to become part of the “big-science” funded research culture, though, to have the resources to conduct far-reaching, large-scale health communication studies. I believe this is an important next step in the evolution of health communication inquiry. There are many emerging opportunities to generate new health communication knowledge to inform public health practices and interventions. Health communication scholars must pursue the most relevant research questions, generate rigorous and generalizable research data, and apply the results of their work to promoting health and improving health care practice. There is a dire need for active collaboration between health communication scientists, relevant health researchers from other disciplinary traditions (such as public health, psychology, sociology, health services administration, informatics, and many more), health care providers, health system administrators, and public policymakers. Health communication scholars must break out of the ivory tower to engage important research populations within the health care system (patients, formal and informal caregivers, and survivors of serious illnesses), examine rich naturalistic research settings (health care clinics, hospices, nursing homes, and medical centers), and investigate pressing health care issues from a communication perspective (disease prevention and early detection,

620

KREPS

quality of care, access to health information, disparities in health outcomes, strategic health promotion, and psychosocial adaptation to serious illness). Research efforts must be disseminated beyond the publication of scholarly research reports to reach the eyes and ears of key consumer groups, health care providers, and public policymakers. The new health communication research and outreach initiatives developed by the National Cancer Institute, described earlier in this chapter, are examples of the kinds of relevant research opportunities health communication scholars should pursue to make a difference in society, to improve the health of our nation, and to touch the lives of many people. I encourage health communication scholars to step forward, seize the moment, and make a real difference in society! REFERENCES Andersen, M. R., & Urban, N. (1999). Involvement in decision-making and breast cancer survivor quality of life. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 21, 201–209. Arciti, C., Pistone, M., Persici, P., Gallo, M., Barbieri, A., & Santi, L. (1994). Campaigns against smoking: Compliance and results. Anticancer Research, 14, 283–288. Bastuji-Garin, S., Grob, J. J., Grognard, C., Grosjean, F., & Guillaume, J. C. (1999). Melanoma prevention: Evaluation of a health education campaign for primary schools. A. M. A. Archives of Dermatology, 135, 936–940. Buller, D. B., Morrill, C., Taren, D., Aickin, M., Sennot-Miller, L., Buller, M. K., Larkey, L., Alatorre, C., & Wentzel, T. M. (1999). Randomized trial testing the effect of peer education at increasing fruit and vegetable intake. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 91, 1491– 1500. Byles, J. E., & Sanson-Fisher, R. W. (1996). Mass mailing campaigns to promote screening for cervical cancer: Do they work and do they continue to work? Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 20, 254–260. Cassell, M. M., Jackson, C., & Cheuvront, B. (1998). Health communication on the internet: A effective channel for health behavior change? Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 3, 71–79. Chamberlain, M. (1996). Health communication: Making the most of new media technologies. Journal of Health Communication, International Perspectives, 1, 43–50. Christofolini, M., Bianchi, R., Boi, S., DeCarli, A., Micciolo, R., Chritofolini, P., & Zumiani, G. (1993). Effectiveness of the health campaign for the early diagnosis of cutaneous melanoma in Trentino, Italy. Journal of Dermatologic Surgery and Oncology, 19, 117–120. Clark, F. (1992). The need for a national information infrastructure. Journal of Biomedical Communication, 19, 8–9. Daugherty, C. K. (1999). Impact of therapeutic research on informed consent and the ethics of clinical trials: A medical oncology perspective. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 17, 1601– 1617. Dearing, J. W., Rogers, E. M., Meyer, G., Casey, M. K., Rao, N., Campo, S., & Henderson, G. M. (1996). Social marketing and diffusion-based strategies for communicating with unique populations: HIV prevention in San Francisco. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 1, 342–364. Elder, J. P. (2001). Family and Community Health, 24, 3, Special Issue on “Cancer Prevention and Control.” Eng, T. R., & Gustafson, D. H. (Eds.). (1999). Wired for health and well-being: The Emergence of interactive health communication. Washington, DC: Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, US Department of Health and Human Services.

27. PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY AND PRACTICE

621

Eng, T. R., Maxfield, A., Patrick, K., Deering, M. J., Ratzan, S., & Gustafson, D. H. (1998). Access to health information and support: A public highway or a private road? Journal of the American Medical Association, 280, 1371–1375. Fallowfield, L., & Jenkins, V. (1999). Effective communication skills are the key to good cancer care. European Journal of Cancer, 35, 1592–1597. Ferguson, T. (1996). Health online: How to find health information, support groups, and self-help communities in cyberspace. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Flora, J. A., Maccoby, N., & Farquhar, J. W. (1989). Communication campaigns to prevent cardiovascular disease: The Stanford community studies. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (2nd ed.; pp. 233–252). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Fogarty, L. A., Curbow, B. A., Wingard, J. R., McDonnell, K., & Somerfield, M. R. (1999). Can 40 seconds of compassion reduce patient anxiety? Journal of Clinical Oncology, 17, 371–379. Fox , S. A., Siu, A. L., & Stein, J. A. (1994). The importance of physician communication on breast cancer screening of older women. Archives of Internal Medicine, 154, 2058–2068. Gamble, K. (1998). Communication and information: The experience of radiotherapy patients. European Journal of Cancer Care, 7, 153–161. Ganz, P. A. (1997). Interaction between the physician and the older patient; the oncologist’s perspective. Cancer, 80, 1323–1325. Gelb, B. D., Boutwell, W. B., & Cummings, S. (1994). Using mass media communication for health promotion: Results from a cancer center effort. Hospital Health Services Administration, 39, 283–293. Greenfield, S., Kaplan, S., & Ware, J. Jr. (1985). Expanding patient involvement in care: Effects on patient outcomes. Annals of Internal Medicine, 102, 520–528. Gustafson, D. H., Hawkins, R. P., Boberg, E. W., Bricker, E., Pingree, S., & Chan, C. L. (1994). The use and impact of a computer-based support system for people living with AIDS and HIV infection. Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, pp. 604–608. Gustafson, D. H., Julesberg, K. E., Stengle, W. A., McTavish, F. M., & Hawkins, R. P. (2001). Assessing costs and outcomes of providing computer support to underserved women with breast cancer: A work in progress. EJC/REC: Electronic Journal of Communication/ La Revue Electronique de Communication (Special issue on “Health Communication and Information Technology), 11(324). Hall, J. A., Irish, J. T., Roter, D. L. et al. (1994). Gender in medical encounters: An analysis of physician and patient communication in a primary care setting. Health Psychology, 13, 384–392. Hoffmann, K., Dirschka, T., Schatz, H., Segerling, M., Tiemann, T., Hoffmann, A., & Altmeyer, P. (1993). A local education campaign on early diagnosis of malignant melanoma. European Journal of Epidemiology, 9, 591–598. Johnson, J. D. (1997). Cancer related information seeking. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Kilpatrick, M. G., Kritjanson, L. J., Tataryn, D. J., & Fraser, V. H. (1998). Information needs of husbands of women with breast cancer. Oncology Nursing Forum, 25, 1595–1601. Korhonen, T., Uutela, A., Korhonen, H. J., & Puska, P. (1998). Impact of mass media and interpersonal health communication on smoking cessation attempts: A study in North Karelia, 1989–1996. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 3, 105– 118. Kreps, G. L. (1988). The pervasive role of information in health and health care: Implications for health communication policy. In J. Anderson (Ed.), Communication yearbook 11 (pp. 238–276). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

622

KREPS

Kreps, G. L. (2001). The evolution and advancement of health communication inquiry. In W. B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Communication yearbook 24 (pp. 232–254). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Kreps, G. L. (2003). The impact of communication on cancer risk, incidence, morbidity, mortality, and quality of life. Health Communication, 15(2), 163–171. Kreps, G. L., Bonaguro, E. W., & Query, J. L. (1998). The history and development of the field of health communication. In L. D. Jackson & B. K. Duffy (Eds.), Health communication research: A guide to developments and direction (pp. 1–15). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kreps., G. L., & Chapelsky Massimilla, D. (2002). Cancer communications research and health outcomes: Review and challenge. Communication Studies, 53(4), 318–336. Kreps, G. L., & O’Hair, D. (Eds.). (1995). Communication and health outcomes. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Kreps, G. L., & Viswanath, K. (2001). Foreword. Communication interventions and cancer control: A review of the National Cancer Institute’s health communication intervention research initiative. Family and Community Health, 24, ix–xiii. Larsson, G., Widmark Peterson, V., Lampic, C., von Essen, L., & Sjoden, P. O. (1998). Cancer patient and staff ratings of the importance of caring behaviors and their relations to patient anxiety and depression. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 27, 855–864. Lieberman, D. (1992). The computer’s potential role in health education. Health Communication, 4, 211–226. Lipkus, I. M., Lyna, P. R., & Rimer, B. K. (1999). Using tailored interventions to enhance smoking cessation among African-Americans at a community health center. Nicotine and Tobacco Research, 1, 77–85. Meyer, T. J., & Mark, M. M. (1995). Effects of psychosocial interventions with adult cancer patients: A meta-analysis of randomized experiments. Health Psychology, 14, 101–108. Miller, D. R., Geller, A. C., Wood, M. C., Lew, R. A., & Koh, H. K. (1999). The Falmouth Safe Skin Project: Evaluation of a community program to promote sun protection in youth. Health Education and Behavior, 26, 369–384. Morra, M. (Ed.). (1998). The impact and value of the Cancer Information Service: A model for health communication. Journal of Health Communication, 3, Supplement. National Cancer Institute. (1992). Community clinical oncology program. NIH Guide, 21, 20, RFA: CA-92-15, P.T. 34. National Cancer Institute. (1999). The nation’s investment in cancer research: A budget proposal for fiscal year 2001. Washington, DC: NCI. The National Technology Infrastructure Administration, United States Department of Commerce. (1999). Falling through the net: Defining the digital divide. Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce. Pavlik, J. V., Finnegan, J. R., Strickland, D., Salman, C. T., Viswanath, K., & Wackman, D. B. (1993). lncreasing public understanding of heart disease: An analysis of the Minnesota heart health program. Health Communication, 5, 1–20. Pierce, J. P., Macaskill, P., & Hill, D. (1990). Long-term effectiveness of mass media antismoking campaigns in Australia. American Journal of Public Health, 80, 565–659. Rakowski, W., Ehrich, B., Goldstein, M. G., Rimer, B. K., Pearlman, D. N., Clark, M. A., Velicer, W. F., & Woolverton III, H. (1998). Increasing mammography among women aged 40–74 by use of a single-matched, tailored intervention. Preventive Medicine, 27, 748–756. Rimer, B. K., Conaway, M., Lyna, P., Glassman, B., Yarnall, K. S. H., Lipkus, I., & Barber, L. T. (1999). The impact of tailored interventions on a community health center population. Patient Education and Counseling, 37, 125–140.

27. PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY AND PRACTICE

623

Rimer, B. K., & Glassman, B. (1998). Tailoring communications for primary care settings. Methods of Information in Medicine, 37, 171–178. Rimer, B. K., Marcus, A. C., Bettinghaus, E. P., Cummings, M., & Warnecke, R. B. (Eds.). (1998). Cancer information research consortium: 1993–1997. Preventive Medicine, 27, Supplement. Roberts, C. S., Cox, C. E., Reintgen, D. S. et al. (1994). Influence of physician communication on newly diagnosed breast patients’ psychologic adjustment and decision making. Cancer, 74, 336–341. Roter, D. (2000). The enduring and evolving nature of the patient-physician relationship. Patient Education and Counseling, 39, 5–15. Roter, D., Lipkin, M. Jr., & Korsgaard, A. (1991). Sex differences in patients’ and physicians’ communication during primary care medical visits. Medical Care, 29, 1083–1093. Salovey, P., Mowad, L. Z., Pizarro, J., & Edlund, D. (2001). Developing computer proficiency among head start parents: An in-progress case study of a New England CIS digital divide project. EJC/REC: Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication (Special issue on “Health Communication and Information Technology”) 11 (324). Samarel, N., Fawcett, J., Davis, M. M., & Ryan, F. M. (1998). Effects of dialogue and therapeutic touch on preoperative and postoperative experiences of breast cancer surgery: An exploratory study. Oncology Nursing Forum, 25, 1369–1376. Sharf, B. F. (1999). The present and future of health communication scholarship. Health Communication, 11, 195–199. Skinner, C. S., Strecher, V. J., & Hospers, H. (1994). Physicians’ recommendations for mammography: Do tailored messages make a difference. American Journal of Public Health, 84, 43–49. Slack, W. V. (1997). Cybermedicine: How computers empower doctors and patients for better health care. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Slevin Perocchia, R., & Rapkin, B. (2001). Bridging the digital divide project: Providing access to cancer information through the Internet. EJC/REC: Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication (Special issue on “Health Communication and Information Technology”) 11(324). Smaglik, P., Hawkins, R. P., Pingree, S., Gustafson, D. H., Boberh, E., & Bricker, E. (1998). The quality of interactive computer use among HIV-infected individuals. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 3, 53–68. Stephenson, M. T., & Witte, K. (1998). Fear, threat, and perceptions of efficacy from frightening skin cancer messages. Public Health Review, 26, 147–174. Street, R. L. Jr. (Ed.). (1996). Health and multimedia. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Street, R. L. Jr., Gold, W. R., & Manning, T. (Eds.). (1997). Health promotion and interactive technology: Theoretical applications and future directions. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Turk-Charles, S., Meyerowitz, B. E., & Gatz, M. (1997). Age differences in informationseeking among cancer patients. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 45, 85–98. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (1999). Healthy people 2010: Objectives for improving health, Conference Edition. Washington, DC: DHHS. van der Kam, W. J., Branger, P. J., van Bemmel, J. H., & Meyboom-de Jong, B. (1998). Communication between physicians and with patients suffering from breast cancer. Family Practice, 15, 415–419.

624

KREPS

Verhoef, M. J., White, M. A., & Doll, R. (1999). Cancer patients’ expectations of the role of family physicians in communication about complementary therapies. Cancer Prevention and Control, 3, 181–187. Wilbright, W. A., Williams, D. L., Hayden, J., Horswell, R., Hutchinson, J., Whiting, R., Davis, T., Wagner, D., & Tolle, C. (2001). Toward overcoming the digital divide for the dissemination of early detection cancer information. EJC/REC: Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication (Special issue on “Health Communication and Information Technology”) 11(324). Winnett, L. B., & Wallack, L. (1996). Advancing public health goals through the mass media. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 1, 173–196. Ziant, G. (1993). Public information: A major tool in cancer prevention. European Journal of Cancer Prevention, 2, 255–260.

28 Lessons Learned from the Field on Prevention and Health Campaigns Timothy Edgar Emerson College

Vicki Freimuth Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Sharon Lee Hammond The goal of this chapter is to discuss important lessons that the three authors have learned that relate to prevention and health communication campaigns. The editors asked us to coauthor the chapter because each of us has lived multiple lives within the health communication discipline. All three of us began our research careers within an academic setting, and we worked together for several years as a research team at the same educational institution. Although we each had other research interests that we pursued, for a period of time we all devoted much of our collaborative efforts to investigating the role of communication in preventing the spread of HIV. At the time, none of us could have predicted that new paths would soon provide us with an incredible variety of experiences encompassing contexts we never had explored and audiences with which we were not familiar. Vicki Freimuth left the academic world to serve in the federal government as the first Associate Director for Communication at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In her position, she balances the roles of health communication practitioner and health communication researcher. She is a practitioner in the sense that her office guides or collaborates on the design and implementation of national health communication activities that reflect the many health issues that CDC addresses. While no longer a day-to-day

At the time that the authors first wrote this chapter, Timothy Edgar and Sharon Lee Hammond worked as research contractors for Westat in the company’s Rockville, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia offices respectively. The observations they make in the chapter are based on their experiences while employed at Westat. Since the completion of the chapter, Dr. Edgar has become an Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Health Communication at Emerson College in Boston, and Dr. Hammond now works as an independent consultant to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.

625

626

EDGAR, FREIMUTH, HAMMOND

hands-on researcher in the same way she was in the academic setting, she does influence research pursuits at a macrolevel by collaborating with other federal officials and governmental partners to establish an agenda for health communication research. Timothy Edgar and Sharon Hammond also made new career choices several years ago that landed them in the midst of government-sponsored health communication research activities, but their perspective differs from Freimuth’s. Both are research contractors who support campaign efforts by conducting formative, process, and outcome evaluation at the request of the government. The research questions they strive to answer typically are not their own, but their professional situation provides them with a unique opportunity to design and implement a large number of health communication studies that rely on a wide variety of methods that are used to collect data with diverse audiences in many different contexts. As a result of these varied experiences, we have learned many lessons about the process and practice of health communication. In this chapter, we discuss several types of lessons that have taught us the most about what practitioners should know in order for prevention efforts to succeed. Specifically, we address three different areas. First, we will examine the lessons we have learned as a result of exposure to new audiences and new contexts in which health communication is practiced. Second, we talk about how we have learned to develop a greater appreciation of the principles that form the foundation of our discipline. And third, we discuss what we have learned about the ways in which the field of health communication can effect greater achievements in prevention work by increasing its visibility and enhancing its credibility. LEARNING ABOUT NEW AUDIENCES AND CONTEXTS New Audiences

Exposure to diverse audiences has been especially important in teaching all three of us new lessons about effective health communication interventions and research. As is the case with many academic researchers, the studies we conducted while we were at the university frequently depended on college student volunteers to serve as subjects. We learned much about health and communication from the information they were able to provide, but the large number of audiences we have encountered through our more recent work has challenged our skills as health communication planners and researchers in ways that we never could have imagined. For the past several years, we have found ourselves conducting qualitative and quantitative communication research with a wide variety of underserved, nontraditional, or special audiences, including physicians who specialize in serving minorities, nurse-midwives, persons with Spina Bifida, parents of special needs children, persons with specific medical conditions like Hepatitis C, pharmacists, African American female binge drinkers, nutritionists, elderly women who have had an abnormal mammogram, emergency response personnel, intravenous drug users, and others. More specific examples include a study in which Edgar had the task of coordinating focus-group research with Hispanic farmworkers on the Texas-Mexico border in order to learn about parent reactions to a new childhood vaccine schedule. Part of the job of the health communication researcher was to find a way to arrange for babysitting for 59 small children so that the parents had the freedom to participate comfortably. The same researcher also worked closely with culturally appropriate consultants to design the most sensible strategies for going to remote reservations in Montana to gather health-related information from American Indian adults who have type 2 diabetes. Hammond also has faced significant challenges when conducting formative research with obese adolescents

28. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FIELD

627

who were asked to speak openly about their situations in a group format. Great care had to be taken to make sure that the research process did not inflict further damage on individuals who already had low self-esteem. Hammond also gained great insight into the obstacles the health communication researcher encounters when developing a study with individuals who have a relatively rare disease such as hemophilia. If the study design requires that participants travel to a central location, then the physical well-being of the individuals with the health problem becomes an additional factor in the planning equation. Conducting communication research within diverse ethnic/racial/underserved communities will be especially important in the future. Attention to these audiences is a necessity not a nicety. It is hard for us to imagine a federal, state, or local government agency funding research designed to communicate a health message to middle-class white men, even if middle-class white men are the audience most affected by the disease or risky behavior. The reality is that health disparities in the incidence and prevalence of disease, in actual health status, and in health awareness, knowledge, and behaviors between whites and ethnic/racial communities are wide, despite much effort in this area. For example, a recent evaluation of a campaign to promote to women the daily use of folic acid (in a multivitamin) to prevent neural tube defects found that the desired attitudes and behaviors of English-speaking women had exceeded the objectives set by the federal government. However, the same indicators in Spanish-speaking women barely increased despite a concerted effort to conduct Spanish-language interventions (both media and nonmedia) in predominately Hispanic U.S. communities. There is one other type of audience that must be mentioned—policymakers. As a result of working on government-sponsored projects, we all have developed a greater appreciation of the fact that the concept of “audience” often goes well beyond the group of people for whom health-related behavior change is the goal. Health communicators frequently must develop persuasive strategies when communicating with policymakers about issues such as funding, health priorities, and the transfer of technical information into the hands of appropriate audiences. Without careful attention to this key audience, prevention efforts with those vulnerable to illness can be rendered moot. In preparing the next generation of health communicators, the discipline should place great emphasis on developing within students a greater appreciation of the diversity in types of potential audiences for interventions. Students also should seek out opportunities to learn more about audiences of which they have limited knowledge. In our rapidly changing society, few health communication professionals are likely to find themselves in positions where they serve a single culture or subculture. Working with an audience for the first time inevitably brings frustrations as one discovers that principles applied successfully in the past with other populations do not necessarily fit in other contexts. Our experience has been that the potential payoff is worth the initial frustration. Not only can we help to make a difference in the lives of others, but the lessons our audiences teach us in return about ourselves often are beyond evaluation. New Contexts

Our combined experience also has taught us much about the role of context and the realities of implementing and evaluating a health communication campaign. Although applied health communication researchers who conduct their work in an academic setting have some restrictions placed upon them, they generally have the freedom to pursue their interests with relatively little interference. Health communication specialists who plan interventions and conduct corresponding research in an environment in which the work is

628

EDGAR, FREIMUTH, HAMMOND

directly linked to public funds are always keenly aware that there are many stakeholders who will directly or indirectly affect key decisions. There will always be policymakers and partners who have an interest in the process. Without appropriate approval at every level, the government cannot collect (or cause to be collected) data from the target audiences of communication campaigns. And, of course, without these data, campaign evaluators are at a loss to determine if the intervention has made an impact on knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of the target audience. What is the purpose of establishing goals and quantifiable objectives for the campaign if program planners are unable then to secure information to measure progress toward these objectives? To obtain approval, procedures must be followed and forms must be submitted. Some existing policies and guidelines inherently dictate a timeline for projects. For example, any type of research funded by the government that is conducted in conjunction with a health communication campaign is subject to review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, DC. If a study is to be conducted in which the same information is collected from more than nine human subjects, then OMB requires that a detailed protocol be submitted for review. The review period typically lasts 3–4 months, and approval is never guaranteed. If campaign planners wish to establish a baseline for evaluation prior to the launch of the campaign, then the additional months required for OMB approval must be factored into the timetable. Researchers must also be cognizant of an agency’s internal mechanism for review. For example, a delay in securing internal Institutional Review Board approval on one of Hammond’s formative evaluation projects to conduct qualitative research with youth about nutrition and physical activity resulted in having to cancel a series of focus groups to be conducted in another part of the country two days hence. Travel costs, recruiting and facility rental, as well as cancellation fees for the moderator were forfeited. This information is more important than ever before. In recent years, health communication researchers trained within the communication discipline either have begun their careers in organizations that provide support to government agencies or have switched from one professional environment (in many cases, an academic one) to an organization that has a business base primarily tied to government contracts. To succeed, applied communication researchers need to become intimately familiar with the policy surrounding these requirements and gain knowledge and experience related to the timing, costs, and other resources needed to conduct research within a political environment involving tax-payer dollars. LEARNING TO APPLY PRINCIPLES OF OUR DISCIPLINE

Even though the audiences that we target, the research questions that we ask, and the contexts in which we work have changed somewhat, the fundamental principles that guide our approach to health communication campaigns have remained the same. Working in the environments in which we do has increased our appreciation of the training we have received within the communication discipline. Conducting research for and implementing interventions has heightened our sense of the academic tradition that serves as the foundation for the approach we take to our work. Principles of Argumentation

An excellent illustration of how principles from the field of communication inform our work comes from our reliance on understanding the fundamental processes through which individuals apply evidence and structure arguments related to their own health and the

28. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FIELD

629

health of others. Application of this knowledge by health communication professionals provides a great tool for developing critical and analytical insights into human motivation and behavior that allow us to better understand audiences and their needs. Too frequently the audience profiles that campaign planners develop rely too heavily on very descriptive bits of information that, while necessary as pieces of the puzzle, fail to provide a more complex understanding of resistance to change on the part of target groups. For example, there is no doubt that it is important to identify the basic demographics of an audience, describe their daily lives, and document their likes and dislikes. But behind each attitude and belief is an argument, explicit or implicit, that a person has constructed and maintained by relying on evidence that may or may not be sound. Unlocking and analyzing arguments can lead to a positive payoff if designers of interventions acknowledge and address the components of an argument. A campaign, which was cosponsored by CDC, not only illustrates the point, but it also represents one of the most fascinating health communication case studies from recent years. In the mid-1990s, CDC and its partners undertook a national effort to inform the American public about the role of the bacterium H. pylori (short for Helicobacter pylori) in causing the majority of peptic ulcers. The eventual goal of the campaign was not only to inform the public about the causal link between H. pylori and peptic ulcers but also to persuade ulcer sufferers to visit their physicians so that they could receive antibiotics that can eradicate the bacteria and cure their ulcers. Campaign planners soon found that their job would be much more difficult than they thought. They discovered that they had to overcome not one but two hurdles to meet the objectives of the campaign. In most cases in which an effective intervention (e.g., pharmacological, behavioral, surgical, etc.) for a health problem or potential health problem exists, the challenge for health communicators is to persuade members of the target audience to act. For the ulcer disease problem, formative research showed that for many ulcer sufferers behavior change was not an option worth discussing because they had too many doubts about the veracity of the claim that ulcers can be caused by bacteria. Many held to the belief that stress and/or spicy foods are the sole culprits when peptic ulcers develop. To better understand the reasoning behind the beliefs, researchers pursued a line of investigation that sought to deconstruct the arguments that people formed in their minds. For example, researchers asked: What is the evidence that ulcer sufferers rely on to support the belief that ulcers can only be caused by stress or spicy foods? What is the evidence that they rely on to support the belief that ulcers cannot be caused by bacteria? What authority figures do they rely on when forming their beliefs about the causes of ulcers? What role does emotion play in forming beliefs about ulcers? Answers to questions like these helped both to form the message concepts that were later tested with potential audience members and to create materials for distribution. Health communication practitioners should never lose sight of the fact that any communication-based intervention depends on the creation of persuasive arguments for its success. To be effective, the arguments must counter the ones currently accepted by target audiences. Only by digging beyond the standard set of descriptive characteristics of audiences will health communicators be able to implement message strategies with the greatest chance for positive outcomes. Symbolic Construction of Reality

Examining the role of the language in the symbolic construction of reality, especially in relationship to illness, is another communication-related concept that guides our work at the most pragmatic levels. Because concern for the spoken word drives most knowledge that stems from our discipline, we always give high priority to “hearing the voices” of

630

EDGAR, FREIMUTH, HAMMOND

members of target audiences. The principles that we apply from the communication field lead us to search for the key metaphors and other forms of language that shape the perceptions that people have of illness in general and their own bodies in particular. Most importantly, we seek to identify language that individuals share that creates a mutual understanding of why we stay healthy, why we become ill, and how our health is restored if we do get sick. The H. pylori campaign discussed previously also provides an example of the rewards to be gained by carefully analyzing the audience members’ own words. Researchers allowed potential audience members to talk extensively about the notion that the cause of peptic ulcer disease is an “infection.” As people used the word “infection” in the context of curing a very painful, chronic illness, health communication researchers found that the ulcer sufferers could collectively reframe for themselves the concept of “infection” from a negative into a positive. The eventual theme of the campaign stressed that knowing that peptic ulcers are caused by an infection is “good news.” Another example comes from formative research conducted for a national diabetes initiative aimed at the American Indian community. Because diabetes has been so devastating to the health of Indian people, researchers often heard representatives of the population speak of the sense of hopelessness they associated with the disease. Careful analysis of the meanings attributed to key words revealed, however, that target audience members reacted positively to positioning “hope” and “diabetes” side by side conceptually if the idea of saving future generations entered the mix. As part of a health campaign design and implementation team, individuals who have been trained in the communication discipline are in an excellent position to help their colleagues develop a greater appreciation of the power of language and a fuller understanding of the ways in which groups of people collectively interpret and react to words. To best apply what we know about the role of symbolic construction of reality to a health context, we must constantly develop and refine research mechanisms that permit us to identify and better understand the meaning of the words that govern health beliefs and behaviors of target audiences. Before we can educate an audience about health matters, we must first let them teach us through their own words how they, together with members of their community, see, talk about, and respond to the world around them. Group Process

Another important lesson that we have learned is the value of understanding the role of group dynamics in health communication planning and research. Group interaction is at play in many contexts, but we have witnessed two particular situations in which knowledge of the rules and roles of group communication is essential for success. The first of these contexts relates to the development of partnerships. Rarely are large-scale health communication efforts undertaken by a single organization. This is especially true if the sponsoring organization is the federal government. Agencies such as CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) place great emphasis on the inclusion of partners for any initiative. Partners can include foundations, societies, advocacy groups, pharmaceutical companies, research scientists, state and local public health professionals, academics, policymakers, private practice health care providers, and HMOs. In addition, research and creative contractors often enter the mix by playing integral roles in the design, implementation, and evaluation of campaigns. With so many parties involved, each new gathering of forces to combat a health problem leads to the formation of a fragile community (Adelman & Frey, 1997). To characterize partnerships as fragile is not to say that they are not viable. To the contrary, most partnerships energize and strengthen health

28. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FIELD

631

communication initiatives in ways that no other model for action can. At the same time, those involved can never lose sight of the fact that competing interests often exist within partnerships even when all parties at the table have the same ultimate goal. Communication practitioners and researchers who have a keen awareness of the factors that contribute to an effective (or ineffective) group process can add extremely valuable insights to the process. We have also learned that knowledge of group processes greatly informs research for health communication campaigns that include focus groups as a method for collecting data. Use of focus groups has become an extremely popular research tool for gathering information for various stages of a campaign such as formative research to understand audience needs, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs; research to evaluate concepts and messages; and outcome assessment to supplement findings from other research approaches. If focus groups are facilitated appropriately, they have the potential to yield data that exceed most other forms of research in depth and richness. They permit the health communication team to “hear the voices” of the potential audience members in ways that other approaches cannot. A skilled moderator has the capacity to tease out the subtleties of the participants’ points of view about their health concerns in ways that can lead to the development of very effective interventions. Although ripe with potential rewards, the focus group setting also constantly challenges campaign planners and researchers to heed the admonition to “first do no harm.” After observing hundreds of focus groups collectively, we have seen many instances where sessions teeter between information-gathering events and support group meetings. It is not uncommon to have participants in a group who never have had the opportunity to discuss their particular health problem with others who share the same malady. In the midst of a group, individuals often will begin to provide each other not only with support but also advice, which can be factually inaccurate. The moderator, who is not in a position to offer therapy or to serve as an expert on the topic, must be very careful to keep the group on task while at the same time not invalidating the need of participants to vent, to accept comfort, or to increase their understanding of their health problem. To help meet the extended needs of individuals, we typically have contact information available at the end of group sessions so that the participants have a mechanism for communicating with a professional who can address unanswered questions. We also encourage campaign planners to have a representative on site so that he or she can enter the room after a session to field questions directly. Although we do not suggest the idea due to the concern of protecting participant confidentiality, we often witness group members initiating the exchange of phone numbers so that they continue the dialogue in another setting. In the future, health communication researchers will have to refine their group skills even further as more nontraditional focus-group formats increase in popularity. We frequently use telephone focus groups, for instance, when there is a need to include individuals in a discussion who either have limited time to travel to a common destination or are so geographically dispersed that convening a group face to face is not possible. In the past few years, we also have witnessed the advent of the online focus group in which up to 20 individuals at a time engage in a discussion via the Internet. These nontraditional approaches to conducting groups have their own unique dynamics to which researchers must adapt. In these cases, facilitators must develop strategies for maintaining high levels of group comfort and participation within settings that by their very nature can be very impersonal. For those who are training to be health communicators, a course of study will be deficient if the entire emphasis is on mediated communication. To be fully equipped

632

EDGAR, FREIMUTH, HAMMOND

methodologically, conceptually, and pragmatically, preparation for a career in health communication should also include coursework that provides a foundation in principles of group communication applied across a variety of settings. LEARNING ABOUT INCREASING THE VISIBILITY AND ENHANCING THE CREDIBILITY OF OUR DISCIPLINE

Although our academic heritage continually enriches our work in applied settings, our identification with and reliance on the communication discipline for philosophical and methodological grounding have led to frustrations. We are often exposed to instances where we see the field of health communication receiving less attention and respect than it deserves. A lack of understanding and influence of the communication discipline in the world of medicine and public health is a key challenge in increasing the visibility and enhancing the credibility of our discipline. In this section we offer some recommendations for the meeting the challenge. First, let us address the understanding issue. Communication or even health communication are not terms well understood outside the academy. At CDC, for example, there are many professionals who are thought of as communication staff but who share little in common. Some are writers and editors who may have training in one of the sciences or in English. Others specialize in media relations and often are trained in journalism. Still others come from public relations backgrounds. The newest group of communication professionals usually has graduate degrees in communication or one of the behavioral sciences and claim the title of “health communicator.” Needless to say, the managers of programs are often very confused when it comes to recruiting and hiring appropriate communication staff. CDC has identified over 80 different competencies needed to do communication work effectively at the agency. It is quite a challenge to help managers develop realistic expectations for how many of these skills they can expect any one person to possess and what combination of staff they need to do their communication work. To the uninitiated, the field of health communication can appear to be a very enigmatic creature that defies clear description. It should be our responsibility to decipher the field for those external to it and to challenge unnecessary fragmentation of the discipline. We also find that the literature of our discipline often does not receive the attention it deserves in campaign work, because our discipline lacks scientific credibility in some circles. Much of our research base is unknown outside our own discipline. We do not think this lack of recognition can be attributed to quality as much as visibility. Too many good health communication research studies are very small scale or are limited to college student samples and are not taken seriously. As a result, campaign planners fail to see how findings have direct applicability to their larger scale projects that target diverse audiences. Our publications also are scattered throughout many different health communication, general communication, and health journals. Even literature searches often fail to turn up a strong corpus of work because indices often categorize the studies by health issue rather than communication approach. Our recommendation for enhancing the discipline’s credibility is to increase our participation in funded research projects. Until very recently, funded health communication research had to be imbedded in more general health promotion research projects. The NCI’s 5-a-day intervention studies are good examples of how communication scholars worked within interdisciplinary teams to receive funding that allowed them to do multiyear large-scale research projects with such diverse audiences as low-income mothers enrolled in the WIC program, male blue collar workers, and elementary school children.

28. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FIELD

633

The good news is that funding agencies are beginning to recognize the need for good communication research and are funding health communication research projects. In the last few years, both CDC and NCI have issued requests for applications specifically for health communication research. Another recommendation to help increase the visibility of our discipline’s research within applied settings is to develop relationships with those who publish articles in the journals of related disciplines and who train students who will eventually become colleagues of health communication professionals. Our researchers must build strong networks in their own universities or across universities. Since so many communication departments only have one or two faculty interested in health communication, it is usually necessary to reach out to schools of public health, medical schools, or health education departments to find colleagues with whom one can network. Sharing students among these programs can be an ideal way to foster interaction among the faculty. We also advise researchers to gain as much experience as they can on review panels for grant applications and expert panels that many of the funding agencies convene regularly. These panels not only are great opportunities for networking but they also are invaluable for learning about priorities of funders and criteria for grant awards. Another important way for the communication discipline to gain recognition in the medical and public health communities is to take the lead in training new professionals in health communication. Few universities offer a comprehensive graduate program in health communication, yet many positions exist for individuals with this training. While some of this training is being offered in schools of public health, it, too, is often limited to a single course or two. The ideal graduate program for health communication would be an interdisciplinary one with a strong medical school or school of public health and a strong department of communication. This same kind of program also could become a center for funded health communication research. Such programs are not likely to materialize, however, unless individuals from our discipline take the lead. The field of health communication can also increase visibility by developing a clearly constructed outline or agenda for future research. Visibility has been limited in the past because there has not been an agenda to guide both planning and evaluation practices. Recently, though, leaders in the field have taken the initiative to develop a vision for the discipline. Specifically, CDC and NCI have generated agendas based upon lessons learned by noted health communication practitioners and researchers. For example, CDC’s Office of Communication used a five-phase process to formulate its health communication research agenda. The CDC: 1. created and maintained a database of public health communication literature; 2. conducted a thematic review of the contents of the database; 3. surveyed CDC health communication researchers and practitioners to ascertain their perceptions concerning gaps in health communication research; 4. convened a group of 12 external health communication researchers, largely from academia, and prominent CDC health communicators to respond to findings from the first three phases of this process in order to develop a draft research agenda; and 5. solicited feedback on the draft research agenda from a broader group of health communication professionals.

The resulting six agenda items are not necessarily definitive, but we believe that they do provide a good model for how an agenda can be articulated. We also believe that the

634

EDGAR, FREIMUTH, HAMMOND

lessons reflected here match our own experiences. For each item, we follow the text of the CDC statement with lessons from our own work that validate the guideline. 1. Evaluate new communication approaches and the conditions under which they most effectively reach and influence individuals and communities. Although not all new communication approaches rely on new technologies, the dramatic increase in the use of technological advances for health communication interventions serves as an excellent example for this agenda item. Just a few years ago we never would have seen health communication practitioners and researchers conducting online focus groups with health care providers, creating surveys for use on the Internet, or creating Web sites that make health information readily available to millions. Evaluators must keep pace by constantly developing and fine-tuning methods for assessing the effectiveness of these tools. In work that we have conducted with Web sites, for instance, we have had to acquire a new set of evaluation skills in order to use methods such as site mapping, e-mail inquiry analysis, search log analysis, and usability testing. We have learned that researchers must understand not only how to use the tools individually, but they must also become familiar with how to use them in combination and within appropriate cost parameters. 2. Identify effective strategies for synthesizing and integrating multiple sources and types of data to make strategic decisions. Ideally formative and summative evaluations include multiple data sources. At CDC, for example, most health communication programs use epidemiological data to describe the health issues and suggest its causes or correlates; market research data to describe the audience segments’ lifestyles and beliefs; and qualitative methods to explore the way audiences understand the issue and relate to it in their own lives. All these sources of data are valuable but serve different purposes. It can be particularly confusing if the different data sources lead program planners in contradictory directions. We need more research to identify ways to interpret these different data sources more effectively and to weigh them when they contradict one another. 3. Integrate communication within a larger public health framework. Those of us who work in this field can fall into the trap at times of believing that communication is the obvious answer to any health problem. The more we learn about the role of health communication within the context of the total public health picture, the more we realize that communication is only part of the solution or, in some instances, not the solution at all. We recommend that those who educate the next generation of health communication practitioners and researchers highlight the point. Already there is evidence that the principle is being incorporated into instructional programs on a systematic basis. For example, all three authors of this chapter had the opportunity to participate in the development of CDCynergy, which is a CD-ROM–based tutorial/model for health communication program planning and evaluation.1 The product, which was created by CDC, presents planning and evaluation as a six-phase process beginning with the definition of the problem at hand. Although the approach taken by CDCynergy is firmly grounded in principles of health communication, the model highlights the notion that communication is but one of several alternatives to attacking a health problem. The CDCynergy student learns quickly that health communication has its limitations. Interventions that rely on engineering (e.g., developing a new vaccine), a change in policy, or the delivery of health services can play just as prominent a role in improving the health of communities. As an individual works his or her way through the various phases of CDCynergy, he or she reaches a point where a decision must be made about which intervention or set of interventions is most appropriate for the problem under analysis. The decision, of course, must be justified. 1 For information about CDCynergy, contact the Office of Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (404) 639 -7290.

28. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FIELD

635

We find that the exercise provides the user with a more heightened awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of using health communication as a tool for change. 4. Evaluate the development, delivery, cost, reach, and effects of communication—finding the best models, data sources, and methods to use under varying program conditions. We have found that the evaluator who can approach a research question with a variety of methodological and analytic tools is greatly valued. Certainly, not all interventions can or should be evaluated comprehensively. Campaign planners are constantly torn between the desire to conduct methodologically rigorous versus cost-effective evaluations. Program planners regularly face difficult decisions about committing funds to the evaluation of a campaign that could have been used to increase the funding of the intervention itself, especially when the health of the audience is at stake. However, when the decision is made to conduct a comprehensive evaluation, it has been our experience that health communication researchers who have the methodological skills necessary to conduct all types of evaluation have the advantage. A specialist, such as an economist or biostatistician, may be needed to increase further the credibility of an evaluation team. However, the researcher with a well-rounded methodological foundation is much better equipped (and, therefore, in greater demand) for applied research than someone who has decided to specialize in one method and/or one area of health behavior or disease topic. 5. Build trust and credibility—what communication strategies work best? CDC faced this question directly when the HBO special “Miss Ever’s Boys” was scheduled for wide distribution. This made-for-television movie depicted the infamous Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis, which many in public health believe underlies much of African American’s distrust of the medical community. CDC and Emory University conducted both qualitative and quantitative research to explore how to communicate effectively in the context of this film. Based on this research, CDC concluded that it was essential to open up communication around the Tuskegee study and try to dispel some of the misinformation surrounding this study. An informational packet about the study and the film was distributed to many partners who regularly work in the African American community and was the foundation for many interactions with the media. 6. Make ethical decisions—what can be done to ensure that communication strategies and messages do not misrepresent the truth, are not manipulative, and do no harm? Ethics is often an afterthought in health communication campaign work because the assumption is that we are all doing good. Guttman (2000; see also Guttman’s chapter in this volume) has made a significant contribution to this field by articulating what a complex and important area ethics is. She makes the point that we usually study the values of target audiences for the purpose of developing effective behavior change strategies but pay far less attention to the values that underpin the choice of intervention goals and tactics. CDC, for instance, constantly challenges itself not to blame the victims but to look at the way the larger environment might influence behavior. For example, it is easy to blame the individual for not being physically active enough but we also need to look at the community to see if there are safe facilities for activity. Even our language choices need to be examined. Consider the different value orientation underlying the term hard to reach versus hardly reached.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, we have attempted to expose the reader to many of the lessons we have learned over the course of a combined 50+ years of experience conducting health communication research in public, private, and academic settings. In the course of the learning process, we have been privileged to witness health communication blossom and transform itself from a more narrowly defined field of study to a broader discipline that informs

636

EDGAR, FREIMUTH, HAMMOND

health-related research and practice in varied and vital ways. We recognize that there is still much work to be done before our discipline receives the visibility and credibility it deserves in the medical and public health community, but we feel very optimistic about the future. In addition to some of the reasons already mentioned, there is great cause for optimism because of the excellent academic programs that provide first-rate training and mentoring for the next generation of health communication professionals. The current number of programs is not large, but continues to expand. The programs expose students to stateof-the-art research and the latest innovations in practice through curricula that are guided at their core by the principles that form the basis of our discipline. We also are encouraged by signs that our colleagues in related disciplines recognize the important role of health communication in larger medical and public health contexts. For example, many of the contributors to our two key journals—Journal of Health Communication and Health Communication—claim academic homes outside of communication. We also applaud the recent institution of the Health Communication Working Group within the American Public Health Association as a very positive step toward building an interdisciplinary network of health communication researchers. As networks form, researchers will have opportunity to benefit from the recent development of research agendas such as those constructed by CDC and NCI that can serve as guides for productive (and fundable) research opportunities in the coming decade. Health communication has the potential to make even greater contributions to society than it already has. The potential will be realized as we continually and carefully examine the lessons we learn along the way and use them as the foundation for future endeavors. REFERENCES Adelman, M. B., & Frey, L. R. (1997). The fragile community: Living together with AIDS. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Guttman, N. (2000). Public health communication interventions: Values and ethical dilemmas. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

29 Lessons Learned about Academic and Public Health Collaborations in the Conduct of Community-Based Research Roxanne Parrott Pennsylvania State University

Carol Steiner Georgia Department of Human Resources

The work of strategic health communicators, those of us who intentionally seek to build and apply theory and research comprising the domain of health communication, is intended to reap positive health benefits. As this volume illustrates, we do not have to try very hard to find examples where we have succeeded. Such success contributes to increased interest in and demand for well-trained health communicators (see Kreps this volume). Unfortunately, as this volume also demonstrates, we do not have to exert much effort to identify situations in which health communicators’ efforts failed to achieve the goals established in association with a particular project. This is especially true in communitybased research where “formal organizations such as local government and businesses; educational institutions; voluntary associations such as religious, fraternal, or service groups; informal social networks; families; and individuals” (Schooler & Flora, 1997, p. 285) all comprise audiences with potential to influence health behavior. Working with communities in relation to health affords researchers opportunities to: (a) improve the quality and validity of research owing to the involvement of people whose lives will be reflected and impacted; (b) recognize the limitations of approaching science as value-free; and (c) help bridge cultural gaps (Israel, Schulz, Parker, & Becker, 1998, pp. 180–181). The lack of trust exhibited between researchers and communities, and the inherently unequal distributions of power and resources, however, impede these endeavors (Israel et al., 1998). Based on our collaborative efforts during the previous decade, we assert that academic and public health linkages represent one strategy to address the barriers associated with conducting community-based research. Additionally, these linkages increase the likelihood that effective health programs and health promotion strategies will be institutionalized. In these collaborative endeavors, rather than treating public health

637

638

PARROTT AND STEINER

agencies as one more audience within the community, the academic health communicators and public health practitioners both comprise the “experts.” As a team, they together have the responsibility to plan, implement, and evaluate efforts to improve public health. As such, they bring different strengths, perspectives, and weaknesses to health promotion endeavors. The lessons learned from our collaborative efforts are the focus of this chapter. FORMING COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN PUBLIC HEALTH PRACTITIONERS AND ACADEMIC HEALTH COMMUNICATORS

The reasons academic health communicators and public health practitioners might initiate relationships are numerous. Academic health communicators might be interested in working with local public health clinics to understand: (a) the strategies used to communicate to parents about immunizing their children; (b) the resources available to promote cancer prevention and detection; or (c) the intersection between state health policy and public health delivery. Public health practitioners may be interested in the application of theory to design health messages and plan program evaluations (Burdine & McLeroy, 1992; van Ryn & Heaney, 1992). These, and a thousand other questions, might bring academic health communicators and public health practitioners together, with introductions occurring via any number of methods, including the use of e-mail to make an initial contact.1 In our case, the recommendation of an academic public health friend led the public health practitioner to initiate contact with the academic health communicator. A request for applications addressing cancer prevention among farming communities sparked the initial interest, with the Request for Applications emerging from advocacy by farming representatives in acknowledgment of increased incidence of some cancer, including skin cancer, among farming populations.2 During the process of writing a proposal to address the RFA, and initiating the field project once we were funded, we learned several lessons about forming and maintaining relationships between academic health communicators and public health practitioners. The lessons are derived directly from our personal experiences. Yet they have implications for forming relationships with communities to conduct community-based research and collaborating with health care professionals and organizations to initiate study of physician interaction or health care organizational communication. Walk a Mile in Each Other’s Shoes

As in any new relationship, building trust in academic and public health linkages takes some time. Public health practitioners may resist efforts to team up with academic health communicators because of previous experiences with or stereotypes about academic researchers who have never been “in the field.” Academic health communicators may doubt public health practitioners’ understanding of theory’s utility for practice or commitment to rigorous evaluation. There are many reasons academics may never have actually worked or conducted research in the field, including the multifaceted nature of their profession 1 A brief e-mail introduction to the Director of Public Health in the state of Pennsylvania when Parrott first moved there produced a rapid and enthusiastic response. 2 We acknowledge gratitude to Mike Slater for his thoughtful question about these collaborations. Public health endeavors may take either a top-down versus bottom-up approach. In our experience, many requests for proposals are guided by advocacy efforts of particular communities, although not all members of a community may have awareness of these efforts. Thus, what may appear to be a decision made from the top to address a particular health issue or topic originates within the group to be served.

29. COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH

639

that constrains their time. Public health practitioners, too, have many bosses to serve, and seldom are these professionals not in the field. Being open to each other’s timeframes and needs is important. In short, there is a difference between doing health communication and doing health communication research, and academic health communicators who team up to collaborate with public health practitioners will do some of both. Doing health communication means applying the body of knowledge already available to improve the process and outcomes associated with a health situation. Numbers of academic health communicators are finding positions in organizations, including the public health care system, where they are hired to do health communication. Sometimes, they are frustrated by the lack of interest in the theories behind the products that they produce. But, that is often the nature of doing health communication—no one wants to hear about the labor pains. Health communication research, on the other hand, strives to extend that body of knowledge and understanding about health communication through the careful, systematic, and intentional execution of a research plan associated with the process and outcomes in a health setting. In the latter situation, there is a great deal of interest in the theory behind the method and hope associated with the belief that the research will contribute to better outcomes associated with doing health communication. Academics should realize that not every situation has to be turned into a research question or a theoretical hypothesis-testing event. In fact, avoiding that tendency will contribute to practitioners’ confidence that the academic has something to contribute and is not just using the public health setting to get subjects and get published. To contribute to such confidence from both sides of the partnership during the formation of academic and public health linkages, make efforts to “walk in each other’s shoes.” This can happen in many ways, with some efforts requiring more time commitment than others. Once our proposal was funded, we decided that the academic health communicator would benefit from attending monthly meetings of the cancer control section’s staff—getting out of the “ivory tower,” so to speak. As a result, the academic began to put faces with names of people with whom she would be working and they, in turn, could put a face with her name. She learned what was going on at the state and local level in cancer prevention and control, the names of programs, and the boundaries of policy- and decision making. The public health staff, in turn, began to understand what the academic might offer as a resource to them, not only in terms of the funded field research endeavor, but also in association with other programs as well. The public health collaborator, on the other hand, has an advanced degree and has taught in the college classroom. She trekked to the academic setting to make presentations and meet with graduate students. She recruited academic health communication graduate students to fill public health internships and part-time employment in the field. Through these initiatives, the public health practitioner affirmed the academic health communicator’s position that graduate education in health communication requires such field experience. Walking a mile in each other’s shoes is a principle worthy of application in any context in which the academic health communicator hopes to conduct health communication research. This lesson emphasizes and supports the value of donning a white lab coat and conducting rounds with attending physicians prior to and while studying medical interaction and writing a health column for the local newspaper or news program. These illustrations highlight the reality that an academic health communicator faces the need to become competent in a new vocabulary each time he or she undertakes an endeavor in a new health arena. The goal is not to become expert but, rather, to be able to understand others who are expert and to be able to ask intelligent questions toward the purpose of achieving a second aim in association with forming productive collaborations.

640

PARROTT AND STEINER

Agree on the Facts

Before seeking community partners, academic health communicators and public health practitioners should recognize that some issues require consensus from the experts as they meet their publics. Agree on the facts bringing you to the field and the facts that you bring to the field. While this sounds very simple, the health promotion literature suggests that it is not. The principle applies to epidemiological evidence of risk in the beginning of a project, but it will also apply to information in support of prevention and detection practices as the project advances. How an academic health communicator defines and interprets evidence and meaning of risk may differ from how the public health practitioner views risk in a given situation, and both views may differ from the community’s perceptions. The health communicator could assess evidence as supporting the need to promote prevention, while the public health expert decides that efforts to increase early detection are needed. This potential barrier to collaboration exists in other health communication contexts as well, with physicians prioritizing some goals for treatment and understanding above others (see Thompson & Parrott, 2002, for review), and medical writers and reporters constructing stories that reflect their own understanding but may not represent other views. One body of knowledge that academic health communicators draw on when planning community-based efforts is the theory and research that deals with resistance to influence attempts (see Pfau, 1995, for discussion). It seems strange to think that individuals would resist efforts to benefit their health and well-being. Yet, we know that they do, often because they do not share the influencers’ perceptions that the efforts will be beneficial (see Guttman, 2000, for discussion). This may occur because we, the so-called experts, have forewarned individuals that their current attitudes are about to be challenged, arousing feelings of vulnerability and motivation to bolster their current attitudes, but failed to present a consistent message about risks and/or benefits in association with eliminating the threat, or failed to present such messages within the community’s framework for understanding and experience. When we began the project to promote sun protection to farmers in southern Georgia, we faced farmers’ questions and concerns about why they were being named as a public health priority (Parrott, Steiner, & Goldenhar, 1996). An increased incidence of skin cancer among the farming community was a fact supported by epidemiological evidence (Blair, Maler, Cantor, Burmeister, & Wilklund, 1985; Weinstock et al., 1991) and one that we chose to state directly in our contacts with farmers. When we began a project to promote sun protection to soccer-playing youth (Parrott, Duggan, et al., 1999), we faced questions about the choice of youth as an audience. This time, we referred to medical research and findings that excessive sunlight poses a risk factor for malignant melanoma, particularly when the exposure occurs in the first 15 years of life (Holman, Armstrong, & Heenan, 1986). In other words, as the “experts” in these community-based endeavors, we anticipated these questions and collaborated on our responses. If we had failed to either anticipate the questions or to agree on how to present the evidence of risk to our audiences, our relationship would have been less effective both in terms of the project aims and as we reached out to form initiatives in the communities. The evidence is not always as clear as it was in these two instances, is sometimes based on supposition, or is itself one of the questions for research. In other situations, there is no efficacious response to address the known health risk. These cases truly challenge health communicators and public health agencies who must decide about the appropriateness of forming relationships in such situations (see Parrott, Kahl, & Maibach, 1995, for a discussion). The overarching challenge is to conduct health communication research,

29. COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH

641

collaborative or otherwise, in an ethical fashion (see Guttman, 2000, for discussion). Two further lessons learned afford guiding principles toward that end. Identify Individual and Institutional Aims

One goal of community-based research is to identify appropriate societal and individual audiences for whom specific messages and programs addressing responsibility in association with health behavior and outcomes will be derived (Parrott, Monahan, Ainsworth, & Steiner, 1998). Academic and public health practitioners may not always agree about the role of societal versus individual responsibility in a situation. As with the need to agree on the facts before going to the field, disagreements about the role of individual versus societal variables in a situation are best worked out in private rather than in the presence of community partners. Academic health communicators and public health practitioners should avoid laying blame at either the feet of individuals or institutions and seek entr´ee into both arenas to improve public health. In our program to promote sun protection to soccer-playing youth, at the end of our formative research, we were in agreement about the appropriateness of targeting both: (a) parks and recreation decision makers to promote the construction of physical cover for players at the sidelines of the soccer fields and (b) parents and coaches to encourage youth to wear sunscreen (Parrott, Duggan, et al., 1999). Additionally, we targeted organizations designing brochures for parents regarding the topic of youth’s sun protection and skin cancer prevention (Slaten, Parrott, & Steiner, 1999). In our endeavors to promote sun protection to south Georgia farmers, sunscreen manufacturers were identified as an important target audience based on farmers’ reports that pesticides stick to sunscreen (Parrott, 1997), while use of sun protective clothing and sunscreen were emphasized with farmers (Parrott et al., 1996). We also developed a continuing education video program for rural health care providers to address the topic of how to conduct clinical skin exams, a strategy to increase the low involvement by physicians in promoting sun protection (Parrott & Steiner, 1998). We agreed on the importance of addressing both societal and individual variables in community-based endeavors (Parrott et al., 1998). If we had not agreed, our collaboration would have suffered until we negotiated a position with which we were both comfortable. The identification of societal and individual solutions to improve the public’s health contributed to the community steering committee’s ability to expand and modify project aims, fostering discussion about how best to achieve these aims rather than argument about what aims to achieve. While community-based endeavors often carefully consider the social and structural environments in which health promotion endeavors will be undertaken, too little attention has been given to the ecological environment. As we have argued elsewhere (Parrott, Egbert, Anderton, & Sefcovic, 2002), it is critical to expand the notion of environment to capture the essence of the physical outdoor ecological system in which an audience lives. While we intuitively recognize differences in temperature, humidity, rainfall, and air and water quality in different regions of the nation, this knowledge must be explicitly considered in the design of recommendations and messages associated with communitybased endeavors. In our early efforts to promote sunscreen use to farmers, we were advised by our audience members that pesticides stick to sunscreen, so they were not about to use it (Parrott et al., 1996). Indeed, southern Georgia is a hot, humid, and sticky place to live and work much of the year—that is the nature of the physical outdoor environment in which farmers are working and youth are playing soccer. Our agreement to consider the physical environment contributed to our ability to form a successful collaboration,

642

PARROTT AND STEINER

not only between academe and public health, but also between the “experts” and our publics. Discussion about the multifaceted components of an individual patient’s environment comprises a method of assessing the subjective component of illness as well (Duggan & Parrott, 2001). This suggests how this principle for forming successful collaborations between academic health communicators and public health practitioners has implications for health communication practice beyond community-based research. One final lesson was learned about forming collaborations between academic health communicators and public health practitioners that offers some insight about strategies to increase the likelihood of success. Know the History of Public Health Promotion and Research

Prior to seeking community partners, the formation of a successful collaborative endeavor between academic health communicators and public health agents will benefit from an assessment of prior public health promotion and research endeavors undertaken in an area. Although agreement about the facts and the identification of individual and institutional aims comprise critical components of our successful collaboration, we faced the distrust sometimes associated with federal agencies and the promises that they fail to keep as we went into the field. We experienced this when we began our formative research with farmers in rural southern Georgia with regard to pesticide container disposal (Parrott et al., 1996). Several interviews with farmers referred to the same incident in which a government program had been initiated in the area, asking farmers to save their pesticide containers for mass collection and disposal. When we introduced our project to one farmer, he told us, “If you’re here to collect those pesticide containers, they’re out back—piled up about as high as my barn.” Until we addressed this previous issue, we were not likely to get very far with our proposed new endeavor. History lays a foundation on which partnerships will be built both between academics and practitioners, and between experts and the lay public. Whereas it may raise uncomfortable questions in the short term, the project will benefit in the long term from a careful analysis of prior public health or academic research endeavors in an area and with a community. At minimum, this may save face for the experts who could otherwise look unprepared, uninformed, and less than credible when confronted with questions about previous community-based research endeavors. It should also save time, as academic health communicators and public health practitioners have the opportunity to be prepared with information to remedy a situation in which promises were not kept. And, fundamentally, it should promote a greater likelihood of forming a successful collaboration between the academic health communicator and public health practitioner in their community-based health promotion endeavors. Once formed, several guidelines based on lessons learned during our collaborative efforts may help to sustain these linkages. MAINTAINING COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN PUBLIC HEALTH PRACTITIONERS AND ACADEMIC HEALTH COMMUNICATORS

Once an alliance has formed between an academic health communicator and public health professional for purposes of conducting a community-based project, as in any successful long-lasting relationship, some serious effort must be made to maintain the collaboration. This reality is further evidence of the fact that health communication is a time-consuming undertaking. There are, as one of the authors is fond of telling her graduate students, many

29. COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH

643

faster roads to publication and tenure. There are few, however, with as many opportunities to contribute to society. To increase the likelihood that the linkages will be sustained, several lessons learned from academic-public health linkages may be useful. Follow-through on Commitments

It is a basic principle in any relationship: “Say what you will do, and do what you will say.” The equation is too frequently absent from collaborations formed outside the boundaries of traditional work relationships. To maintain successful academic and public health linkages, defining the academic-public health team and its commitment to each other is crucial. The commitment must be based in reality, including the aforementioned discussion about the constraints on each other due to professional lives and commitments beyond the collaborative effort. Health communicators and public health practitioners need to make promises that they can keep—to each other as collaborators and to their community partners. This includes pledges about the time that each partner will devote to the project and resources available within each partner’s setting to contribute to the community-based endeavor. The public health professional in our collaboration has been the Director of Cancer Control for Georgia for more than two decades and was particularly skilled at tempering the overzealous timetables the academic health communicator sometimes proposed. Based on our experiences, we recommend that collaborators, when outlining commitments to the project and its aims, recognize that everything takes more time than you plan for it to take, so plan in the first place on the fact that “nothing ever happens on time.” Separate organizational hierarchies and bureaucracies will create challenges to partnerships between health communicators and public health practitioners. The public university system and the public health system each directly constrain these collaborations through elaborate systems of grants and contracts. The lives of funded researchers are filled with reporting, and the reality of maintaining collaborations between multiple institutions is—at minimum—an increase in the number of recipients for these reports. The university system may also indirectly constrain collaboration if the merit system rewards solo-authored work more than collaborative research, or intrainstitutional rather than interinstitutional collaboration. We faced these types of barriers to our timetables and others in our collaborations. One strategy we adopted to address such challenges, beyond simple acknowledgment to one another that it was happening (often very effective in initiating conversation in these cases), was to expend extra effort to make sure that both organizations employing us received due credit. We even duplicated project awards, including the Linkages Award, so that each organization would have a visible symbol of project involvement and recognition. We also miss no opportunity to publicly state the reality that two agencies and their representatives working together attain far more than the combined efforts of two individual agencies working alone. This lesson applies just as well in other health communication settings, as any research conducted in this domain of communication activity represents the endeavors of multiple institutions and individuals following through on their commitments and should be acknowledged as such. Avoid Researcher Greed

As noted with regard to the formation of collaborations between academic health communicators and public health practitioners, not everything has to be framed as research. The temptation to do so is likely to follow the academic into the field. While it is a

644

PARROTT AND STEINER

hard temptation to overcome, especially in the wake of successful collaborations between academics and public health professionals, academics should adopt a minimalist attitude when it comes to requests to study the setting. When granted access, identify the minimum resources needed from one another in your partnership in order to achieve specific aims. This goes hand in hand with enhancing the likelihood of being able to follow through on commitments to one another. Carry that principle to the field, and identify the minimum resources needed from communities in order to accomplish research goals and agree to make only those requests. One way of bounding these requests is to ask only for information and other resources needed in the present; avoid the too frequent tendency to ask for more just because you have access. To maintain a successful collaboration, discuss each other’s perceptions about what is minimally necessary. Compliance with human subjects protocols as legislated by the federal government should motivate academic researchers and public health practitioners to consider their requests for information and the possible psychological and other effects associated with these searches. Because of the involvement of children, we underwent a full board review for our community-based project promoting sun protection to soccer-playing youth in Georgia (Parrott & Duggan, 1999). Such boards contain members of the community, including parents. In our situation, that involved parents of soccer-playing youth. We were surprised when our application for use of human subjects was rejected, as we regarded it as posing no threat to youth. Attendance at the next meeting of the board to revisit the application provided an explanation—parents on the board were concerned that a child’s decision not to participate in the project might lead to a coach’s decision not to allow a child to play. Because coaches were receiving incentives in the form of sun protective hats and sunglasses when they returned the pre- and posttest surveys of participating youth and parents, the reviewers perceived that coaches had a motive to require youth to participate. With this specific concern before us, we were able to clarify the research process and reassure the board members that there would be no such motive present. We were, however, again reminded that our requests for information and resources from our communities should be carefully considered and kept to a minimum. Communities are often able to recall situations where previous research has proven to be costly in the form of future economic and personal resources allocated as solutions derived from the research. Communities are by definition interdependent (Schooler & Flora, 1997). As such, community members work together, worship together, and play together. In short, they live and die together. Health communicators and public health practitioners may believe that their community-based efforts will prevent the latter from happening prematurely, but that largely depends on the community’s willingness to participate at multiple levels, disclosing information when it is sought and sacrificing time to the public health effort. Community members’ reticence regarding information disclosure is a broad phenomenon, with financial, personal, relational, and even political dimensions. Early on in our collaborative efforts with the farming community, for example, confusion over differences between the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) contributed to farmers’ safeguarding of information (Parrott et al., 1996). They reasoned that any disclosure would lead to additional regulations of their work practices and concomitant financial burdens. Questions such as “How many tractors do you own” and “Do they have cabs or an umbrella to shield the driver from the sun” were considered to be a means to assess levels of sun protection afforded by individuals’ equipment, as compared to protection through personal action. Such requests for information could be projected to the regulatory realm, however,

29. COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH

645

with farmers fearing legislation that would require them to add sun protection devices to their equipment. Although academic health communicators’ efforts to limit the scope of research to be conducted throughout the collaboration are necessary to sustain academicpublic health linkages, public health practitioners’ tradition of providing services must be addressed in a like fashion. Balance Process and Impact Evaluation Orientations and Priorities

Public health practitioners and academic health communicators sometimes operate in different spheres when it comes to defining how to evaluate the success of field projects. To maintain successful collaborations, striving for balance between a process and service orientation versus an impact and research orientation is important. For public health agencies, the process is a vital indicator of a program’s success, so a count of the number of programs presented and the number of people attending a program, receiving a brochure, or calling a hotline constitutes data to support the program’s value. For the academic, this falls far short of the evidence necessary to test a theory-driven approach to community-based research. In our collaborative pursuits, the burden to explain why we were not giving away more free goods and services, including sunscreen, sun protective clothing, and clinical skin exams, fell on the shoulders of the public health collaborator. The public, and even public health staff, may view health promotion endeavors, especially when they are funded by government agencies, as a ticket to give and receive health services. In short, the significance of evaluation is not universally understood. Illustrative of the potential for conflict to occur between academic health communicators and public health professionals was our effort to evaluate a program designed to be used at a Farm Kids Safety camp. The public health leaders of the camp were enthused about the introduction of such a program and approved the notion that we would evaluate the Sun Safety class. We soon, learned, however, that their approach to evaluation was limited to one or two knowledge-based questions representing each activity that took place during the three-day camp. To more systematically examine our program, we designed the evaluation as an integral part of the class, making it much like a science class lab rather than a test (see Turk, Parrott, Martin, Steiner, & Lewis, 1997). Creative approaches to evaluation are sometimes key to conducting evaluation, particularly when the activity being evaluated is involved with the delivery of public health services. Health communicators, public health practitioners, and community members all have their own priorities in community-based research. Health communicators and public health practitioners should agree on a set of priorities that encompass each side of the aisle, so to speak, and then—once more—present a united front regarding these matters to graduate students, public health staff, and communities. The lesson carries over to other health communication contexts where different priorities, including the business mission of health care organizations, must be balanced with research aims. Listen and Look More Than You Talk—Act as a Translator

One final noteworthy lesson that sustains our collaborative efforts, perhaps more than any other, and with rich implications for successful health communication research and practice across the boundaries of different contexts is the maxim to listen and look more than you talk. Health communicators are translators. We are not the medical or scientific or public health experts. Public health practitioners are also translators. They, too, are seldom the medical or scientific experts. Our function is to develop and/or apply the best

646

PARROTT AND STEINER

available theory and knowledge in the health communication and public health realms, thereby translating the medical and scientific understanding about health in ways that inform and motivate individuals and institutions to act in ways that improve health and well-being. Sometimes that means when something is not working in the field, even when it is based on a carefully derived strategic plan, it may be necessary to change direction and try something else. Considerable efforts have been expended in health communication to make messages available for low-literacy audiences. Considerable resources have been expended to translate English messages into other languages. There has been an increased awareness that even the most literate audiences may struggle to understand health information, contributing to the notion that health literacy is a specialized type of literacy (see Bernhardt & Cameron, this volume). There has also been an increased awareness, too, that efforts to translate health messages into multiple languages sometimes give too little recognition and attention to the reality that individuals who speak another language may not be able to read messages in that language. This reality parallels the inability of many English speakers to read a message in English. But even more challenging to the achievement of health communication-public health aims is the reality that some words simply have no direct translation in meaning, experience, or understanding. During the meeting of the International Communication Association in Jerusalem in 1998, a panel of academic health communicators and public health experts from Israel and the United States gathered to discuss their experiences in the arena of women’s health. In a discussion about women’s reproductive health in Israel, it was noted that the Bedouins, a nomadic people of the Middle Eastern deserts, do not live by a formal calendar. Thus, for health communicators and public health professionals to talk about reproductive health in the usual terms relating to monthly cycles had little meaning and no motivation within their experience. Yet, they would be unlikely to articulate this reality; they would not even have a vocabulary for expressing it. While every communication student from the entry class on can recite the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, putting it in the context of community-based health communication requires intentional listening and looking. Unique approaches to listening and looking must be practiced. One such approach we used during the formative research conducted within the Georgia farming communities is called photovoice (Wang, 1997). By taking photographs of a community at work and play, researchers and practitioners may make observations about what they see, and members of the community can help the researchers and practitioners to understand what is taking place. Through this method, insights about the lives of community members may be gained that are critical to integrating a health practice into lived experiences. For example, we observed that farmers socialize at feed and seed stores, seeking social support in very informal ways. This contributed to our decision to place sun protection promotion information and products in feed and seed stores, making it an integral part of the environment in which farmers already spent time for varied purposes (Parrott, Lewis, Jones, Steiner, & Goldenhar, 1998). We also observed that migrant farmworkers hang their laundry on clotheslines that are so close to the field where they work that aerial pesticides would be likely to settle on the clothing as well as the crops (Parrott, Wilson, Buttram, Jones, & Steiner, 1999). Whereas one principle for breaking down pesticide residual on clothing is to hang the clothing in the sun, promoting this practice among the farmworkers would have likely increased rather than decreased the presence of pesticides on clothing. Yet, the farmworkers would be unlikely to tell us this, as it simply makes up part of their daily existence. Once more, the need to go to the field and spend considerable time listening and looking, seeking to understand the lives of individuals and institutions with whom one works as an academic-public health team—to listen and look more often than

29. COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH

647

talking—becomes the most important lesson to be learned. Take a little time to recognize that while the project is our work, it is our community’s lives. Through this recognition, respect for the knowledge, skills, and experiences of the academic, public health, and community partners evolves and becomes evident in the research and field activities. CONCLUSION

The focus of this chapter has been based on our experiences collaborating in communitybased programs, but the lessons learned cut across many contexts of health communication. In clinical settings, for example, doctors may seek to understand how communication influences their patients’ understanding and behavior. The academic health communicator may seek to understand barriers to self-disclosure, contributing to the ability of physicians to understand how communication influences patients’ understanding and behavior (e.g., Parrott, Duncan, & Duggan, 2000). Physicians and health communicators may form relationships to work toward these aims together. The successful formation of such relationships may depend upon a willingness to understand each other’s professional perspective and to agree on the facts regarding the issue bringing them together. Moreover, an examination of the roles of the physician and the patient, as well as the health care organizational setting and other institutions, including health policy at the state and national levels, will contribute to the ability to form an effective partnership. Finally, knowledge of the history of other efforts to examine medical interaction as a site of significant study in a specific setting will enhance the ability to form the present relationship. The ability to maintain these working relationships, as with the academic health communicator and public health professional, will depend upon the commitment of the medical and academic partners to follow through with promises made to one another. Additionally, efforts to limit the request for researcher access, to balance the other aims in the setting with the aims of the research, and to listen and look more than talk are likely to contribute to the maintenance of research relationships between physicians and academic health communicators. In community-based health promotion research, health communication is a pervasive and multifaceted phenomenon that will likely incorporate discussion about health in families and between friends, together with explicit and implicit media messages about health and the formal interactions with health care providers and within the health care system. These multiple discourses (see Duggan & Parrott, 2001; Parrott, Huff, Kilgore, & Williams, 1997) about health mutually influence one another in the cocreation of individuals’ interpretations and meanings of health. These discursive practices are what help individuals to understand and name illness and disease, to attribute responsibility and blame to institutions and individuals for illness and disease, and to seek a course of action among all the standards for behavior and codes of conduct available to institutions and individuals. Health communication as a behavioral science activity has reached an age of maturity about these processes that is both exciting and sobering. The recognition that communication is a vital process in the efforts to achieve healthy people is exciting. The realization that many competing and coexisting processes contribute to the health of this nation’s people is sobering. In some circles, health communicators no longer have to rank the importance of communication activities in a long list of important criteria for achieving health, such as financial and geographic access to care. That is a gain. Careful and considerate effort is needed to identify what, when, and why among all the communication activities relating to health, some endeavors succeed. More linkages between academic health communicators and public health professionals, as well as other health professionals, afford one means of increasing the validity associated with efforts to identify, understand, and replicate these successful endeavors.

648

PARROTT AND STEINER

REFERENCES Blair, A., Maler, H., Cantor, K. P., Burmeister, L., & Wilklund, K. (1985). Cancer among farmers: A review. Scandinavian Journal of Work and Environmental Health, 11, 397–407. Burdine, J. N., & McLeroy, K. R. (1992). Practitioners’ use of theory: Examples from a workgroup. Health Education Quarterly, 19, 331–340. Duggan, A., & Parrott, R. (2001). Physicians’ nonverbal rapport-building behaviors and patients’ talk about the subjective component of illness. Human Communication Research, 27, 299–311. Guttman, N. (2000). Public health communication interventions: Values and ethical dilemmas. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Holman, D. C., Armstrong, B. K., & Heenan, P. J. (1986). Relationship of cutaneous malignant melanoma to individual sunlight-exposure habits. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 76, 403–14. Israel, B. A., Schulz, A. J., Parker, E. A., & Becker, A. B. (1998). Review of community-based research: Assessing partnership approaches to improve public health. Annual Review of Public Health, 19, 173–202. Parrott, R. (1996). Advocate or adversary?: The self-reflexive roles of media messages for health. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 266–278. Parrott, R. (1997). Encouraging sunscreen use. Journal of Cosmetics & Toiletries, 112, 94. Parrott, R., Duncan, V., & Duggan, A. (2000). Promoting patients’ full and honest disclosure during conversations with healthcare providers. In S. Peronio (Ed.), Balancing the secrets of private disclosures. Mahwah, NJ: LEA. Parrott, R., & Duggan, A. (1999). Using coaches as role models of sun protection for youth: Georgia’s “Got Youth Covered” project. Journal of Applied Communication, 27, 1–13. Parrott, R., Duggan, A., Cremo, J., Eckles, A., Jones, K., & Steiner, C. (1999). Communicating youth’s sun exposure risk to soccer coaches and parents: A pilot study in Georgia. Health Education & Behavior, 26, 385–395. Parrott, R., Egbert, N., Anderton, J., & Sefcovic, E. (2002). Enlarging the role of environment as a social influence construct in health campaigns. In M. Pfau & J. Dillard (Eds.), Persuasion: Theories and practice (pp. 633–660). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Parrott, R., Huff, T., Kilgore, M., & Williams, M. (1997). A peer discussion of physicians’ communication competence. Southern Medical Journal, 90, 709–719. Parrott, R. L., Kahl, M., & Maibach, E. (1995). Enabling individuals to be healthy: Policy and administrative practices at a crossroad. In E. Maibach & R. Parrott’s (Eds.), Designing health messages: Approaches from communication theory and public health practice (pp. 270–283). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Parrott, R., Lewis, D., Jones, K., Steiner, C., & Goldenhar, L. (1998). Identifying feed and seed stores as a site to promote skin cancer control: A social marketing approach to agricultural health communication. Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health, 4, 149–158. Parrott, R., Monahan, J., Ainsworth, S., & Steiner, C. (1998). Communicating to farmers about skin cancer: A behavioral adaptation model. Human Communication Research, 24, 386–409. Parrott, R., & Steiner, C. (1998). The role of Georgia physicians in control of farmers’ skin cancer. Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, 87, 109–111. Parrott, R., Steiner, C., & Goldenhar, L. (1996). Georgia’s harvesting healthy habits: Formative evaluation. Journal of Rural Health, 12, 291–300. Parrott, R., Wilson, K., Buttram, C., Jones, K., & Steiner, C. (1999). Migrant farmworkers’ access to pesticide protection and information: Cultivando buenos habitos campaign development. Journal of Health Communication, 4, 49–64.

29. COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH

649

Pfau, M. (1995). Designing messages for behavioral inoculation. In E. Maibach & R. L. Parrott (Eds.), Designing health messages: Approaches from communication theory and public health practice (pp. 99–113). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schooler, C., & Flora, J. A. (1997). Contributions of health behavior research to community health promotion programs. In D. S. Gochman (Ed.), Handbook of health behavior research, vol. IV (pp. 285–297). New York: Plenum Press. Slaten, D., Parrott, R., & Steiner, C. (1999). Readability of skin cancer prevention brochures targeting parents of young children. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 40, 997–998. Thompson, T., & Parrott, R. (2002). Interpersonal communication and health care. In M. Knapp & J. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed. (pp. 680– 725)). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Turk, D., Parrott, R., Martin, M., Steiner, C., & Lewis, D. (1997). Communicating safe sun practices to farm youth: A model and field test of a proposed curriculum. Journal of Agromedicine, 4, 391–395. Van Ryn, M., & Heaney, C. A. (1992). What’s the use of theory? Health Education Quarterly, 19, 315–330. Wang, C. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24, 369–387. Weinstock, M. A., Bogaars, H. A., Ashley, M., Little, V., Bilodeau, E., & Kimmel, S. (1991). Nonemlanoma skin cancer mortality: A population-based study. Archives of Dermatology, 127, 1194–1197.

30 Ethics in Health Communication Interventions Nurit Guttman Tel Aviv University

INTRODUCTION

Ethics is at the heart of health communication interventions. Invariably communication that aims to affect people’s views or health-related behavior raises a multitude of ethical concerns, especially since they deal with topics that are integral to deeply held personal preferences and social values.1 The following four propositions underscore why ethical issues should be considered in the design and implementation of health communication interventions: (a) any communication activity that constitutes a purposeful attempt to promote people’s health—even the most benevolent—is inundated with ethical issues; (b) ethical issues can be found in each component of the intervention, from conception of goals to assessment of outcomes; (c) ethical issues are often implicit and embedded in subtle decision-making processes and their delineation requires an assessment of unintended impacts; and (d) attending to ethical considerations may be not only a moral prerequisite but also has pragmatic significance. Whereas communication for health promotion is essentially a benevolent endeavor (Rogers, 1994), by definition it is a purposeful attempt to bring about certain changes in people’s lives. Thus, like any attempt to intervene or influence people to adopt health recommendations, health communication needs a moral justification. When closely scrutinized, most, if not all, decisions that relate to the goals, design, implementation, and evaluation of health communication interventions are associated with ethical issues (Burdine, McLeroy, & Gottlieb, 1987; Doxiadis, 1987, 1990). These include decisions regarding which health issues to tackle, which populations should

1 Ethical issues in the ideological orientations and health promotion policies deserve a separate discussion. See Rothschild (2001) for distinctions as they relate to social marketing and Tesh (1988) for a historical analysis.

651

652

GUTTMAN

be targeted by the intervention, how to employ the most effective tactics, and according to which criteria to assess success (Hornik, 1990; Ratzan, 1994). In addition, because health communication interventions are increasingly carried out as an interdisciplinary enterprise, professional orientations and moral obligations may differ and may even place conflicting demands.2 Why should health communicators seek to identify ethical issues? One argument is that when goals are noble, the means to achieve them must be noble as well (Kirby & Andreasen, 2001). Identifying and addressing subtle ethical issues has become an imperative as health communication interventions take place in multicultural settings, commercial marketing tactics are widely embraced, and new information dissemination resources are rapidly developing. In some cases ethical issues are explicit and capture the attention of health communicators. Yet, in others, pertinent ethical issues may be more difficult to recognize. For example, it may not be difficult to identify that it is problematic to use pictures of women in seductive postures as a persuasive and attention-getting appeal: such an image can obviously serve to reinforce the stereotype of women as sexual objects. In contrast, the ethical ramifications of saying that a woman—as a wife—should cook appropriate foods for her husband’s hypertension may be subtle or confounding. Thus, scrutinizing messages for ethical issues should become a routine part of message design. Addressing ethical issues, however, is important not only because any benevolent attempt to contribute to the well-being of people needs to be ethical, but also because it has pragmatic implications: Interventions that are sensitive to ethical concerns are more likely to gain the trust and respect of intended populations and collaborators. To illustrate how one may delineate ethical concerns, the chapter opens with a brief overview of ethical approaches and precepts and discusses the notion of ethical dilemmas and then it elaborates how these relate to health communication interventions’ goals, strategies, and tactics. It concludes with thoughts on ethical issues associated with professional obligations and challenges for the near future. MORAL OBLIGATIONS AND ETHICAL DILEMMAS

Human societies are characterized by having certain moral values regarding what is ethically right or wrong in human conduct and which issues are morally problematic (Sherwin, 1999). Philosophers present ethical theories and principles that define moral duties and obligations, some with particular relevance to the health care and health promotion context (e.g., Beauchamp & Childress, 1994; Coughlin, Soskolne, & Goodman, 1997; McLeroy, Gottlieb, & Burdine, 1987; Seedhouse, 1991; Tangwa, 1996; Veatch, 1999). Ethicists note the moral obligation to do the utmost to better people’s health, to avoid doing them any harm, to respect people’s autonomy and privacy, to ensure equity and fairness and provide for those who are particularly vulnerable or who have special needs, and to maximize the greatest utility from the health promotion efforts, especially when resources are limited. Whereas much of the literature on ethics in health promotion has embraced these obligations in different variations, it has also been criticized as representing mainly a Western approach to the conception of moral issues, drawing too much on assumptions of 2

Callahan and Jennings (2002) discuss the importance of focusing on ethical issues in public health and identifying basic ethical issues and orientations that would be helpful in clarification and resolution of these issues. The overview they provide can inform the discussion here that focuses more specifically on health communication interventions.

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

653

individualism and universalism, being too removed from the sociocultural milieu in which moral choices actually take place, and not reflecting diversity in moral reasoning (see Blackhall, Murphy, Frank, Michel, & Azen, 1995; Carrese & Rhodes, 1995; Makau & Arnett, 1997; O’Brien-Hallstein, 1999; Pellegrino, 1993). Taking these reservations into consideration, these moral precepts can help identify and address ethical issues in health communication interventions. In addition to moral precepts, the bioethics literature typically notes two major theoretical approaches broadly labeled as deontological and teleological. Deontological approaches—as implied by the Greek word deon, which means duty—hold that some actions are intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of the consequences they may lead to and that individuals should not be treated as a means to an end. The teleological perspective—as indicated by the work telos, which means end—focuses on consequences as the main criteria for determining moral worth. The utilitarian perspective, which adopts a teleological approach, emphasizes the importance of efficiency and effectiveness in terms of maximizing the greatest good to the greatest number of people within society’s limited resources. It can be argued that the adoption of particular goals and strategies reflects the adoption of a particular moral approach, even if done so unintentionally. For example, the choice to present certain statistics on risk in a manner that may be misleading but likely to capture the attention of large populations reflects a teleological moral approach; whereas, choosing not to proceed with a potentially effective strategy because some people may be offended reflects a moral commitment to the precept of not to compromise individual dignity. Two central moral obligations noted by ethicists that have a particular relevance to health communication interventions are the obligations to do good and to do no harm. The former is the obligation to promote people’s health or help protect them from potential health risks. The latter is often considered the foremost ethical maxim for health providers since the days of Hippocrates and includes physiological, psychological, social, and cultural aspects of harm. Harmful effects may occur when messages create undue anxiety, label or stigmatize people, as well as when they trigger the opposite of what the message is intended to do. An example is an antidrug message that reminded a former cocaine user of his great enjoyment from the drug and nearly caused him to start using it again (Earle, 2000). The obligation to do good (beneficence), or prevent people from being harmed, is also considered a basic tenet of the helping professions. Respect for personal autonomy and privacy is another central ethical obligation, based on the premise that individuals have an intrinsic right to make decisions for themselves on any matter that affects them, at least so far as such decisions do not bring harm to others. This precept is rooted in liberal Western tradition that places high importance on individual choice, both regarding political life and personal development. It underlies democratic forms of government and self-determination of individuals, communities, and nations, and has been the foundation for the development of important medical care codes such as patients’ rights, informed consent, and confidentiality. Health communicators, according to this precept, are obligated to honor the dignity of each individual as an autonomous, free actor. This also applies to respecting the values and preferences of groups and communities. Respecting the autonomous preference of values and morals of others, however, raises ethical issues when these strongly conflict with those of society or of the health communicators. Similarly, in multicultural settings a contentious issue concerns moral relativism: whether to respect particular cultural values that are cherished by members of a certain cultural group but conflict with moral precepts people outside it consider to be universal (Macklin, 1999).

654

GUTTMAN

Another central ethical precept is the notion of justice that typically encompasses the moral requirement of a just society to eliminate or reduce barriers that prevent equal opportunities to good health and decrease exposure to factors that pose a risk from health hazards. The obligation to promote justice also refers to a fair and equitable distribution of resources, opportunities, benefits, and risks (Beauchamp & Childress, 1994; Daniels, 1985, 1996). Health communicators invariably face issues associated with justice and fairness when they choose to “target” one group rather than another, or when benefits of the intervention are not likely to be shared by all populations. Another moral perspective is called the Ethic of Care, which draws from feminist studies and emphasizes the moral importance of maintaining relationships and connectedness over principles (Manning, 1992; O’Brien-Hallstein, 1999; Sherwin, 1992). Other perspectives that emphasize harmony and interdependence as moral imperatives are found in Communitarian or community-oriented approaches, and non-Western cultures (Azukaego, 1997; Cortese, 1990; Etzioni, 1993; James, 1999; Parker, 1999). Casuistry presents yet another type of moral reasoning that does not rely on abstract principles. Casuistry (the Latin root for “case”) is grounded in an appeal to reasoning that is derived from analogical cases, and focuses on the specific circumstances of each case (Beauchamp & Childress, 1994; Coughlin, Soskolne, & Goodman, 1997). Each of these ethical perspectives can proffer tools to articulate, identify, and address ethical issues embedded in the health communication intervention as a whole or in its particular facets. Ethical dilemmas thus occur when decisions involve a struggle between compelling but competing values or when one has to pit one important moral commitment with another. For example, in order to promote safer sexual practices among youth who are at risk for sexually transmitted diseases, one may need to discuss with them topics to which their parents object. This pits important values against each other: the obligation to protect the youth from harm versus their right to autonomy, versus the obligation to respect the authority of parents and their right to bring up their children according to their own values. Further prerequisites for ethical health communication can be informed by several stipulations posed by communication ethics scholars (see Johannesen, 1996). The most prominent may be the adherence to truth, considered one of the tenets of Western morality (Beauchamp, 1994, 1996), even if distorting it is done for what health communicators consider a good cause. Truthful communication also requires that all relevant information should be provided. Thus, the ethical standard of completeness indicates it would be unethical to present a one-sided argument, to select only favorable supporting evidence, or to present scientific findings as certain when they are considered tentative (Jensen, 1981, cited in Johannesen, 1996; Marshall, 1995; Sproule, 1980). This is a challenge health communicators often need to address, especially when they believe that, to be effective, the health message should be brief and nontentative. A related stipulation is to ensure correctness of the information disseminated that may be based on recommendations that are tentative, incomplete, or subject to different interpretations (Marshall, 1995). Another obligation is to ensure that the topic is truly relevant to the intended population and not made to seem relevant (McLeroy et al., 1995). This can be related to the standard of sincerity. Reasons for the communicative initiative need to be made clear, including goals and implicit agendas of sponsors. In some cases the identity and motives of stakeholders who are likely to benefit from the potential impact of the health communication activity should be disclosed and made explicit. Sincerity may be particularly important to members of groups who feel they have been discriminated against or exploited in

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

655

the past, or who feel that the interventional messages serve hidden agendas (Myrick, 1998). Highly relevant to health communication interventions is the stipulation of comprehensibility: to ensure that the information, recommendations, and claims made in messages can be fully understood by all members of the intended audiences. When developing messages for populations with low levels of literacy or different types of cognitive skills, the information provided needs to be adapted to individuals’ capacities. Sometimes it is advisable to present it in a style that is simple in words and format (Davidhizar & Brownson, 1999; Wilson, 2000; Winkelby et al., 1997). Finally, associated with the moral obligation to respect people’s autonomy and self-determination is the standard of inclusion. It underscores the importance of involving diverse members of the populations whose behavior the intervention aims to influence. Inclusion may also be important for strategic reasons: Messages developed with those who are its intended audiences are more likely to create a sense of ownership (Zimmerman, Ramirez-Valles, Suarez, de la Rosa, & Castro, 1997). Intervention Levels

The promotion of health can take place at different intervention levels, ranging from individual, interpersonal, family, community, organizational to societal. Much of health communication activity focuses on the individual level, aiming to influence individuals’ beliefs, thoughts, and competencies. As pointed out by ecological approaches to health promotion, health is a result of multifaceted causes (McLeroy, Bibeau, Steckler, & Glanz, 1988; Green & Kreuter, 1991). When only one level of problem causation is acknowledged, the communicative effort may disregard essential factors. For example, the promotion of physical activity may depend on messages that enhance individual motivation, but may also need to address barriers to the adoption of physical activity related to inflexible and long work hours or lack of appropriate facilities in the neighborhood. Individuals who do not adopt an exercise regimen yet continue to be barraged with messages on the importance of physical activity may be made to feel guilty. Health communicators, thus, may need to consider the extent to which their messages and strategies need to address multilevel causation (Guttman, 2000; Hornik, 1990; Rogers & Storey, 1987; Winett, King, & Altman, 1989).3 Each intervention level can be associated with particular ethical concerns. Messages aimed at the family level (For example, that all family members should encourage a smoker to quit smoking) may serve to enhance family members’ sense of commitment and caring for each other, but they may also serve to increase tensions among family members and constrain individual members’ sense of autonomy. At the organizational level, the question is to what extent workplaces and other organizations are obligated to change their physical and social environments in order to promote the welfare of their members. Is it ethical to infuse health messages in various organizational sites and activities? It has been argued that work organizations’ activities to promote health may in fact serve to infringe upon the privacy on individual members and serve as an organizational mechanism of control. This can take place by developing means to monitor workers’ adoption of health practices and by disseminating messages on topics that can be considered private and nonwork related (Conrad & Walsh, 1992).

3 An example is a community-based program on asthma in a multiethnic, low-income urban community (Wilson et al., 1997).

656

GUTTMAN

ETHICAL ISSUES IN GOALS, STRATEGIES, AND TACTICS

All decisions associated with the conception and implementation of health communication interventions involve ethical issues. This section focuses on several major concerns related to goals, targeting, the use of persuasive strategies, and cultural icons. Goals and Mandate

Consider messages that urge automobile drivers to see to it that passengers in their vehicle are wearing seatbelts and messages that tell parents they should see to it that their children are vaccinated. Who has the moral right to tell people to follow such recommendations (and to make them feel inadequate if they do not)? Do auto insurance or pharmaceutical companies have such a prerogative? Are particular public or private entities obligated to do so? In general, who has the mandate to sponsor, implement, and intervene in people’s lives through health claims and persuasive messages for the purpose of prompting health behavior changes? These questions represent ethical concerns associated with the issue of entitlement (following Paisley’s 1989, conception). Health care providers, by the virtue of their profession, are viewed as having both the right and obligation to try to affect health behaviors of patients or of the public as a whole, but are they entitled to intervene through persuasive messages? Further, who else, and according to which criteria, is entitled to do so? Health communication activities are often initiated by agencies or organizations that come from outside the intervention community or represent only particular sectors. In certain communities there may be a residue of distrust of governmental agencies because of a history of prejudice and abuse (Glantz, Rimmer, & Lerman, 1996; Herek & Capitanio, 1993; Myrick, 1998; Thomas & Quinn, 1991). These populations may not believe certain agencies are entitled to intervene in their lives. The moral mandate to intervene cannot be taken for granted. It may need to be justified and earned. The choice of goals and objectives also raises ethical issues because there may be alternative ways of understanding causes and solutions to health-related problem (MackeyKallis & Hahn, 1991). For example, certain cultural groups may believe that what health communicators describe as a problem is in fact a normal part of aging, or they may emphasize the role of fate or of a supreme being in resolving particular health problems (Chin, Polonsky, Thomas, & Nerney, 2000; Ontiveros, Black, Jakobi, & Doodwin, 1999; Skinner et al., 1998; Wingerd & Page, 1997). Individuals or groups may feel they have alternative priorities that should be pursued by the intervention, as illustrated in a meeting conducted with low-income residents for the purpose of recruiting them to an HIV/AIDS prevention program. The only residentinitiated question was how the program could help address the residents’ pressing problem of plumbing (Galbraith et al., 1996). The issue goes back to the question of mandate: Do health communicators have a moral obligation to broaden the interventions’ goals and adapt them to those prioritized by the intended population? Another ethical issue associated with the issue of mandate is whether and how to obtain the consent of those who are the intended population of the intervention. In provider-patient encounters consent can be obtained directly from the individuals involved, but obtaining consent for health communication interventions carries with it unique challenges (Habiba, 2000). Because messages are typically disseminated to groups or large populations with whom the communicators do not have direct contact, obtaining direct consent from each individual may not be feasible. An approach often used is to engage community advisory boards for this purpose (Earp et al., 1997; Kegeles, Hays, & Coats, 1996). This method

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

657

raises ethical concerns as well, because the advisory board may not necessarily represent the various perspectives in the community. Further, recruitment of advisory board members may be difficult and the process may be inefficient and hinder the implementation of the intervention (Myrick, 1998). Another ethical concern arises in situations in which it is difficult to disclose the actual topic of the health communication intervention before a certain level of trust is established with members of the population. While refraining from a full disclosure may violate the stipulation for sincerity, immediate disclosure may jeopardize activities that may actually help. The notion of consent raises another dilemma: What is the moral approach health communicators should adopt when adults who have an authority over the children/youth (e.g., parents, educators) do not want them to be exposed to messages that health communicators believe may protect them from harm? Whose consent needs to be obtained to reach children and youth? (Eng, Parker, & Harlan, 1997). A different set of ethical considerations associated with program goals is whether the health recommendations can be readily adopted by all population members. For example, are early detection programs, drug rehabilitation facilities, or medical follow-up resources readily accessible to all members of the intended population? If they are not, the intervention may help only those who can obtain them and may frustrate those who cannot (Smith, 2000). Targeting and Segmentation

To effectively utilize resources and reach the intervention’s intended populations, health communicators often adopt both the terminology and practice of commercial marketers. “Segmentation” and “targeting” are accepted as essential strategic approaches even within ethnic populations (Albrecht & Bryant, 1996; Flora, Schooler, & Pierson, 1997). The mere decision to “segment” a population according to certain parameters contains within it moral judgments typically associated with considerations of equity and utility (Guttman, 1997; Kahn, 1996; Rothschild, 2001). The moral suppositions embedded in these decisions, nonetheless, are often not made explicit. For example, in some interventions it is decided to target those who are most likely to adopt recommendations or who seem to possess a higher degree of readiness to do so (a utilitarian approach). Others may choose to target those with the greatest need, despite assumptions that they are the most difficult to reach or least likely to adopt the recommendations (Des Jarlais, Padian, & Winkelstein, 1994; Freimuth & Mettger, 1990). Some populations may be viewed as deprived because they are not targeted. This was noted in the case of older American Chinese women who were considered to have lower rates of breast cancer than white women. It was found that older American Chinese women were more likely to have undetected breast cancer because existing early-detection messages did not address their cultural values or particular concerns (Mo, 1992). A prominent approach to health promotion—referred to as the population approach— illustrates some of the ethical dilemmas associated with targeting (McLeroy et al., 1995). In this approach the intervention is aimed at relatively large segments of the population. This approach is based on the rationale that even modest health-related changes (e.g., in blood cholesterol levels or systolic blood pressure) in large populations produce relatively substantial changes in overall morbidity and mortality (Rose, 1985). For the individual, however, especially those at high risk, the benefit may be less prominent. For example, it has been argued that it may be inefficient to target relatively small pockets of people who are heavy smokers compared to targeting larger populations of light-to-moderate smokers, in terms of having a substantial impact on the community as a whole (Fisher,

658

GUTTMAN

1995). Similar arguments have been made in favor of interventions to reduce the amount of alcohol consumption among large numbers of moderate drinkers and of interventions to reduce driving speed among drivers who are not in the habit of speeding. The argument is that individuals whose behavior is moderate are more likely to respond to and adopt changes, and they are also larger in number. Further, it is argued that the potential of wide exposure to the health messages and the sheer volume of those who adopt their recommendations can justify the population approach by invoking the precept of promoting the good of the population as a whole and refraining from inefficient use of limited public resources. Another moral justification for this approach, as Beauchamp (1988) pointed out, is that urging the public as a whole to adopt particular risk-reducing practices, even when most people are not at high risk, can serve to influence the behavior of those who are at high risk, promote values of solidarity, and reduce the likelihood of victim-blaming and stigmatization of those considered at high risk. The notion of “tailoring” implies making efforts to literally customize communication tactics to fit the social and cultural beliefs and practices of intended populations (MichalJohnson & Bowen, 1992). Tailoring and targeting are ways to meet the obligations to promote equity and obtain comprehensibility. Each requires the provision of equivalent but culturally appropriate messages to populations with different sociocultural backgrounds and levels of literacy (Bell & Alcalay, 1997; Freudenberg, 1998; Kreps, 1996; Schwab et al., 1992). One ethical issue noticed by several practitioners is that, because increasingly people live in culturally diverse contexts, they may be exposed to messages that were tailored to particular populations. Consequently, they may feel excluded. For example, Lalonde, Rabinowitz, Shefsky, and Washiendo (1997) found that in a program tailored for Hispanic youth, non-Hispanic youth were angered by being excluded by the messages’ cultural specificity. Ethical concerns are also raised when interventions serve as “social experiments” (Finnegan et al., 2001; Fisher, 1995; Mitchell-Dicenso et al., 1997). Although it can be argued that such interventions differ from clinical trials, it may be important to ask what are the moral obligations when employing communication strategies believed to be more effective with one group and not with others. Further, should population members have a say regarding whether they want to participate in an “experiment” and which type of method they are exposed to? In one experimental intervention parents whose kids were assigned to a “control group” asked why their kids’ program could not include the same activities that were in the “experiment” program (Galbraith et al., 1996). The Tools of Persuasion: Exaggeration, Omission, the Use of Fear, and Emotional Appeals

Making health claims and persuasive appeals to convince people to adopt particular health recommendations clearly is ethically problematic. As health communicators learn to adopt marketing strategies, they are increasingly equipped with sophisticated methods to identify intended populations’ vulnerabilities, concerns, and desires, and to use effective tactics to facilitate persuasion (Pollay, 1989; Witte, 1994). Whether emotionally sweeping or anxiety-provoking, critics maintain that such messages have a manipulative potential (Faden, 1987; Goodman & Goodman, 1986). Yet persuasive tactics often appear to be the most efficient way to get people to adopt the health recommendations. They can portray negative consequences that people, once aware of them, will choose to avoid, and can help motivate them to adopt the recommended health practices. Some communicators feel that messages with subtle appeals fail to attract people’s attention and consequently will be ignored. The justification for appeals that can potentially “break through the clutter” may

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

659

be thus grounded in the precepts of doing good and utility (Smith, 2000). The dilemma whether to use such messages is particularly vexing when such messages are based on suggestions of members from the intervention’s population. Further, the utility of effectiveness of fear arousing messages is not clear-cut, even when they appear to arouse the interest of those who are exposed to them (Hale & Dillard, 1995). Emotional appeals may also fail to meet stipulations for correctness and accuracy if they inflate the probability of risk by misrepresentation of statistics (Blakeslee, 1992; Covello, 1992). Despite the inclination to use strong emotional and fear appeals, many message designers choose to avoid these avenues and present information in ways believed to be more factual, dialogical, or deliberative. These approaches aim to enable individuals and groups to articulate their values and to consider choices between competing obligations rather than to approach them with predetermined prescriptions. Participative and deliberative strategies for message production are increasingly adopted in health communication interventions (e.g., Laub, Somera, Gowen, & Diaz, 1999; Mody, 1991; Rudd & Comings, 1994), particularly in the context of community programs (Bernstein et al., 1995). It is suggested that even appeals disseminated through mass media channels can represent an honest and sincere dialogical attitude toward intended audiences (Yoos, 1979; cited in Johannesen, 1996). Entertainment-education projects may also feature a deliberative approach. Dialogue and plot can be used to present different perspectives and value orientations in a narrative and deliberative format and can model how to acquire skills and overcome barriers for personal and collective action (Papa et al., 1998). Further, they can involve population representatives in the articulation of ethical issues. Yet the use of entertainment-education raises its own slew of ethical concerns as well (see Brown & Singhal, 1990; Cambridge, McLaughlin, & Rota, 1995; Singhal & Rogers, 2001). As a final point, when health communication interventions take place in multicultural settings, one may need to reconcile different conceptions of values and beliefs regarding what is a moral method to influence people. Members of different groups have divergent views on the morality of different persuasive strategies. Some may prefer an emphasis on values of personal responsibility and culpability whereas others may want to stress social solidarity, respect for elders, or harmony with nature. Cultural Themes: Co-optation, Appropriation, and Confrontation. Taking into consideration the cultural heritage of minority and ethnic populations has become one of the staples in message design. The underlying rationale is that the incorporation of cultural values, symbols, and themes in health messages can serve as a source of pride, increase identification with the message, enhance attendance to it, and increase the likelihood of the adoption of the health recommendations. Ethical concerns, however, can be raised when cultural themes or symbols can be viewed as co-opted by detaching them from their original meaning, which may devalue and demean them. For example, the use of cultural values such as the importance of loyalty to the family among U.S. Latinos has been described as a highly successful strategy for the development of effective messages. It can also contribute to a positive feeling of cultural pride and inclusion, in addition to meeting utility requirements of message appeal. Nonetheless, since several values are often intertwined, an emphasis on certain themes may, by implication, legitimize others that are ethically problematic. For example, values that emphasize the importance of traditional family relations may include values associated with machismo. Emphasizing the tradition of family can thus inadvertently serve to perpetuate traditional gender roles. This raises another moral dilemma: Should certain cultural norms be challenged? In other words, are health communicators obligated to confront norms and traditions they believe are

660

GUTTMAN

detrimental to the health-related goals? Practitioners described such dilemmas when trying to promote personal empowerment. Some report having to challenge dominant cultural norms that say people should rely on expert or authority figures for advice and direction and norms that reinforce dependency on others. Similarly, some found that values of simpatia (a desire to maintain smooth personal relations and avoid direct confrontation) and respeto (the need to be valued and treated with respect) had to be challenged when the intervention called for confronting individuals’ risky sexual behaviors that put them and others at risk (Baker et al., 1997; Sabogal, Oterso-Sabogal, Pasick, Jenkins, & Pe’rez-Stable, 1996; Scott, Jorgensen, & Suarez, 1998). A related ethical issue associated with cultural sensitivity is the use of images or messages that may be deemed offensive by some. Is being offensive necessarily being unethical? Messages viewed by members of one social group as offensive may be nonetheless disseminated because they are believed to be essential in promoting health-related goals of others. For example, messages that display men loving each other may be viewed by certain populations as offensive, but advocates suggest that increased exposure to them develops tolerance toward and acceptance of homosexuality (Smith, 2000). Only a decade ago it was considered offensive to mention oral or anal sexual practices or impotency, but, although some groups still find mentioning them as offensive, these issues can now be found even in newspaper headlines. According to health practitioners this has made it easier to mention testicular and prostate cancer and to discuss the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. The use of images considered culturally appropriate may also serve to perpetuate negative stereotypes held within a particular culture. This was illustrated in the case of messages developed for older urban minority women with strong religious beliefs who shared a belief that breast cancer risk is mainly associated with what they considered “loose” or promiscuous behavior. To dispel this perception, printed material developed to be culturally oriented showed women in different apparent lifestyles including a woman in clerical robes and one in a tight-fitting low-cut dress (Skinner et al., 1998). The portrayal of the “loose” woman, however, may serve to further entrench negative stereotypes of women who choose to dress in a nontraditional way. As health communication interventions increasingly incorporate cultural symbols and themes, the challenge is to develop sensitivity not only to which themes may be appropriate, but to the ethical issues their application may spawn. Blame, Shame, Culpability, and Responsibility

Personal responsibility as “the key to good health” is central in modern discourse on health promotion (Kirkwood & Brown, 1995; Knowles, 1977; Minkler, 1999). People are urged to make prudent and responsible choices in their food consumption, leisure activities, sexual relations, and lifestyle in general. Appeals to responsibility are used as an effective strategy to motivate people to increase their adoption of health recommendations (Pfau & Parrot, 1993). Some persuasive messages warn individuals that illness or disability will result from failure to adopt what is considered a responsible lifestyle and that, if this negative outcome should occur, they will become a burden to their family or society as a whole. This appeal indeed resonates with the precept of fairness, but it risks being manipulative. Further, it may elicit strong feelings of shame and guilt among individuals who find that they are not able to adopt the health recommended practices for varying reasons (Finerman & Bennet, 1995). The impact of these messages may, thus, violate the precept of “doing no harm.” For example, in a study on breastfeeding in a low-income

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

661

population, many of the mothers who did not breastfeed their babies expressed feelings of guilt for failing to breastfeed but felt that their life circumstances simply did not enable them to do so (Guttman & Zimmerman, 2000). Attribution of culpability and blame for the adverse health outcomes thus may be unethical since the health-related behavior may not be fully under the volition of the individual or his or her circumstances may make it very difficult for him or her to adopt them. More so, one’s behavior may not be the exclusive cause for the particular outcome and other (more prominent) factors may be involved (Bayer, 1996; Callahan, 1990; Guttman & Ressler, 2001; Veatch, 1982). Messages that advise individuals to adopt behaviors considered responsible and to avoid those considered risky are reminiscent of ancient exhortations to overcome vices such as gluttony, sloth, and lust (as formulated by Breslow cited in Minkler, 1999). Implied in these messages is the assumption that people’s behavior can significantly affect their health. Whereas such messages can serve to empower people and resonate with the notion of agency,4 they also raise the ethically problematic notions of culpability and accountability (Veatch, 1980; Wikler, 1987). Although health messages may not explicitly blame individuals for being responsible for their illness, they may frame the notion of responsibility for disease prevention as if it were primarily under the control of individuals, when in fact, those individuals may have only partial control (Blane, 1995). As such, they may deemphasize structural factors, such as work and housing conditions, access to health care, or pollution, that significantly contribute to the etiology of health-related problems and warrant institutional changes, rather than only changes in personal motivation and practices (e.g., Glantz, 1996; Milio, 1981). Health messages that emphasize lifestyle factors and personal responsibility may implicitly characterize those who do not adopt recommended practices as unwilling, lazy, or weak of character and at fault for their medical condition. Evidence on the acceptance of such notions of culpability can be found in studies that show that the public and decision makers tend to accept a proposition that people should be obligated to pay more for the expenses of particular health conditions believed to be a result of what has been determined as irresponsible behavior (Blendon, Hyams, & Benson, 1993; McLachlan, 1995; Sachs, 1996) or should have lower priority for their health care services (Bowling, 1996). These sentiments raise concerns among ethicists regarding their influence on policies they believe should be based on values of equity and solidarity. Similarly, an emphasis on culpability may become victim-blaming, described by Ryan (1976) as locating the causes of social problems within the individual, rather than in social and environmental forces (Marantz, 1990; Wallack, 1989, Wikler, 1987). The discourse on risk, like any other discourse that relates to the human body, can be viewed as ideologically and culturally based (Foucault, 1972; Martin, 1994). What is considered irresponsible depends, therefore, on each society’s selection of what it considers risky and its definition of social roles, behavioral obligations, sanctions, and rewards (Douglas, 1994; Keeney, 1994; Lupton, 1993). The moral bases of appeals to personal responsibility, thus, are linked to conceptions of social roles and obligations and may be contested by those who hold alternative views of such roles. Some persuasive messages rely on individuals’ moral obligations to be responsible because of their social role or their obligation to take care of their health for the sake of others. For example, messages developed to promote breast cancer screening among

4 The notion of agency is used to emphasize the right and ability of individuals to be self-aware and to be able to intentionally control and influence critical events and circumstances in their social world.

662

GUTTMAN

low-income ethnic populations, generated by a community advisory group, addressed women in the intended population with messages that they are “a wife, mother, grandmother, friend.” And that “others depend on you: get a mammogram” (Earp et al., 1997, p. 441). Individuals may also be called upon to be proactive and help promote or protect the health of significant others. Common examples are messages that suggest that one should help his or her spouse maintain a healthy diet, should insist kids use seatbelts, or should support a sibling’s attempts to quit smoking. Such messages are also associated with social roles and can serve to reinforce moral commitments such as responsiveness to others with special needs, compassion, kindness, and promise keeping (Nodding, 1990; Pellegrino, 1993). Ethicists point out that we express moral disapproval, even outrage, of people who do not warn, protect, or come to the aid of others who are at risk, even if they are not related to them (Douard & Winslade, 1994). Antidrunk-driving messages utilized the appeal that “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” basing this proclamation on the responsibility people feel for others. But what does this responsibility entail? Are friends also responsible in a situation when the individual drinks beyond what is believed to be safe, resists the friends’ pleas, chooses to drive, and is involved in a crash? A different kind of appeal to people’s sense of responsibility to help others in need is found in the messages disseminated by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health’s “Depression Awareness, Recognition, and Treatment” campaign. It suggested that certain individuals who suffer from depression “need help to get help.” Are people indeed obligated to try to influence the behavior of others, particularly when they resist the recommended change? As noted earlier, asking people to fulfill this obligation risks putting them in a situation with adverse effects since it may cause tensions in the relationship or may even put them in physical danger. They may also feel that intervening is paternalistic and infringes on the other’s autonomy. On the other hand, people living with depression may not be able to help themselves. Messages that encourage people to help others can serve to fulfill the moral obligation to do good and to practice compassion and care. INADVERTENT IMPLICIT IMPACTS: STIGMAS, GAPS, DEPRIVATION, AND VALUING

The ethical precept that entreats health communicators to “do no harm” serves as a reminder that unintended adverse outcomes of their activities can have harmful effects (Brown & Singhal, 1990; Stewart & Martin, 1994; Windhal, Signitzer, & Olson, 1992). Interventions in health care, particularly those in clinical settings, are notorious for being susceptible to the prospect of detrimental iatrogenic (an adverse condition that comes from or is caused by healing or medical treatment) outcomes. The welfare of the individual may be compromised, and subsequently she or he may suffer from an illness as a result of the very treatment that was supposed to help her or him. In his critique of modern institutionalized medicine, Illich (1975) extended the concept of physiological iatrogenesis to include three levels: clinical, social, and cultural. This distinction can help characterize potential adverse effects of health communication interventions that raise ethical concerns. Clinical or physiological harmful effects include injuries sustained when individuals engage in recommended physical activities and the tendency for eating disorders reinforced by messages on dieting (Seedhouse, 1991). Psychological harmful effects need to be considered as well, because individuals may be made to feel guilty about not taking good care of their health or find themselves living in a constant state of worry about it

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

663

(Barskey, 1988). At the social level, health communication interventions may increase social gaps or privilege certain organizations, including medical institutions or companies that sell health products and services. It may reinforce social negative stereotypes or increase medical control over various domains of human behaviors as described in the notion of medicalization. Medicalization, a term attributed to Zola (1972) and Illich (1975), adds additional insight regarding potential implicit effects. It refers to the social phenomenon in which various life domains increasingly become incorporated within medical definitions and control. Critics maintain that medical ways of labeling and framing issues have come to play a central role in social discourse. They observe that more and more people live according to rules propagated by the medical profession and that they see and understand various social phenomena and redefine life events in medical terms (Verweij, 1999). This may serve to deprive them from other ways (e.g., more spiritual) of experiencing life and may cause harm by turning health, as defined medically, into the focus of human existence. Clearly, this discussion on potential adverse effects is not meant to dismiss the contribution of health communication efforts to the promotion of individuals’ and populations’ welfare. Rather, it is to sensitize health communicators to the possibility that health communication interventions may have a cumulative process of subtle effects. Three main areas are further elaborated: labeling and stigmatization, deprivation and the augmentation of social gaps, and the elevation of health as an ultimate value. The challenge is to identify such potential effects and to develop communication activities that avoid or reduce their likelihood to occur. Labeling, Stigmatizing, and Stereotyping

Despite the sophistication of current scientific understanding of the etiology of diseases, people often seek explanations for devastating illnesses in moral frameworks and social stereotypes (Douglas, 1994; Sontag, 1989). Throughout history, individuals or groups associated with threatening diseases were feared and stigmatized, and at times even quarantined. People with stigmatized diseases tend to be viewed as deviant, punished by higher forces and may suffer from what sociologists describe as spoiled identities (Cline & Boyd, 1993; Crawford, 1994). Indications of adverse societal-level effects of stigmatization can be found in the tendency of people who hold stigmatizing views to support coercive measures and discrimination against individuals with these conditions. Thus, health messages that warn against the risk of contracting a stigmatized medical condition may inadvertently serve to reinforce prejudice and damage the self-esteem of those who have these conditions (Allard, 1989; Dourard, 1990; Glick Schiller, Crystal, & Lewellen, 1994). Even school-based programs for weight loss, suggest researchers, may serve to stigmatize overweight children (McLeroy et al., 1995). Similarly, messages depicting the horror of being confined to a wheelchair because of drunk driving or the use of guns were perceived by individuals with mobility disabilities as devaluing them and attacking their self-esteem and dignity (Wang, 1998). One possible way to meet the challenge of developing nonstigmatizing messages to avoid hazards is to focus on social and environmental risk factors rather than on disability as the dreaded outcome. Not only stigmas, but also labeling, may affect individuals’ or groups’ identities. Persuasive messages can influence the way people see themselves or their sense of identity (Forester, 1989, 1993; Foucault, 1972; Schlenker, Britt, Pennington, Murphy, & Doherty,

664

GUTTMAN

1994). Labeling people by connecting their persona to their medical condition may lower their self-esteem or place them in an almost constant state of anxiety (Barsky, 1988; MacDonald, Sackett, Haynes, & Taylor, 1984). Messages that portray those who do not adopt the recommended practice in a negative way may contribute to the creation of a new type of negative stereotype. The ethical challenge is to determine whether messages such as those that depict nonbreastfeeding mothers as harassed (Wright, Naylor, Wester, Bauer, & Sutcliffe, 1997) may in fact contribute to a negative stereotype that can be victimblaming as well as ineffective. Those who identify with the negative stereotype may adopt an approach of shame and fatalism, whereas others may reject the negative image as irrelevant to their own situation (Pierce & Wardle, 1997; White and Maloney, 1990; Ziff, Conrad, & Lachman, 1995). Even humorous uses of presumably harmless stereotypes in health messages need to be scrutinized for ethical implications. For example, although messages developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to inform the public on the new diagnosis and treatment of stomach ulcers were carefully developed through formative evaluation, subtle ethical issues can be found embedded in them. These messages used humorous images of the nagging mother-in-law, a wife’s bad cooking when a man returns from work, or an intimidating boss to convey erroneous lay conceptions of the causes of ulcers. Yet, such messages may serve to reinforce stereotypes of traditional gender roles as well as acceptance of unpleasant workplace relations with one’s superior as a given. This discussion underscores the challenge to develop methods that can encourage individuals to avoid potentially detrimental health problems, without making negative attributions about people in the group who may have these problems. Deprivation and the Augmentation of Social Gaps

Health interventions are typically committed to the moral obligation to promote equity in terms of health status and health promotion opportunities across social groups. Yet health communication activities may, nonetheless, inadvertently serve to reinforce existing social disparities. The knowledge gap phenomenon, as identified by communication researchers, can be found also in the dissemination of health information (Salmon, Wooten, Gentry, Cole, & Kroger, 1996; Yows, Salmon, Hawkins, & Love, 1991; Viswanath, Finnegan, Hannan, & Luepker, 1991): Gaps in the adoption of recommended health practices. Research findings indicate that populations from higher socioeconomic groups were more likely to increase their knowledge relevant to the health issue after the dissemination of health information and were more likely to adopt recommended practices, though motivation to do so may have been similar across different populations (Aruffo, Coverdale, & Vallbona, 1991; Davis, Winkleby, & Farquhar, 1995; Farley, Haddad, & Brown, 1996; Winkleby, Taylor, Jatulis, & Fortmann, 1996). Ethicists maintain that ethical health care entails ensuring equity in opportunities to adopt health-promoting practices and to avoid health risks (Daniels, 1985). By implication, health communication interventions in populations with limited resources may need to engage in advocacy to ensure that the less privileged are provided not only with information on recommended practices or with motivating appeals, but also with resources to carry out the practices. Social gaps may also be reinforced when health promotion recommendations call upon people to relinquish practices they enjoy, or ones that have become part of their identify or daily routine. These practices may have cultural significance or emotional importance, even when viewed by society as risky or even immoral. Certain practices considered unhealthy might offer members of vulnerable groups not only pleasure but also an important coping mechanism that is not easily substituted (Odets, 1994).

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

665

Information and opportunity gaps can also be found as an implicit effect of deprivation: The less privileged are likely to have fewer options for healthier substitutions and their quality of life may in fact suffer from what critics have labeled “forceful, evangelistic health propaganda” (Strasser, Jeanneret, & Raymond, 1987, p. 190). An example can be found in an antismoking program developed for American Vietnamese men whose practice was to carry a pack of cigarettes and offer one to a friend in social encounters. When offered a cigarette, the men reported, they felt obliged to accept it. This sharing of cigarettes appears to be an important social function that serves to reinforce social ties and solidarity in this immigrant community. The message developed in the intervention that aimed to challenge this norm bluntly stated that offering someone cigarettes is like offering them cancer. Although this well-intentioned message followed the obligation to help protect these men from harm, if successful, it may serve to deprive them from a gratifying social practice. If it did not, it could result in making them feel guilty about maintaining this practice. This example raises the question whether health communicators are morally obligated to help find alternatives practices when they aim to eliminate “risky” practices that serve nonetheless to enhance social solidarity or represented gestures that express generosity, kinship, friendship, and bonding. Exaltation and Distraction: Health as an Ultimate Value

Among the potential long-term impacts of the accumulation of exposure to mediated messages one type of effects identified by communication scholars is which topics become prioritized on both public and personal agendas (Dearing & Rogers, 1996).5 Another type of effect is discussed in terms of how cumulative messages construct people’s conceptions of reality (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994). The ethical concerns discussed in this section are rooted in ideological and normative approaches regarding the nature of society and goals of social institutions, and therefore may appear contentious (Rutherford, 2000). Nonetheless, ardent health-promotion scholars have noted with concern the moral impact of health promotion messages on culture and society, reminiscent of the cultural iatrogenic effects specified above. It may be difficult to conceive what kind of diffuse cultural effects are likely to occur as a result of the accumulation of benevolent health communication intervention activities, but a central question that can be raised is what adverse impact may occur when people attach more and more importance to health as an overriding value. Critics maintain that, when health becomes a significant feature in people’s aspirations and personal goals, this gives place to moral concerns. One of these concerns is associated with the obligation to promote equity. The assumption is that an emphasis on health as a value reinforces the notion of individual needs as the basis for health care and contributes to escalating expectations of the public from medicine and health care. Critics suggest that only the more powerful groups will be able to demand that the health care system meet their escalating needs whereas members of vulnerable groups will continue to receive relatively fewer services and benefits (Daniels, 1996; Thomas, 1990). Another concern is that a cultural preoccupation with personal health practices may distract people from other social issues and causes of ill health (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1991; Callahan, 1990; Pollay, 1989). It is feared that an emphasis on

5 This phenomenon is referred to as the agenda-setting process of the mass media, described as not telling people what to think, but what to think about, prioritize, or how to frame issues (McCombs, 1997).

666

GUTTMAN

health as a value may serve to promote individualism and self-interest at the expense of values of connectedness to others and interdependence (Minkler, 1999) and that the adoption of commercial marketing tactics increases values of consumerism. Health messages thus may inadvertently promote values health promoters may find detrimental to good health or social equity. An example is the suggestion to include a warning label on Israeli cigarettes that smoking increases the formation of wrinkles. Objections to this message were that it will serve to reinforce the notion of youthful looks as the ideal for attractiveness (see also Kirby & Andreasen, 2001). A growing ethical concern is that as good health increasingly turns to signify virtue, those who are not healthy may be made to feel that they have been punished or are unworthy (Callahan, 1990; Fitzgerald, 1994; Gillick, 1984). They may be viewed as social deviants or as people who lack the necessary willpower to be admirable members of society (Crawford, 1994). As Becker (1993), a prominent health promotion scholar, forcefully warned: Health promotion interventions may turn the pursuit of health into a crusade with moral overtones that may harm people more than do them good. ETHICS AND PROFESSIONAL OBLIGATIONS

Whether engaged in the design, implementation, or evaluation of health interventions, health communicators often hold multiple professional and organizational obligations.6 Obligations to the Individual

The moral commitment to respect individuals’ privacy and autonomy and to avoid causing harm imply that health communicators should avoid tactics considered manipulative and allow individuals to make informed choices, even if this may mean that they continue to practice behaviors they find gratifying but which may put them at risk (Campbell, 1990). Nonetheless, Health communicators may argue that messages should be as persuasive as possible because people’s decisions are jeopardized by commercial pressures. Ethical issues are also raised when interventions promote mainly the welfare of the public as a whole, rather than of the individual. Working with media organizations often raises concern regarding the obligation to protect individuals’ privacy. News organizations may agree to help promote health intervention efforts by publicizing their cause. This is typically done by featuring a compelling story that reveals intimate information about individuals who have the health conditions, including children. Such an exposure may conflict with the moral obligation of the health communication practitioner to respect the privacy of this individual, even if he or she or their guardians agree to be exposed in the media. Their agreement may be a result of pressure or a feeling of obligation. Obligations to the Community

When working in community settings, dilemmas are often associated with what has been characterized as the MORT syndrome (Kegeles, Hays, & Coats, 1996), an acronym that represents community mistrust of interventions and refers to (a) money: who gets 6

Adapted from Last (1996) on the obligations of epidemiologists.

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

667

the funding and who decides how to use it? (b) ownership: who has ownership of the materials and findings? (c) rigor: should there be a focus on scientific method and sciencebased priorities or on the needs as perceived by the community? (d) time: should there be a focus on short- or long-term benefits? Professional and organizational obligations may thus conflict. Other types of dilemmas concern the fact that communities are often comprised of diverse groups with competing needs and interests and not all can be met through health communication efforts, and some messages may conflict with these community members’ traditions or cultural beliefs. Health communicators may need to make difficult choices regarding which obligations override others: Should they attend to the needs of certain groups, and not others, and invoke equity or distributive justice consideration? Should they challenge particular cultural practices or beliefs that conflict with the adoption of the health recommendation and risk insulting community members and infringe on their right to autonomy? Health communicators in community settings are likely to need to work with various organizations and groups. Involvement with grassroots organizations, while it may be significant to the success of the intervention and support values of participation and empowerment, may also serve to deplete these organizations’ limited resources (Green, 1989). The challenge facing the health communicator, thus, may include finding ethical ways to utilize community resources without exploiting them. Obligations to the Organizations, Sponsors, and Employers

Obligations to the agency or organization that sponsor the intervention typically include maximization of the effectiveness of the intervention to achieve its stated goals. Population members, though, may want to modify the intervention or adapt it to their priorities. Health communicators may need to pit the obligation to the goals of the intervention with the obligation to respect the autonomy of the population. An additional obligation they may have is whether to protect proprietary rights of sponsoring agencies regarding materials, because these are often a result of consultation or collaborative activities with members of the intended population. Health communicators may also have obligations to public agencies or commercial companies that sponsor their activities. These may not want to sponsor certain messages despite evidence that they could be critical in achieving overall intervention goals, as illustrated in the case of abstinence education for youth (Haignere, Gold, & McDanel, 1999). Obligations to Society

The obligations of health interventions to advance the well-being of individuals and groups as members of society may have to be tempered by the awareness that society has limited resources and that these resources need to be used prudently. Obligations to society, therefore, require considerations of utility and maximization of the public good. In addition, because health interventions, particularly those employing new strategies, may be viewed as social experiments (Sussur, 1995), health communicators may be obligated to develop improved models and methods for use in future interventions and to share and disseminate their findings to other professionals. In addition, they may consider it their moral obligation to assess whether their health communication activities contribute to stigmatization, an emphasis on health as an ultimate value, the medicalization of social life, or the reinforcement of values of consumerism and individualism.

668

GUTTMAN

Obligations to the Profession

Health interventions are typically implemented by a multidisciplinary team of professionals. Codes and standards of conduct and means to identify and resolve ethical problems may differ among the professionals involved. For example, professionals trained in psychology and medicine are likely to place an emphasis on individual behavior and on the rights of the individual for privacy, whereas professionals trained in community organization and public health may focus on maximizing the welfare of the community or society as a whole. Health communicators may thus face conflicting obligations resulting from multiple roles and orientations. FUTURE CHALLENGES AND DIRECTIONS

The task of implementing ethically derived health communication interventions in the 21st century is an exciting but daunting challenge. Health promotion, disease prevention, and medical care are high on national and personal agendas. Yet a wide range of health issues—representing the interests of different sectors of society—are likely to compete for the attention of policymakers, public and for-profit organizations, as well as the public. Health care is provided in systems that have become increasingly complex both in terms of administration and technology, and in a social climate of cost-control that emphasizes self-help and personal responsibility (Minkler, 1999). This puts increasing demands on individuals to know how to navigate, utilize, and influence the system. Health communicators will thus need to reassess their roles and obligations in this changing health care environment. As it is increasingly evident that health is linked to socioeconomic inequities, health communicators may feel their obligations entail a commitment to reduce social and economic disparities. Future health communication activities will also need to take into consideration the rapid growth in the availability of health-related information through channels that only a few years ago seemed unimaginable. New and enhanced methods in health communication include personally tailored messages, sophisticated entertainmenteducation strategies, novel partnerships with the private sector, and new media technologies. Such innovative advancements in the field are likely to raise new kinds of ethical issues. An ongoing specification of moral obligations and articulation of stipulations such as those outlined in this chapter can help delineate ethical issues in present and future health communication enterprises. In the same ways that health communicators seek to enhance their knowledge of health behavior-change theories and gain skills in message design, knowledge and skills in normative theories, constructs, approaches, and moral decision making should be sought (Coughlin et al., 1997). In the same way that health communication as an emerging discipline has positioned itself as a field devoted to the development of theories, strategies, and tactics, its scholars and practitioners should further the development of normative approaches and professional obligations. The following are some of the pertinent challenges for the field: the development of normative approaches and ethical competencies, the practice of health communication in the context of diverse societies and within social and economic disparities, wide adoption of commercial marketing tactics and approaches, collaborations with the private sector, rapid growth in the availability of health-related information, and the use of new methods. The list that follows reflects some of the tasks to help meet these challenges:

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r

669

Enhance awareness and knowledge of different ethical approaches and perspectives Acquire skills to identify and articulate ethical issues Develop ethical decision-making skills Develop and implement participative methods to ensure meaningful involvement of intended population in all facets of the intervention process Contribute to the advancement of dialogical health communication methods Conduct health communication interventions that meet the needs of populations whose access to health information and resources is limited Develop capacities to recognize and be attuned to diverse social values Develop an appreciation of the difficulties involved with moral relativism Find ways to learn how members of different cultures frame and conceive what is ethical in health communication interventions Develop culturally sensitive approaches to message design beyond mere tailoring Find ways to promote respect for autonomy without overriding values of compassion and care for others or interdependence Increase awareness of ethical issues associated with the use of marketing techniques Adapt strategies to present information intended to encourage people to adopt health recommendations that avoid exaggerations or embellishment Disclose any possible interests of intervention sponsors or partners such as a research agenda, organizational or personal gains Share approaches, methods, ethical concerns, and lessons with others Assess and evaluate the contribution of ethical analyses to the design and outcomes of health communication interventions Assess ethical issues associated with the use of new information technologies

Future directions in health communication interventions are indicated in the way the notion of health literacy has emerged as a central concept in health promotion and has been embraced as a health communication challenge (Kickbusch & Ratzan, 2001; Ratzan, 2001; see also Bernhardt & Cameron, this volume) in all its modes (Nutbeam, 2000), from message comprehension and enhanced service utilization to critical appraisal and social mobilization approaches including media advocacy strategies (Gomez & Goldstein, 1995; Wallack & Dorfman, 2001). The development of capacities to critically appraise and deconstruct antihealth messages—particularly those disseminated by powerful commercial organizations—is another type of critical literacy challenge (Pollay, 1997). Children can be provided with skills to interpret and critically appraise advertising appeals, especially when they feature products that may put them at risk, but which are made to appear enjoyable and harmless, as in the case of alcohol or cigarettes (Ramirez, Gallion, Espinoza, McAliser, & Chalela, 1997). Additional types of health literacy skills will be needed, as new information technologies become major sources of health information, including online information resources, interactive multimedia materials, decision-making systems, and Web site technology for the design of community interventions (Cline & Haynes, 2001; Finnegan et al., 2001; Lieberman, 2001; Mittman & Cain, 2001; Rice, 2001). The need for new types of health literacies clearly raises a multitude of ethical

670

GUTTMAN

issues, which may require new formulations and imaginative thinking. The distinctions between different types of health literacies, whether functional or critical, may serve to reposition the moral commitment of health communicators, from paying attention to the ethics of message design—whether print or electronic—to focusing on the ethics of the deliberative and transformative capacities of older and newer health communication modes. REFERENCES Albrecht, T. L., & Bryant, C. (1996). Advances in segmentation modeling for health communication and social marketing campaigns. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 65–80. Allard, R. (1989). Beliefs about AIDS as determinants of preventive practices and of support for coercive measures. American Journal of Public Health, 79, 448–452. Aruffo, J. F., Coverdale, J. H., & Vallbona, C. (1991). AIDS knowledge in low-income and minority populations. Public Health Reports, 106(2), 115–119. Azukaego M. A. (1997). Communalistic societies: Community and self-respect as African values. In C. Chriatians & M. Traber (Eds.), Communication ethics and universal values (pp. 170–193). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Baker, E. A., Bouldin, N., Durham, M., Lowell, M. E., Gonzalez, M., Jodaitis, N., Cruz, L. N., Torres, I., Toress, M., & Adams, S. T. (1997). The Latino health advocacy program: A collaborative lay health advisor approach. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 495– 509. Barsky, A. J. (1988). Worried sick: Our troubled quest for wellness. Boston: Little, Brown. Bayer, R. (1996). AIDS prevention: Sexual ethics and responsibility. New England Journal of Medicine, 334, 1540–1542. Beauchamp, D. E. (1988). The health of the republic: Epidemics, medicine, and moralism as challenges to democracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Beauchamp, T. (1996). Moral foundations. In S. S. Coughlin & T. L. Beauchamp (Eds.), Ethics and epidemiology (pp. 24–52). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beauchamp, T. L. (1994). Ethical theory and bioethics. In T. L. Beauchamp & J. F. Childress (Eds.), Principles of biomedical ethics (4th edition; pp. 1–43). New York: Oxford University Press. Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress, J. F. (1994). Principles of biomedical ethics (4th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Becker, M. H. (1993). A medical sociologist looks at health promotion. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 34, 1–6. Bell, R. A., & Alcalay, R. (1997). The impact of the Wellness Guide/Gui’a on Hispanic women’s well-being-related knowledge, efficacy beliefs, and behaviors: The mediating role of acculturation. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 326–343. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1991). The good society. New York: Knopf. Bernstein, E., Wallerstein, N., Braithwaite, R., Gutierrez, L., Labonte, R., & Zimmerman, M. (1995). Empowerment forum: A dialogue between guest editorial board members. Health Education Quarterly, 21, 281–294. Blackhall, L. J., Murphy, S. T., Frank, G., Michel, V., & Azen, S. (1995). Ethnicity and attitudes toward patient autonomy. Journal of the American Medical Association, 274, 820– 825. Blakeslee, S. (1992, March 15). Faulty math heightens fears of breast cancer. The New York Times, Section 4, p. 1.

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

671

Blane, D. (1995). Editorial: Social determinants of health—socioeconomic status, social class, and ethnicity. American Journal of Public Health, 85, 903–905. Blendon, R. J., Hyams, T. S., & Benson, J. M. (1993). Bridging the gap between expert and public views on health care reform. Journal of the American Medical Association, 269, 2573–2578. Bowling, A. (1996). Health care rationing: The public’s debate. British Medical Journal, 312, 670–674. Brown, W. J., & Singhal, A. (1990). Ethical dilemmas of prosocial television. Communication Quarterly, 38, 268–280. Burdine, J. N., McLeroy, K. B., & Gottlieb, N. H. (1987). Ethical dilemmas in health promotion: An introduction. Health Education Quarterly, 14, 7–9. Callahan, D. (1990). What kind of life: The limits of medical progress. New York: Simon & Schuster. Callahan, D., & Jennings, B. (2002). Ethics and public health: Forging a strong relationship. American Journal of Public Health, 92, 169–176. Cambridge, V., McLaughlin, E., & Rota, J. (1995). Entertainment-education and the ethics of social intervention. Paper presented at the International Communication Association’s Annual Conference, May, 1995, Albuquerque, New Maxico. Campbell, A. V. (1990). Education or indoctrination? The issue of autonomy in health education. In S. Doxiadis (Ed.), Ethics in health education (pp. 15–27). New York: Wiley. Carrese, J. A., & Rhodes, L. A. (1995). Western bioethics on the Navajo reservation: Benefit of harm? Journal of the American Medical Association, 274, 826-829. Chin, M. H., Polonsky, T. S., Thomas, V. D., & Nerney, M. P. (2000). Developing a conceptual framework for understanding illness and attitudes in older, urban African Americans with diabetes. The Diabetes Educator, 26, 439–449. Cline, R. J., & Boyd, M. F. (1993). Communication as threat and therapy: Stigma, social support, and coping with HIV infection. In E. B. Ray (Ed.), Case studies in health communication (pp. 131–147). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cline, R. J., & Haynes, K. M. (2001). Consumer health information seeking on the Internet: The state of the art. Health Education Research, 16, 671–692. Conrad, P., & Walsh, D. C. (1992). The new corporate health ethic: Lifestyle and the social control of work. International Journal of Health Services, 22(1), 89–111. Cortese, A. (1990). Ethnic ethics: The restructuring of moral theory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Coughlin, S. S., Soskolne, C. L., & Goodman, K. W. (1997). Case studies in public health ethics. Washington, DC: American Public Health Association. Covello, V. T. (1992). Risk communication: An emerging area of health communication research. In S. Deetz (Ed.), Communication yearbook, 15 (pp. 359–373). Crawford, R. (1994). The boundaries of the self and the unhealthy other: Reflections on health, culture and AIDS. Social Science and Medicine, 38, 1347–1356. Daniels, N. (1985). Just health care. New York: Cambridge University Press. Daniels, N. (1996). Justice and justification: Reflective equilibrium in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidhizar, R. E., & Brownson, K. (1999). Literacy, cultural diversity, and client education. Health Care Management, 18, 39–47. Davis, S. K., Winkleby, M. A., & Farquhar, J. W. (1995). Increasing disparity in knowledge of cardiovascular disease risk factors and risk-reduction strategies by socioeconomic status: Implications for policymakers. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 11, 318– 323.

672

GUTTMAN

Dearing, W. J., & Rogers, E. M. (1996). Agenda-setting. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. De Castro, L. D. (1999). Is there an Asian bioethics? Bioethics, 13, 228–235. De Jarlais, D. C., Padian, N. S., & Winkelstein, W. (1994). Targeted HIV- prevention programs. New England Journal of Medicine, 331, 1451–1453. Douard, J. W., & Winslade, W. J. (1994). Tarasoff and the moral duty to protect the vulnerable. In J. F. Monagle & D. C. Thomasa (Eds.), Health care ethics: Critical issues (pp. 316–324). Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers. Douglas, M. (1994). Risk and Blame: Essays in cultural theory. London: Routledge. Douard, J. W. (1990). AIDS, stigma, and privacy. AIDS and Public Policy Journal, 5, 37–41. Doxiadis, S. (Ed). (1987). Ethical dilemmas in health promotion. New York: Wiley. Doxiadis, S. (Ed.). (1990). Ethics in health education. New York: Wiley. Earle, R. (2000). The art of cause marketing. Chicago: NTS Business Books. Earp, J. A., Viadro, C. I., Vincus, A. A., Altpeter, M., Flax, V., Mayne, L., & Eng. E. (1997). Lay health advisors: A strategy for getting the world out about breast cancer. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 432–451. Eng, E., Parker, E., & Harlan, C. (1997). Lay advisor intervention strategies: A continuum for natural helping to paraprofessional helping. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 413–417. Etzioni, A. (1993). The spirit of community. New York: Crown. Faden, R. R. (1987). Ethical issues in government sponsored public health campaigns. Health Education Quarterly, 14, 227–237. Farley, C., Haddad, S., & Brown, B. (1996). The effects of a 4-year program promoting bicycle helmet use among children in Quebec. American Journal of Public Health, 86, 46–51. Finerman, R., & Bennet, L. A. (1995). Guilt, blame and shame: Responsibility in health and sickness. Social Science and Medicine, 40, 1–3. Finnegan, J. R., Alexander, D., Rightmyer, J., Estabrook, B., Gloe, B., Voss, M., Leviton, L., & Luepker, V. (2001). Using the Web to assist communities in public health campaign planning: A case study of the REACT Project. In R. E. Rice & J. E. Katz (Eds.), The internet and health communication: Experiences and expectations (pp. 147–166). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fisher, E. B. (1995). Editorial: The results of the COMMIT Trial. American Journal of Public Health, 83, 159–160. Fitzgerald, F. T. (1994). The tyranny of health. New England Journal of Medicine, 331, 196– 198. Flora, J. A., Schooler, C., & Pierson, R. M. (1997). Effective health promotion among communities of color: The potential of social marketing. In M. E. Goldberg, M. Fishbein, & S. Middlestadt (Eds.), Social marketing: Theoretical and practical perspectives (pp. 353–373). Mahawah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates. Forester, J. (1989). Planning in the face of power. Berkeley: University of California Press. Forester, J. (1993). Critical theory, public policy, and planning practice: Toward a critical pragmatism. Albany: State University of New York. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. New York: Pantheon. Freimuth, V. S., & Mettger, W. (1990). Is there a hard-to-reach audience? Public Health Reports, 105, 232–238. Freudenberg, N. (1998). Community-based health education for urban populations: An overview. Health Education and Behavior, 25(1), 11–23. Galbraith, J., Ricardo, I., Stanton, B., Black, M., Feigelman, S., & Kaljee, L. (1996). Challenges and rewards of involving community in research: An overview of the “Focus on Kids” HIV risk reduction program. Health Education and Behavior, 23, 383–394.

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

673

Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1994). Growing up with television: The cultivation perspective. In. J. Bryant & D. Zillman (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (pp. 17–41). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Eralbaum Associates. Gillick, M. R. (1984). Health promotion, jogging, and the pursuit of the moral life. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 9, 369–387. Glantz, S. A. (1996). Editorial: Preventing tobacco use—the youth access trap. American Journal of Public Health, 86, 156–157. Glanz, K., Rimer, B. K., & Lerman, C. (1996). Ethical issues in the design and conduct of community-based intervention studies. In S. S. Coughlin & T. L. Beauchamp (Eds.), Ethics and Epidemiology (pp. 156–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glick Schiller, N., Crystal, S., & Lewellen, D. (1994). Risky business: The cultural construction of AIDS risk groups. Social Science and Medicine, 38, 1337–1346. Gomez, C. A., & Goldstein, E. (1995). The HIV prevention evaluation initiative: A model for collaborative and empowerment evaluation. In D. M. Fetterman, S. J. Kaftarian, & A. Wandersman (Eds.), Empowerment evaluation: Knowledge and tools for self-assessment and accountability (pp. 100–122). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Goodman, L. E., & Goodman, M. J. (1986). Prevention: How misuse of a concept undercuts its worth. Hastings Center Report, 16(2), 26–38. Green, L., & Raiburn, J. (1990). Contemporary developments in health promotion: Definitions and challenges. In N. Bracht (Ed.), Health promotion at the community level (pp. 29–44). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Green, L. W. (1989). Comment: Is institutionalization the proper goal of grantmaking? American Journal of Health Promotion, 3, 44. Green, L. W., & Kreuter, M. W. (1991). Health promotion planning: An educational and environmental approach (2nd ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing. Guttman, N. (1997). Ethical dilemmas in health communication interventions. Health Communication, 9, 155–190. Guttman, N. (2000). Public health communication interventions: Values and ethical dilemmas. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Guttman, N., & Ressler, W. H. (2001). On being responsible: Ethical issues in appeals to personal responsibility in health campaigns. Journal of Health Communication, 6, 117– 136. Guttman, N., & Zimmerman, D. (2000). Low income mothers’ views of breastfeeding. Social Science and Medicine, 50, 1457–1473. Habiba, M. A. (2000). Examining consent within the patient-doctor relationship. Journal of Medical Ethics, 26, 183–187. Haignere, C. S., Gold, R., & McDanel, H. J. (1999). Adolescent abstinence and condom use: Are we sure we are really teaching what is safe? Health Education and Behavior, 26, 43–54. Hale, J. L., & Dillard, J. P. (1995). Fear appeals in health promotion campaigns: Too much, too little, or just right? In E. Maibach & R. L. Parrot (Eds.), Designing health messages: Approaches from communication theory and public health practice (pp. 65–80). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Herek, G. M., & Capitanio, J. P. (1993). Public reactions to AIDS in the United States: A second decade of stigma. American Journal of Public Health, 83(4), 574–577. Hornik, R. (1990). Alternative models of behavior change. In J. Wasserheit, S. Aral, & K. Holmes (Eds.), Monograph on behavioral research for prevention and control of sexually transmitted disease (pp. 1–25). Philadelphia: Annenberg School of Communication. Illich, I. (1975). Medical nemesis. London: Calder & Boyars.

674

GUTTMAN

James, S. A. (1999). Primordial prevention of cardiovascular disease among AfricanAmericans: A social epidemiological perspective. Preventive Medicine, 29, S84–S89. Jensen, V. (1981). Argumentation: Reasoning in communication. New York: Van Nostrand. Johannesen, R. L. (1996). Ethics in human communication (4th ed.). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Kahn, J. G. (1996). The cost-effectiveness of HIV prevention targeting: How much more bang for the buck? American Journal of Public Health, 86, 1709–1712. Keeney, R. L. (1994). Decisions about life-threatening risks. New England Journal of Medicine, 331, 193–196. Kegeles, S. M., Hays, R. B., & Coats, T. J. (1996). The empowerment project: A communitylevel HIV prevention intervention for young gay men. American Journal of Public Health, 86, 1129–1136. Kickbusch, I., & Ratzan, S. C. (2001). (Editorial). Health literacy: Making a difference in the USA. Journal of Health Communication, 6, 87–88. Kirby, S. D., & Andreasen, A. R. (2001). Marketing ethics to social marketers: A segmentation approach. In A. R. Andreasen (Ed.), Ethics in social marketing (pp. 160–183). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Kirkwood, W. G., & Brown, D. (1995). Public communication about the causes of disease: The rhetoric of responsibility. Journal of Communication, 45(1), 55–76. Knowles, J. H. (1977). The responsibility of the Individual. In J. H. Knowles (Ed.), Doing better and feeling worse: Health in the United States. New York: Norton. Kreps, G. L. (1996). Communicating to promote justice in the modern health care system. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 99–109. Lalonde, B., Rabinowitz, P., Shefsky, M., & Washiendo, K. (1997). La Esperanza del Valle: Alcohol prevention novellas for Hispanic youth and their families. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 587–602. Last, J. (1996). Professional standards of conduct for epidemiologists. In S. S. Coughlin & T. L. Beauchamp (Eds.), Ethics and epidemiology (pp. 53–75). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laub, C. L., Somera, D. M., Gowen, L. K., & Diaz, R. M. (1999). Targeting “risky” gender ideologies: Constructing a community-driven, theory-based HIV prevention intervention for youth. Health Education and Behavior, 26, 185–199. Lieberman, D. A. (2001). Using interactive media in communication campaigns for children and adolescents. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed.; pp. 373–388). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lupton, D. (1993). Risk as moral danger: The social and political functions of risk discourse in public health. International Journal of Health Services, 23, 425–435. MacDonald, L. A., Sackett, D. L., Haynes, R. B., & Taylor, D. W. (1984). Labeling in hypertension: A review of the behavioral and psychological consequences. Journal of Chronic Disease, 37, 933–942. Mackey-Kallis, S., & Hahn, D. F. (1991). Questions of public will and private action: The power of the negative in the Reagans’ “Just Say No” morality campaign. Communication Quarterly, 39, 1–17. Macklin, R. (1999). Against relativism: Cultural diversity and the search for ethical universals in medicine. New York: Oxford University Press. Makau, J., & Arnett, R. (1997). (Eds.). Communication ethics in an age of diversity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Manning, R. (1992). Speaking from the heart: A feminist perspective on ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

675

Marantz, P. R. (1990). Blaming the victim: The negative consequence of preventive medicine. American Journal of Public Health, 80, 1186–1187. Marshall, J. R. (1995). (Editorial). Improving Americans’ diet—setting public policy with limited knowledge. American Journal of Public Health, 85, 1609–1611. Martin, E. (1994). Flexible bodies: Tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. McCombs, M. (1997). Building consensus: The news media’s agenda-setting roles. Political Communication, 14, 422–443. McLachlan, H. V. (1995). Smokers, virgins, equity and health care costs. Journal of Medical Ethics, 21, 209–213. McLeroy, K. R., Bibeau, D., Steckler, A., & Glanz, K. (1988). An ecological perspective on health promotion programs. Health Education Quarterly, 15, 351–377. McLeroy, K. R., Clark, N. M., Simons-Morton, B. G., Forster, J., Connell, C. M., Altman, D., & Zimmerman, M. A. (1995). Creating capacity: Establishing a health education research agenda for special populations. Health Education Quarterly, 22, 390–405. McLeroy, K. R., Gottlieb, N. H., & Burdine, J. N. (1987). The business of health promotion: Ethical issues and professional responsibilities. Health Education Quarterly, 14, 91– 109. Michal-Johnson, P., & Bowen, S. P. (1992). The place of culture in HIV education. In T. Edgar, M. A. Fitzpatrick, & V. S. Freimuth (Eds.), AIDS: A communication perspective (pp. 147–172). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Milio, N. (1981). Promoting health through public policy. Philadelphia, PA: F. A. Davis. Minkler, M. (1999). Personal responsibility for health? A review of the arguments and the evidence at century’s end. Health Education and Behavior, 26, 121–140. Mitchell-Dicenso, A., Thomas, B. H., Delvin, M. C., Goldsmith, C. H., Willan, A., Singer, J., Marks, S., Watters, D., & Hewson, S. (1997). Evaluation of an educational program to prevent adolescent pregnancy. Health Education and Behaviour, 24, 300–312. Mittman, R., & Cain, M. (2001) The future of the internet in health care: A five-year forecast. In R. E. Rice & J. E. Katz (Eds.), The internet and health communication: Experiences and expectations (pp. 47–73). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mo, B. (1992). Modesty, sexuality, and breast health in Chinese-American women. Western Journal of Medicine, 157, 260–264. Mody, B. (1991). The idea. Designing messages for development communication. New Delhi: Sage. Morone, J. A. (1997). Enemies of the people: The moral dimension to public health. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 22, 993–1019. Myrick, R. (1998). In search of cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness: Communication strategies used in rural HIV prevention campaigns designed for African Americans. Health Communication, 10, 65–85. Nodding, N. (1990). Ethics from the standpoint of women. In M. Pearsall (Ed.), Women and values: Reading in recent feminist philosophy (2nd ed.; pp. 379–390). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Nutbeam, D. (2000). Health literacy as a public health goal: A challenge for contemporary health education and communication strategies into the 21st century. Health Promotion International, 15, 259–267. O’Brien-Hallstein, D. L. (1999). A postmodern caring: Feminist standpoint theories, revisioned caring, and communication ethics. Western Journal of Communication, 63, 32–56. Odets, W. (1994). AIDS education and harm reduction for gay men: Psychological approaches for the 21st century. AIDS and Public Policy, 9, 1–5.

676

GUTTMAN

Ontiveros, J. A., Black, S. A., Jakobi, P. L., & Doodwin, J. S. (1999). Ethnic variation in attitudes toward hypertension in adults ages 75 and older. Preventive Medicine, 29, 443– 449. Paisley, W. (1989). Public communication campaigns: The American experience. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (2nd ed.; pp. 15–38). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Papa, M. J., Singhal, A., Law, S., Pant, L., Sood, S., Rogers, E. M., & Shefner-Rogers, C. L. (1998). Entertainment-education and social change: An analysis of parasocial interaction, social learning, collective efficacy, and paradoxical communication. Journal of Health Communication, 50, 31–55. Parker, M. (1999). Introduction: Health care ethics: Liberty, community or participation? In M. Parker (Ed.), Ethics and community in the health care professions (pp. 1–14). New York: Routledge. Pellegrino, E. D. (1993). The metamorphosis of medical ethics: A 30-year retrospective. Journal of the American Medical Association, 269, 1158–1162. Pfau, M., & Parrott, R. (1993). Persuasive communication campaigns. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Pierce, J. W., & Wardle, J. (1997). Cause and effect beliefs and self-esteem of overweight children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 38, 645–650. Pollay, R. W. (1989). Campaigns, change and culture: On the polluting potential of persuasion. In C. T. Salmon (Ed.), Information campaigns: Balancing social values and social change (pp. 185–196). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Pollay, R. W. (1997). Hacks, flacks, and counter-attacks: Cigarette advertising, sponsored research, and controversies. Journal of Social Issues, 53, 53–74. Ramirez, A. G., Gallion, K. J., Espinoza, R., McAliser, A., & Chalela, P. (1997). Developing a media- and school based program for substance abuse prevention among Hispanic youth: A case study of Mirame!/Look at Me! Health Education and Behavior, 24, 603–612. Ratzan, S. C. (1994). Editor’s introduction: Communication—the key to a healthier tomorrow. American Behavioral Scientist, 38, 202–207. Ratzan, S. C. (2001). Health literacy: Communication for the public good. Health Promotion International, 16, 207–214. Rice, R. E. (2001). The internet and health communication: A framework of experiences. In R. E. Rice & J. E. Katz (Eds.), The internet and health communication: Experiences and expectations (pp. 5–46). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rogers, E. M. (1994). The field of health communication today. American Behavioral Scientist, 38, 208–214. Rogers, E. M., & Storey, J. D. (1987). Communication campaigns. In C. R. Berger & S. H. Chaffee (Eds.), Handbook of communication science (pp. 817–846). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Rose, G. (1985). Sick individuals and sick populations. International Journal of Epidemiology, 14, 32–38. Rothschild, M. L. (2001). Ethical considerations in the use of marketing for the management of public health and social issues. In A. R. Andreasen (Ed.), Ethics in social marketing (pp. 39–69). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Rudd, R. E., & Comings, J. P. (1994). Learner developed materials: An empowerment product. Health Education Quarterly, 21, 313–327. Rutherford, P. (2000). Endless propaganda: The advertising of public goods. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ryan, W. (1976). Blaming the victim. New York: Random House.

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

677

Sabogal, F., Oterso-Sabogal, R., Pasick, R., Jenkins, C. N., & Pe’rez-Stable, E. J. (1996). Printed health education materials for diverse communities: Suggestions learned from the field. Health Education Quarterly, 23(Supplement), S123–S141. Sachs, L. (1996). Causality, responsibility and blame—core issues in the cultural construction and subtext of prevention. Sociology of Health and Illness, 18, 632–652. Salmon, C. T. (1989). Campaigns for social “improvement”: An overview of values, rationales and impacts. In C. T. Salmon (Ed.), Information campaigns: Balancing social values and social change (pp. 19–53). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Salmon, C. T., Wooten. K., Gentry, E., Cole, G., & Kroger, F. (1996). AIDS knowledge gaps in the first decade of the epidemic. Journal of Health Communication, 1, 141–155. Schlenker, B. R., Britt, T. W., Pennington, J., Murphy, R., & Doherty, K. (1994). The triangle model of responsibility. Psychological Review, 101, 632–652. Schwab, M., Newhauser, L., Margen, S., Syme, L., Ogar, D., Roppel, C., & Elite, A. (1992). The wellness guide: Towards a new model for community participation in health promotion. Health Promotion International, 11, 27–36. Scott, S. A., Jorgensen, C. M., & Suarez, L. (1998). Concerns and dilemmas of Hispanic AIDS information seekers: Spanish-speaking callers to the CDC National AIDS Hotline. Health Education and Behavior, 25, 501–516. Seedhouse, D. (1991). Ethics: The heart of healthcare. New York: Wiley. Shaw, D. (1996). The pleasure police: How bluenose busybodies and lily-livered alarmists are taking all the fun out of life. New York: Doubleday. Sherwin, S. (1992). No longer patient: Feminist ethics and health care. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sherwin, S. (1999). Foundations, frameworks, lenses: The role of theories in bioethics. Bioethics, 13, 198–203. Singhal, A., & Rogers, E. (2001). The entertainment-education strategy in communication campaigns. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed.; pp. 343–356). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Skinner, C. S., Sykes, R. K., Monsees, B. S., Andriole, D. A., Arfken, C. L., & Fisher, E. B. (1998). Learn’ share and live: Breast cancer education for older, urban minority women. Health Education and Behavior, 25, 60–78. Smith, W. A. (2000). Ethics and the social marketer: A framework for practitioners. In A. R. Andreasen (Ed.), Ethics in social marketing (pp. 1–16). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Sontag, S. (1989). AIDS and its metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sproule, M. J. (1980). Argument: Language and its influence. New York: McGraw-Hill. Stewart, D. W., & Martin, I. M. (1994). Intended and unintended consequences of warning messages: A review and synthesis of empirical research. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 13, 1–19. Strasser, T., Jeanneret, O., & Raymond, L. (1987). Ethical aspects of prevention trials. In S. Doxiadis (Ed.), Ethical dilemmas in health promotion (pp. 183–193). New York: Wiley. Sussur, M. (1995). Editorial: The tribulation of trials—interventions in communities. American Journal of Public Health, 85, 156–158. Tangwa, G. B. (1996). Bioethics: An African perspective. Bioethics, 10(3), 183–200. Tesh, S. N. (1988). Hidden arguments: Political ideology and disease prevention policy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Thomas, S. B. (1990). Community health advocacy for racial and ethnic minorities in the United States: Issues and challenges for health education. Health Education Quarterly, 17, 13–19.

678

GUTTMAN

Thomas, S. B., & Quinn, S. C. (1991). The Tuskegee Syphilis study, 1932 to 1972: Implications for HIV education and AIDS risk education program in the Black community. American Journal of Public Health, 81, 1498–1505. Veatch R. M. (1980). Voluntary risks to health: The ethical issues. Journal of the American Medical Association, 243, 50–55. Veatch, R. M. (1982). Health promotion: Ethical considerations. In R. B. Taylor, J. R. Ureda, & J. W. Denham (Eds.), Health promotion: Principles and clinical applications. Norwalk, CT: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Veatch, R. M. (1999). The foundation of bioethics. Bioethics, 12, 206–217. Verweij, M. (1999). Medicalization as a moral problem for preventive medicine. Bioethics, 13, 89–105. Viswanath, K., Finnegan, J. R., Hannan, P., Luepker, R. V. (1991). Health and knowledge gaps: Some lessons from the Minnesota heart health program. American Behavioral Scientist, 3, 727–741. Wallack, L., & Dorfman, L. (2001). Putting policy into health communication: The role of media advocacy. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed.; pp. 389–401). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wallack, L. M. (1989). Mass communication and health promotion: A critical perspective. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (2nd ed.; pp. 353–367). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Wang, C. (1998). Portraying stigmatizing conditions: Disabling images in public health. Journal of Health Communication, 3, 149–159. White, M. S., & Maloney, S. K. (1990). Promoting healthy diets and active lives to hard-to-reach groups: Market research study. Public Health Reports, 105, 224–231. Wikler, D. (1987). Who should be blamed for being sick? Health Education Quarterly, 14, 11–25. Wilson, F. L. (2000). Are patient information materials too difficult to read? Home Healthcare Nurse, 18, 107–115. Wilson, S. R., Scamagas, P., Grado, J., Norgaard, L., Starr, N. J., Eaton, S., & Pomaville, K. (1997). The Fresno asthma project: A model intervention to control asthma in multiethnic, low-income, inner-city communities. Health Education and Behavior, 25, 79–98. Windhal, S., Signitzer, B., Olson, J. T. (1992). Using communication theory: An introduction to planned communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Winett, R. A., King, A., & Altman, D. G. (1989). Health psychology and public health: An integrative approach. New York: Pergamon. Wingerd, J. L., & Page, J. B. (1997). HIV testing among Haitian women: Lessons in the recognition of risks. Health Education and Behaviour, 24, 736–745. Winkelby, M. A., Howard-Pitney, B., Albright, C. A., Bruce, B., Kraemer, H. C., & Fortmann, S. P. (1997). Predicting achievement of a low-fat diet: A nutrition intervention for adults with low literacy skills. Preventive Medicine, 26, 874–882. Winkleby, M. A., Taylor, B., Jatulis, D., Fortmann, S. P. (1996). The long-term effects of a cardiovascular disease prevention trial: The Stanford Five-City Project. American Journal of Public Health, 86, 1773–1779. Witte, K. (1994). The manipulative nature of health communication research: Ethical issues and guidelines. American Behavioral Scientist, 38, 285–293. Wright, A. L., Naylor, A., Wester, R., Bauer, M., & Sutcliffe, E. (1997). Using cultural knowledge in health promotion: Breastfeeding among the Navajo. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 625–639.

30. HEALTH COMMUNICATION INTERVENTIONS

679

Yoos, G. E. (1979). A revision of the concept of ethical appeal. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 12, 41–58. Yows, S. R., Salmon, C. T., Hawkins, R. P., & Love, R. R. (1991). Motivational and structural factors in predicting different kinds of cancer knowledge. American Journal of Behavioral Scientist, 34, 727–741. Ziff, M. A., Conrad, P., & Lachman, M. E. (1995). The relative effects of perceived personal control and responsibility on health and health-related behaviors in young and middle-aged adults. Health Education Quarterly, 22, 127–142. Zimmerman, M. A., Ramirez-Valles, J., Suarez, E., de la Rosa, G., & Castro, M. A. (1997). An HIV/AIDS prevention project for Mexican Homosexual men: An empowerment approach. Health Education and Behavior, 24, 177–190. Zola, I. K. (1972). Medicine as an institution of social control. Sociological Review, 20, 487– 504.

Author Index

Numbers in italics indicate pages with complete bibliographic information.

A

Aaron, 403, 414, 418 Aasland, O. G., 76, 85 Abbott, A. D., 319, 339 Abbott, A. S., 381, 388, 400 Abdool Karim, Q., 298, 305 Abdool Karim, S. S., 298, 305 Aberbach, 413 Abernathy, A. M., 550, 553 Abraham, C., 299, 312 Abrams, D. B., 500, 508 Abramson, J. S., 377, 378, 386, 388, 392, 396 Abramson, L. Y., 44, 54, 55 Adamany, 404, 405 Adame, D., 297, 309 Adams, S. T., 660, 670 Adelman, M. B., 27, 30, 44, 51, 55, 246, 256, 264, 265, 268, 269, 273, 277, 283, 287, 299, 305, 358, 363, 630, 636 Adelman, R. D., 68, 84, 128, 129, 136, 137, 143, 146, 157, 192, 198 Adkins, E., 213, 220 Adler, C., 349, 365 Administration on Aging, 190, 198, 330, 339 Adriaans, N. F., 295, 308 Afifi, W., 336, 341 Afifi, W. A., 299, 305 Afonso, N., 167, 177 Agee, W. K., 538, 556 Agne, R. R., 69, 82 Ahern, R. K., 457, 470 Ahlner, J., 144, 145, 158

Ahmad, F., 358, 368 Ahmed, P. I., 14, 30, 424, 437 Ah Yun, J. K., 492 Aickin, M., 610, 620 Aiello, J. R., 426, 437 Aiken, L. H., 337, 339 Ainsworth, 483 Ainsworth, S., 641, 648 Airhihenbuwa, C. O., 52, 55, 242, 244, 245, 248, 255n, 256, 257 Ajzen, I., 452, 469, 473, 485, 489, 491, 499, 504, 508, 549, 553 Alatorre, C., 610, 620 Alberts, J. K., 287, 305 Albom, M., 28n, 30 Albrecht, T. A., 44, 51, 55 Albrecht, T. L., 244, 259, 263, 264, 265, 268, 269, 273, 274, 276, 277, 278, 283, 287, 305, 306, 339, 358, 360, 363, 367, 474, 489, 657, 670 Albright, C. A., 655, 678 Albright, C. L., 590, 602 Alcalay, R., 251, 259, 658, 670 Alderfer, C. P., 376, 396 Aldrich, H., 338, 339 Aldwin, C., 270, 279 Alemagno, S., 223, 236 Alemi, F., 276, 277 Alexander, D., 658, 669, 672 Alexander, G. R., 268, 279 Alexander, J. A., 320, 339, 376, 377, 378, 379, 381, 384, 386, 387, 389, 396, 397, 400 Alexander, S. C., 263, 264, 273, 276, 277, 280 Alexy, B. B., 429, 437

681

682 Alexy, S., 434, 437 Alford, 405n Algazy, J. I., 497, 508 Alguire, P., 97, 119 Allard, R., 663, 670 Allen, A., 516, 519, 520, 523, 525, 527, 532, 534, 535 Allen, C. E., 587, 589, 590, 600 Allen, J., 40, 55 Allen, M., 479, 489 Allen, M. W., 545, 553 Allen, R., 566, 567, 576 Allen, R. F., 40, 55 Allison, K. R., 483, 489 Alonzo, A. A., 302, 305 Alpert, H., 170, 171, 176 Altmaier, E. M., 360, 368, 426, 427, 428, 429, 442 Altman, D. E., 564, 577 Altman, D. G., 286, 312, 654, 655, 657, 663, 675, 678 Altmeyer, P., 610, 621 Altpeter, M., 656, 662, 672 Amaro, H., 243, 244, 257 Ambrosini, V. L., 377, 381, 384, 386, 401 American Academy of Family Practice, 326, 339 American Association of Health Plans, 323 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 196, 198 American Hospital Association, 326, 327, 339 American Medical Association, 197, 198, 325, 339, 419, 584, 586, 587, 588, 590, 591, 592, 598, 600 AmericasDoctor.com, 528, 532 Ames, B., 484, 489 Amodeo, M., 372, 374, 377, 383, 401 Amos, C. I., 170, 179 Analogies enhance teaching efforts, 186, 198 Ancona, D. G., 395, 396 Anderlik, M. R., 170, 179 Andersen, B. L., 272, 277 Andersen, R. M., 335, 339 Anderson, J., 528, 532 Anderson, J. A., 36, 37, 38, 42, 46, 54, 55 Anderson, L. A., 105, 106, 110, 112, 115 Anderson, M. R., 610, 620 Anderson, R., 248, 257, 301, 313 Anderson, R. J., 145, 155 Anderton, J., 641, 648 Andreasen, A. R., 652, 666, 674 Andres, D., 189, 201 Andrews, K., 75, 76, 77, 89 Andriole, D. A., 656, 660, 677 Andsager, J. L., 561, 564, 568, 575, 576

AUTHOR INDEX Aneshensel, C. S., 270, 277 Angelos, P., 170, 175 Annandale, E., 327, 339 Antonius, D., 80, 85 Antonucci, T. C., 264, 281 Apker, J., 16, 33, 350, 351, 353, 354, 363, 366, 375, 400 Apospori, E., 498, 513 Applegate, J. L., 168, 174, 177, 359, 368, 377, 382, 384, 402 Arborelius, E., 150, 152, 155, 156 Arbuckle, T. Y., 189, 201 Arches, J., 327, 342 Arciti, C., 610, 620 Arcury, T., 231, 234, 235 Ardagh, M., 172, 175 Arfken, C. L., 656, 660, 677 Argent, J., 98, 116, 167, 168, 177 Argote, L., 378, 385, 386, 387, 396 Aries, P., 42, 55 Arkoff, A., 478, 492 Armstrong, B. K., 640, 648 Armstrong, D., 147, 159 Armstrong, W. T., 275, 283 Arnett, R., 653, 674 Arnett, R. C., 248, 257 Arnold, C., 588, 591, 592, 594, 596, 601 Arnold, C. L., 132, 139 Arntson, P., 3, 4, 5, 16, 20, 27, 31 Aronowitz, R. A., 41, 43, 55 Aronsson, K., 132, 135 Arrington, M., 22, 25, 28, 31 Arrington, T. L., 268, 280 Arsenie, L. S., 353, 364 Aruffo, J. F., 664, 670 Ascher, W., 225, 236 Ashforth, B. E., 349, 355, 359, 363, 366 Ashley, D. L., 286, 309 Ashley, M., 640, 649 Ashworth, P. D., 166, 176 Askov, E. N., 592, 601 Aspden, P., 75, 76, 82 Aspinwall, L., 223, 235 Association for Fitness in Business, 429, 437 Aston, J., 357, 363 Atkin, C. K., 286, 312, 452, 453, 459, 461, 466, 469, 473, 480, 483, 489, 493 Atkinson, P., 44, 55 Ault, P. H., 538, 556 Aultman, T., 232, 239 Aune, 416 Auslander, G. K., 559, 566, 576 Austin, C., 231, 234, 235

AUTHOR INDEX Austin, E. W., 585, 600 Autry, J. A., 426, 437 Aved, B. M., 267, 277 Avery, R., 563, 579 Avorn, J., 70, 87 Axinn, G. H., 215, 217 Axinn, N. W., 215, 217 Ayers, W., 78, 79, 87 Ayres, L., 14, 33 Azari, R., 67, 68, 80, 82, 85, 195, 199 Azen, S. P., 173, 176, 653, 670 Azukaego, M. A., 654, 670

B

Babrow, A. S., 4, 5, 35, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 164, 174, 175, 176, 265, 280, 358, 359, 364, 365, 486, 490, 568, 576 Bach, B. W., 53, 56, 339 Bacharach, 405 Bacharach, S. B., 357, 364 Backer, T., 452, 466, 469 Backer, T. E., 338, 339 Backhaus, S., 272, 282 Backman, 413 Backstrom, C. H., 572, 576 Badley, B., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Badzek, L., 42, 43, 44, 47, 55, 58 Baer, L., 518, 524, 532, 533 Baesler, E. J., 479, 490 Baggs, J. G., 377, 378, 384, 387, 396 Baile, W. F., 100, 101, 104, 115 Bailey, C. M., 268, 280 Bailey, D. B., 378, 386, 393, 396 Bain, D. J. G., 67, 82, 152, 156, 164, 176 Bain, P., 426, 437 Baker, D., 428, 440 Baker, D. M., 585, 592, 603 Baker, D. W., 584, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 592, 594, 596, 598, 600, 602, 604, 605 Baker, E. A., 660, 670 Baker, E. L., 212, 217 Baker, L., 84 Baker, L. H., 96, 99, 104, 117, 497, 508 Baker, M., 167, 177 Baker, N. J., 78, 83 Baker, S., 452, 471 Bakker, D., 267, 284 Bakst, H. J., 378, 397 Balas, E. A., 523, 532 Balch, D., 524, 534

683 Baldry, C., 426, 437 Bales, R. F., 125, 126, 135, 548, 553 Balgopal, P. R., 431, 437 Ball, L., 227, 228, 235 Ball, P., 323, 341 Bambas, A., 520, 521, 533 Bame, S. I., 358, 368 Banaszak-Holl, J., 377, 379, 397 Bandura, A., 44, 55, 104, 115, 213, 217, 249, 257, 452, 469, 473, 482, 485, 490, 499, 504, 508, 549, 553, 560, 576 Banks, 417 Banks, S. M., 480, 490 Bannard, J. R., 185, 186, 187, 198 Banta, H. D., 369, 378, 392, 397 Bar, M., 377, 379, 398 Baranowski, J., 504, 508 Baratz, 405 Barbee, A. P., 272, 277 Barber, L. T., 610, 622 Barber, N., 153, 156 Barbieri, A., 610, 620 Barbour, J., 337, 341 Bargh, J. A., 477, 490 Barker, 404 Barker, L. R., 97, 99, 104, 118, 147, 148, 159 Barley, S. R., 331, 339 Barley, S., 527, 529, 530, 532 Barmark, J., 377, 379, 398 Barnes, D., 173, 177 Barnes, M., 251, 252, 253, 258 Barnes, M. D., 252, 257 Barnes, V., 585, 602 Barnlund, B. C., 164, 176 Barr, D., 336, 339 Barr, D. B., 286, 309 Barr, S. L., 485, 492 Barrera, M., 270, 278 Barrera, M., Jr., 270, 283 Barrett, F. J., 435, 437 Barrett, J., 521, 533 Barriatua, R. D., 69, 88 Barry, C. A., 153, 156 Barsky, A. J., 663, 664, 670 Bartholomew, J., 150, 159 Bartlett, H., 349, 365 Bartolucci, G., 190, 203 Basen-Engquist, K., 223, 235 Bashshur, R., 516, 518, 519, 520, 521, 523, 533, 534 Basil, M. D., 286, 312 Basile, C. M., 173, 176 Bass, D. M., 276, 278

684 Bass, M. J., 148, 156 Bast, R. C., Jr., 100, 101, 104, 115 Bastani, R., 298, 310 Bastuji-Garin, S., 610, 620 Bates, D. W., 381, 384, 386, 400 Bateson, G., 38, 55 Battcock, A., 519, 533 Batter, V., 301, 309 Battit, G. E., 148, 156 Bauer, C., 75, 82 Bauer, H., 244, 260 Bauer, H. M., 244, 245, 257 Bauer, M., 664, 678 Baum, M., 148, 156 Bauman, 413 Bauman, L. J., 70, 89, 127, 128, 140, 267, 278 Baumgarten, M., 274, 278 Baumgartner, 406, 409, 410, 411, 413n, 414 Baun, W. B., 429, 437 Bausell, R. B., 298, 299, 309 Baxter, L. A., 45, 55 Baxter, L. K., 297, 305 Bayer, 417 Bayer, R., 661, 670 Bazzini, D. G., 563, 579 Beach, S., 363, 364 Beach, W. A., 45, 55, 135 Beale, E. A., 101, 104, 115 Beales, J. G., 185, 186, 187, 198 Beall, S. K., 434, 441 Beauchamp, 417 Beauchamp, D. E., 658, 670 Beauchamp, T. L., 47, 56, 652, 654, 670 Beauchamps, T., 304, 305 Beaulieu, A., 568, 576 Beauvais, J., 480, 490, 561, 580 Beavin, J. H., 50, 61 Beck, C. S., 76, 82, 131, 135, 138, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199. 203 Beck, J. C., 377, 381, 384, 386, 401 Beck, V., 463, 470 Becker, A. B., 637, 648 Becker, J., 270, 280 Becker, M. H., 51, 58, 245, 257, 452, 470, 473, 481, 483, 492, 494, 499, 503, 504, 508, 510, 512, 570, 576, 666, 670 Becker, P. M., 377, 378, 384, 386, 397 Becker, S. L., 287, 308 Beckhard, R., 376, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 391, 397 Beckman, H. B., 77, 81, 82, 83, 131, 132, 136, 139, 141, 149, 156, 164, 176 Bedimo, A. L., 303, 305

AUTHOR INDEX Beecham, J., 377, 381, 384, 400 Beehr, T. A., 270, 282 Beery, W., 210, 216, 217 Beevor, A. S., 299, 306 Beisecker, A. E., 67, 73, 82, 105, 115, 188, 191, 192, 199 Beisecker, T. D., 67, 73, 82, 105, 115, 188, 199 Belcher, L., 299, 309 Bell, R. A., 377, 400, 658, 670 Bellah, R. N., 212, 217, 665, 670 Bellis, J. M., 501, 502, 512 Bemis, A. E., 75, 76, 82 Bennet, L. A., 660, 672 Bennett, C., 572, 573, 581 Bennett, M., 303, 305 Bennett, M. J., 302, 306 Bennett, P., 224, 235 Bennett, T. L., 270, 280 Benoit, W. L., 545, 553 Benschoter, R., 523, 535 Bensing, J. M., 96, 117, 128, 135 Ben-Sira, Z., 126, 135 Benson, J. M., 661, 671 Benson, L., 377, 378, 397 Bental, D. S., 502, 508 Benton, J. G., 378, 397 Berel, S., 585, 602 Berelson, B., 559, 576 Berenson, A. B., 268, 284 Beresford, S. A. A., 430, 431, 437 Berger, C. R., 36, 39, 51, 56, 288, 289, 306 Berger, J. T., 300, 306 Berger, P. L., 10, 31, 289, 306 Bergman, B., 358, 368 Berkanovic, E., 573, 574, 578 Berkel. H. J., 588, 591, 596, 601 Berkman, L. F., 263, 264, 265, 278 Berkowitz, B., 208, 217 Berland, G. K., 497, 508 Berline, J. A., 78, 79, 87 Bernard, A. L., 297, 311 Bernard, G., 223, 238 Bernhardt, J. M., 501, 509, 597, 601 Bernstein, E., 127, 139, 246, 250, 254, 257, 260, 659, 670 Berntson, G. G., 266, 278 Bernzweig, J., 67, 82, 194, 195, 199 Bero, L. A., 562, 578 Berry, L. L., 550, 555 Bertakis, K. D., 67, 68, 74, 82, 83, 111, 115, 195, 199 Berteotti, C. R., 328, 336, 339, 376, 377, 378, 397

AUTHOR INDEX Berwick, D. M., 321, 336, 339 Bethea, L. S., 362, 364 Bettencourt, B. A., 250, 257 Bettinghaus, E. P., 617, 623 Beumer, C., 173, 178 Biafora, F., 498, 513 Bianchi, R., 610, 620 Biancolillo, K., 350, 364 Bibace, R., 184, 185, 199 Bibeau, D., 245, 259, 655, 657, 675 Biermann, J. S., 497, 508 Biersack, R., 403, 422 Bigby, J. A., 353, 354, 358, 366 Billings, J. H., 275, 278, 283 Bilo, H. J. G., 128, 133, 139 Bilodeau, E., 640, 649 Bindman, A. B., 72, 73, 84 Bird, J. A., 252, 257 Birenbaum, A., 72, 82 Birk, P. A., 125, 138 Birk, P. S., 148, 160 Birk, T. S., 51, 56 Birkholt, M., 337, 324, 356, 366 Birnenbaum, A., 352, 364 Bishop, C., 39, 60 Bishop, K., 597, 601 Bisogni, C., 563, 579 Bitzer, L., 48, 56 Bizzell, P., 47, 56 Bjerke, D., 542, 554 Black, D. R., 486, 490 Black, M., 298, 299, 312, 656, 658, 672 Black, S. A., 656, 676 Black, W. C., 584, 585, 604 Blackburn, H., 452, 471 Blackhall, L., 173, 177 Blackhall, L. J., 173, 176, 653, 670 Blackhurst, A. E., 563, 581 Blackwell, B., 144, 145, 156 Blair, A., 640, 648 Blair, P., 520, 521, 533 Blakeslee, S., 659, 670 Blanchard, C., 264, 273, 277 Blanchard, C. G., 192, 202 Blanchard, E. B., 192, 202 Blanchard, J. S., 589, 590, 592, 601, 605 Blanchard, S. H., 322, 324, 340 Blane, 661, 671 Blank, 416, 417 Blank, D., 589, 598, 603 Blankson, M. L., 267, 278 Blatt, L., 173, 176 Blendon, R. J., 661, 671

685 Blijham, G. H., 273, 279 Block, L. G., 480, 490 Bloom, J. R., 148, 159, 267, 284, 377, 379, 397 Blum, H. L., 40, 56 Blum, S., 377, 79, 398 Blum, T. C., 431, 437 Blumer, H., 450, 469 Blumhagen, D., 78, 82 Blustein, J., 143, 160 Boberg, E. W., 276, 281, 621 Boberg, E. W., 610, 623 Bocchini, J. A., 592, 594, 601 Bochner, A. P., 25, 30, 31, 37, 46, 50, 54, 56 Bochner, S., 66, 71, 86 Boeke, J. P., 270, 271, 283 Bogaars, H. A., 640, 649 Boi, S., 610, 620 Boles, M., 102, 104, 115 Boley-Cruz, T., 476, 494 Bonaguro, E. W., 611, 622 Bonnell, K. H., 265, 281, 569, 578 Bonoma, T. V., 474, 490 Boohan, M., 96, 117 Book, H., 389, 395, 397 Booker, V. K., 252, 253, 257 Boon, H., 124, 135, 154, 156 Booth, K. M., 99, 100, 104, 114, 118, 571, 579 Borawski, E. A., 151, 152, 157 Bordenave, J. D., 211, 217 Bordia, P., 519, 533 Boren, S., 523, 532 Borgen, F. H., 426, 438 Borges, S., 132, 135 Borland, R., 474, 490 Bormann, E., 26, 31 Bormann, J. S., 357, 364 Borok, G. M., 377, 381, 384, 386, 401 Borowitz, S. M., 76, 82 Borzekowski, D., 223, 235 Boss, P., 50, 56 Boster, F. J., 288, 311, 477, 490 Bostrom, A., 227, 228, 235 Bottrell, M. M., 170, 171, 176 Boulay, M., 488, 493 Bouldin, N., 660, 670 Boulding, K., 3, 5 Boulton, M., 127, 139, 293, 294, 298, 306 Bourgeois, M. S., 363, 364 Bourke, S. J., 167, 180 Boutwell, W. B., 610, 621 Bovasso, G., 223, 235 Bover, E. G., 300, 308 Bowen, R. H., 267, 280

686 Bowen, S. P., 294, 306, 658, 675 Bower, P., 128, 129, 137 Bowers, J. W., 3, 5 Bowling, A., 661, 671 Bowman, F. M., 97, 104, 114, 115 Boyd, M. F., 663, 671 Boyd, S., 273, 284 Bozzette, S. A., 301, 313 Bracci, 417 Bracht, N., 210, 211, 217, 251, 253, 257, 452, 470, 471 Bradac, J. J., 37, 56, 289, 306 Braddock, C. H., 171, 176 Bradley, C. P., 153, 156 Bradley, E., 332, 343 Brady, L. A., 564, 577 Braithwaite, D. O., 244, 257 Braithwaite, R., 254, 257, 659, 670 Branch, W. T., 164, 176 Brand, R. J., 275, 283 Brandenburg, M., 173, 176 Brandt, A. M., 76, 77, 86 Branger, P. J., 610, 623 Brann, M., 48, 59 Brasfield, T. L., 299, 312 Brashers, D. E., 23, 31, 39, 41, 44, 51, 56, 265, 278, 301, 306 Brasure, M., 597, 601 Brauner, D. J., 11, 14, 32, 33 Brecht, R., 521, 533 Brecklin, T., 585, 601 Breed, W., 574, 576 Breggin, G. R., 41, 56 Breggin, P. R., 41, 56 Bremberg, S., 150, 155 Brender, J. A., 339 Brenders, D. A., 44, 56 Brennan, L., 113, 117, 500, 510 Brennan, P. F., 276, 278 Brennan, T. A., 325, 340 Brewer, C., 377, 379, 398 Brewin, T. B., 167, 168, 176 Brewster, L., 334, 340 Brez, S. M., 587, 588, 590, 601 Bricker, E., 276, 281, 610, 621, 623 Briggs, M. C. E., 373, 400 Brimlow, D. L., 296, 306 Britt, T. W., 132, 139, 663, 677 Britten, N., 153, 156 Britton, P. J., 502, 509 Broadwell, L. H., 594, 602 Brock, B. L., 566, 576 Brock, W., 286, 309

AUTHOR INDEX Broder, M. S., 497, 508 Brodie, M., 564, 572, 577 Brodsky, C. M., 379, 397 Brody, D. S., 81, 85, 172, 176 Brody, H., 11, 15, 17, 20, 21, 31 Brody, R. V., 167, 179 Broom, G. M., 498, 508 Broom, M. N., 539, 553 Brown, 413 Brown, B., Jr., 392, 397, 452, 470, 484, 491, 664, 672 Brown, D., 19, 32, 349, 365, 528, 533, 660, 674 Brown, E., 372, 397 Brown, G., 523, 532 Brown, H., 223, 236, 378, 397 Brown, J., 571, 577 Brown, J. A., 78, 86 Brown, J. B., 102, 104, 115, 128, 133, 135, 137, 139, 143, 149, 153, 158, 160, 164, 180 Brown, J. W., 498, 509 Brown, L. K., 293, 298, 306 Brown, M. A., 75, 82 Brown, M. H., 189, 204 Brown, P., 166, 176 Brown, S. E., 275, 283 Brown, S. J., 501, 508 Brown, T. M., 369, 370, 372, 391, 397 Brown, W., 223, 236 Brown, W. J., 659, 662, 671 Brownbridge, G., 126, 135 Browne, J., 294, 295, 306 Browne, R., 350, 364 Brownell, A., 265, 276, 278 Brownlea, A., 100, 104, 116 Brownson, K., 655, 671 Bruce, B., 590, 602, 655, 678 Bruder, M., 173, 179 Brug, J., 500, 501, 502, 505, 507, 508, 509 Brummans, B., 210, 215, 219 Brummett, B., 10, 31 Bruner, J., 14, 31, 479, 490 Brunner, R. D., 225, 236 Bruyere, O., 543, 555 Bryant, C., 474, 489, 657, 670 Bryant, C. A., 498, 509 Buber, M., 248, 257 Bucher, R., 372, 390, 391, 393, 401, 402 Buchwald, E., 69, 73, 75, 80, 88 Buck, C., 148, 156 Buck, M. L., 595, 601 Buckley, J., 100, 104, 116 Buckman, R., 164, 167, 176 Budrys, G., 327, 334, 341

AUTHOR INDEX Buggs, C., 376, 379, 397 Buiser, M., 353, 364 Bukoski, W., 452, 470 Bulger, D., 500, 508 Bull, F. C., 501, 503, 509, 510, 597, 601 Bull, P. E., 108, 110, 116 Buller, D. B., 81, 82, 194, 199, 596, 604, 610, 620 Buller, M. K., 81, 82, 194, 199, 610, 620 Bullis, C., 53, 56 Bungum, T. J., 434, 437 Burbach, D. J., 183, 185, 199 Burdick, E., 381, 384, 386, 400 Burdine, J. N., 607, 608, 638, 648, 651, 652, 671, 675 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 428, 437 Burgio, L. D., 363, 364 Burgoon, J. K., 288, 311, 479, 490 Burgoon, M., 39, 43, 51, 56, 336, 341, 452, 469, 486, 490, 589, 590, 601, 605 Burham, C. E., 188, 199 Burish, T. G., 266, 278 Burke, D. M., 189, 199 Burke, J. A., 287, 308 Burke, J. E., 78, 79, 87, 88 Burke, K., 48, 57 Burke, L. E., 113, 115, 116 Burke, M., 53, 60 Burleson, B. R., 264, 265, 271, 273, 277, 278, 287, 306 Burmeister, L., 640, 648 Burrell, G., 565, 566, 577 Burrows, G. D., 147, 156 Burton, M. V., 126, 135 Bury, M., 568, 577 Bush, T., 377, 380, 384, 399 BusinessWorld, 540, 553 Butler, et al., 409 Butler, D. D., 550, 553 Butler, R., 190, 199 Butler, S., 17, 31 Butow, P. N., 108, 111, 115 Butterfoss, E. D., 253, 257 Butterfoss, F. D., 208, 214, 220 Butterill, D., 389, 395, 397 Buttram, C., 646, 648 Buysse, V., 378, 386, 393, 396 Byles, J. E., 610, 620 Bynoe, G., 358, 364 Byosiere, P., 427, 439 Byrd, J. C., 585, 602 Byrd, T., 246n, 251, 252, 253, 257 Byrd, T. L., 268, 278 Byrne, P. S., 66, 83

687 C

Cacioppo, J. T., 264, 266, 278, 284, 503, 511, 550, 555 Cahill, J., 428, 440 Cahill, S. E., 25, 31 Cai, D., 78, 79, 85 Caillouet, R. H., 545, 553 Cain, M., 75, 86, 669, 675 Cairns, A. B., 44, 59 Callahan, D., 42, 43, 57, 652n, 661, 666, 671 Callahan, E. J., 67, 68, 74, 80, 82, 83, 85, 151, 152, 160, 195, 199, 525, 533 Callister, M., 336, 341 Calnan, M., 143, 160 Cambridge, V., 659, 671 Cameron, G. T., 538, 556 Cameron, K. A., 481, 495 Campbell, A. V., 666, 671 Campbell, B., 73, 88 Campbell, D. T., 370, 397 Campbell, E. M., 144, 145, 159 Campbell, M. K., 501, 505, 507, 508, 509, 512, 597, 601 Campbell, T. L., 70, 74, 83, 164, 177 Campbell-Heider, N., 376, 397 Campinha-Bacote, J., 594, 601 Campion, P., 132, 137 Campo, S., 207, 218, 610, 620 Canary, D., 193, 199 Candy, S. E., 190, 202 Cantor, K. P., 640, 648 Cantrill, J. G., 288, 312 Capitanio, J. P., 656, 673 Caplan, G., 264, 278 Caplan, R. D., 426, 439 Caporael, L. R., 126, 136 Cappella, J., 457, 470 Caputo, G. C., 81, 85 Carbone, E., 597, 601 Cardello, L. L., 164, 176 Cardillo, L. W., 23, 31, 44, 56, 301, 306 Cardinal, E., 589, 598, 603 Cardozo, L., 167, 177 Carey, J. W., 432, 437 Carey, S., 185, 199 Carlaw, R., 452, 471 Carlson, E. S., 561, 569, 577 Caronna, C. A., 319, 320, 337, 344 Carpentier, W., 73, 88 Carrese, J. A., 168, 176, 653, 671 Carson, J., 349, 365 Carter, J. A., 297, 306

688 Carter, R. M., 592, 601 Carter, W. B., 69, 88, 126, 128, 129, 133, 135, 137 Cartwright, S., 426, 437 Carver, C. S., 489, 490 Casas, R., 185, 186, 200 Case, N., 266, 279 Case, R. B., 266, 279 Casey, M. K., 207, 218, 610, 620 Casrield, C., 296, 307 Cassata, D. M., 1, 2, 3, 5, 39, 57 Cassel, J. C., 147, 157, 263, 274, 279 Cassell, E. J., 15n, 31, 41, 57 Cassell, M. M., 610, 620 Cassileth, B. R., 67, 83 Castillo Moran, M. A., 485, 493 Castle, N. G., 377, 379, 397 Castro, M. A., 655, 679 Catalan, J., 299, 306 Catz, S., 587, 589, 596, 602, 603 Caughlin, J., 48, 58 Cauthen, D., 69, 73, 75, 80, 88 Cawley, J., 334, 340 Cawsey, A. J., 501, 502, 508, 509 Cebul, R. D., 151, 152, 157 Cecil, D. W., 129, 136 Cegala, D. J., 105, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 164, 179, 524, 533 Center, A. H., 539, 553 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 241n, 252, 257, 290, 291, 306 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, 324, 340 Chaffee, S. H., 499, 512 Chaiken, S., 479, 486, 491, 493 Chalela, P., 482, 483, 493, 669, 676 Chalmers, R. K., 589, 598, 603 Chamberlain, K., 569, 578 Chamberlain, M., 610, 620 Chamberland, M. E., 296, 307 Chan, B. K., 79, 84 Chan, C. L., 621 Chang, 476 Chao, J., 151, 152, 160 Chapandy, A. M., 503, 511 Chapell, N. L., 357, 364 Chapelsky Massimilla, D., 619, 622 Chapman, N. J., 275, 279 Chapman, P., 300, 310, 319, 343 Chapman, S., 571, 577 Chappelle, K. G., 322, 324, 340 Charlton, R. C., 167, 176 Charmaz, K., 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31 Charon, R., 15, 31, 68, 84, 128, 129, 136, 137, 143, 157, 192, 198

AUTHOR INDEX Chau, P., 526, 534 Chavis, D. M., 246, 259 Cheadle, A., 208, 210, 213, 216, 217, 218 Cheek, J., 568, 577 Chen, M. S., 476, 490 Chen, W., 517, 519, 533 Chenail, R. J., 131, 132, 137 Cheney, G., 426, 443 Chenoweth, D., 423, 427, 437 Chernew, M., 334, 340 Cherry, C., 299, 309 Cherwitz, R. A., 10, 31 Chesebro, J. W., 48, 57, 566, 576 Chesney, M., 73, 83 Chess, C., 230, 234, 236 Chess, W. A., 354, 360, 365, 368 Chetwynd, J., 294, 306 Cheung, A. M., 358, 368 Cheuvront, B., 610, 620 Chicago Sun Times, 540, 553 Children’s Hospital of Boston, 551, 553 Childress, J. F., 47, 56, 304, 305, 652, 654, 670 Chi-Lum, B., 75, 76, 77, 89 Chin, M. H., 656, 671 Chinman, M., 213, 218 Chng, C. L., 434, 437 Cho, H., 467, 470 Choi, K.-H., 245, 258 Chrisler, J. C., 569, 577 Christensen, C., 381, 388, 400 Christensen, J., 131, 140 Christensen, K., 73, 83 Christenson, J. A., 209, 218 Christianson, A., 430, 431, 437 Christofolini, M., 610, 620 Christofolini, P., 610, 620 Chua, E., 77, 84 Chulis, et al., 421 Churchill, L. R., 17, 20, 21, 25, 31 Churchill, S. W., 17, 20, 21, 25, 31 Cicourel, A. V., 131, 136 Cirksena, M. K., 497, 498, 509 Cissna, K. N., 248, 257 Clair, R. P., 53, 59, 424, 435, 440 Clancy, C., 95, 117 Clapp, M. D., 381, 384, 386, 400 Clapp, R., 428, 443 Clark, D. A., 337, 340 Clark, E. M., 501, 503, 510 Clark, F., 610, 620 Clark, M. A., 610, 622 Clark, M. W., 15, 31 Clark, N. M., 654, 657, 663, 675

AUTHOR INDEX Clark, P. F., 340 Clark, P. G., 376, 388, 391, 392, 397, 398 Clark, R. A., 288, 303, 305, 306 Clark, W., 195, 202 Clark, W. S., 587, 589, 590, 600 Clarke, J. N., 567, 569, 571, 577 Clarke, P., 172, 174, 176 Clayton, E. W., 149, 157 Clegg, 404n, 405, 406 Clemow, L., 102, 116 Clift, E., 37, 39, 57 Cline, G., 210, 215, 219 Cline, R. J. W., 44, 60, 244, 258, 286, 293, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 307, 424, 434, 437, 467, 470, 663, 669, 671 Clow, K. E., 550, 553 Clute, C., 377, 380, 399 Coates, W. C., 586, 587, 596, 605 Coats, T. J., 656, 666, 674 Cobb, R., 408, 412, 413, 414, 421, 422 Cobb, S., 263, 264, 279 Cochran, S. D., 294, 297, 310 Cockburn, J., 96, 119 Coe, L., 563, 564, 575, 581 Coe, R. M., 144, 145, 156, 192, 199 Coelho, G. V., 14, 30, 424, 437 Cohen, D., 188, 200 Cohen, H. J., 376, 377, 378, 379, 384, 386, 397 Cohen, J. B., 302, 307 Cohen, L., 301, 303, 311 Cohen, L. M., 173, 179 Cohen, M., 69, 85, 408, 413 Cohen, M. H., 44, 57 Cohen, S., 264, 270, 279 Cohen, S. L., 541, 553 Cohen, S. P., 548, 553 Cohen, S. S., 353, 364 Cohen-Cole, S. A., 127, 136, 164, 177 Cole, G., 463, 470, 664, 677 Cole, K. A., 97, 99, 104, 105, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 147, 148, 159 Coleman, J. S., 207, 214, 218 Coleman, M. T., 105, 115 Coleman, P. G., 166, 177 Coleman, P. L., 476, 492 Coleman, R., 302, 307 Coley, B., 480, 492 Collingwood, T. R., 429, 438 Collins, C., 585, 602 Colon, S. E., 478, 494 Comings, J. P., 659, 676 Community Health Care, 326, 340 Comstock, L. M., 69, 85

689 Conaway, M., 610, 622 Condiotte, M. M., 482, 490 Condit, C. M., 48, 57, 193, 203, 479, 490, 559, 560, 562, 575, 572, 577, 580 Cone, J. E., 430, 440 Connell, C. M., 654, 657, 663, 675 Conquergood, D., 28, 31 Conrad, 404n, 408n, 409, 410, 417 Conrad, J. K., 268, 279 Conrad, P., 431, 438, 565, 566, 577, 655, 664, 671, 679 Constantine, L. L., 50, 61 Contractor, N. S., 337, 340 A controlled trial to improve care for seriously ill hospitalized patients, 146, 147, 156 Converse, 408 Conway, T., 274, 284 Cook, J. A., 276, 281 Cook, T. D., 122, 138 Cook, V. A., 485, 491 Cooke, M., 79, 88 Coombs, W. T., 544, 545, 545, 546, 553 Cooney, M., 377, 400 Coope, J., 194, 199 Cooper, C., 167, 179 Cooper, C. L., 425, 426, 427, 428, 437, 438 Cooper, J., 95, 117 Cooper, M. C., 173, 177 Cooper, M. L., 270, 279 Cooper-Patrick, L., 79, 83 Coovert, M., 264, 273, 277 Copeland, D., 388, 392, 401 Copp, E. P., 379, 397, 398 Coppel, D. B., 270, 280 Corbie-Smith, G., 79, 83 Corbin, J., 21, 31 Corbin, W. R., 297, 306 Corcoran-Perry, S., 172, 178 Corea, G., 193, 194, 199 Corey, F. C., 244, 258 Corley, M. C., 355, 368 Corman, S. R., 432, 438 Corris, P. S., 167, 180 Cortese, A., 654, 671 Coser., R. L., 376, 379, 397 Cosgrove, J. L., 377, 379, 398 Coshan, M., 425, 431, 438, 442 Costa, P., 481, 490 Costanza, M. E., 102, 116 Costello, D. E., 1, 2, 5 Cotton, D. J., 484, 492, 597, 603 Couchman, W., 369, 387, 388, 392, 398 Coughlin, S. S., 652, 654, 668, 671

690 Coupland, J., 272, 279 Coupland, N., 272, 279 Court, P., 301, 302, 303, 309 Courtenay, M. J., 150, 159 Courval, L. P., 274, 278 Covell, N. H., 294, 297, 299, 313 Covello, V. T., 228, 237, 659, 671 Coverdale, J. H., 664, 670 Cowan, J., 377, 380, 398 Cowan, R., 502, 509 Cox, A., 70, 83 Cox, C. E., 610, 623 Coyle, J. T., 518, 532 Coyne, J. C., 270, 271, 272, 279, 282 Coyne, J. D., 264, 283 Crabtree, B. F., 151, 152, 160 Crabtree, R. D., 242, 251, 252, 253, 257, 258 Craig, A. S., 286, 309 Craig, R. T., 10–11, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 424, 438 Crain, E., 70, 89, 127, 128, 140 Crandall, C. S., 302, 307 Crandall, S. J., 195, 199 Crawford, C., 517, 519, 533 Crawford, P., 392, 397 Crawford, R., 663, 666, 671 Cremo, J., 640, 641, 648 Crepeau, E. B., 377, 398 Crewe, M., 243, 258 Cristinzio, S., 501, 512 Croasman, E., 10, 31 Crockford, E. A., 166, 177 Crofton, C., 272, 284 Crook, T. H., 189, 199 Croteau, D., 558, 572, 577 Crouch, M. A., 591, 592, 601 Croughan-Minihane, M., 79, 88 Crow, R., 452, 471 Crowell, T., 192, 202 Crowson, T. W., 80, 84 Cruz, L. N., 660, 670 Cruz-Collins, M., 504, 510 Crystal, S., 301, 313, 663, 673 Cukor, P., 518, 524, 532, 533 Culhane-Pera, K. A., 78, 83 Cullen, D. J., 381, 384, 386, 400 Culler, J., 48, 57 Cummings, L. S., 267, 277 Cummings, M., 617, 623 Cummings, S., 610, 621 Cunningham, M., 272, 277 Cunningham, W. E., 78, 86, 301, 313 Curbow, B. A., 610, 621

AUTHOR INDEX Curran, J., 232, 239 Curry, S., 208, 213, 217, 501, 512 Curtis, R., 295, 296, 311 Cusella, L. P., 69, 82 Cusick, L., 294, 295, 307 Cutlip, S., 539, 546, 553 Cutrona, C. E., 271, 272, 279 Cvetkovich, G., 227, 236 Cwikel, J. M., 271, 274, 275, 279 Cyber Dialogue, 528, 533

D

Dacre, J. E., 543, 555 Daft, R., 525, 530, 533 Dahl, 405n Dainas, C., 429, 438 Dakof, G. A., 266, 271, 279 Dale, J., 143, 160 Daltroy, L. H., 68, 84 Daniels, 417 Daniels, M. J., 562, 568, 577 Daniels, N., 654, 664, 665, 671 Danis, M., 173, 177 Darling, R., 189, 204 Darongkamas, J., 392, 397 DaRosa, D. A., 170, 175 D’Ascoli, P. T., 268, 279 Daugherty, C. K., 610, 620 Daughty, V. S., 287, 308 D’Aunno, T. A., 320, 340, 377, 378, 384, 386, 396 Davidhizar, R. E., 655, 671 Davidson, B. N., 431, 438 Davidson, M. J., 428, 438 Davidson II, W. S., 68, 85 Davies-Avery, A., 142, 160 Davis, D., 15, 31 Davis, E. B., 300, 308 Davis, H., 167, 168, 177 Davis, K., 194, 199 Davis, M., 125, 126, 136, 370, 398 Davis, M. M., 610, 623 Davis, R. E., 328, 344 Davis, R. H., 151, 160, 499, 509 Davis, S. K., 664, 671 Davis, T., 614, 624 Davis, T. C., 588, 591, 592, 594, 596, 601, 602, 603 Dawson, N. V., 153, 157 Day, D., 337, 340 Day, E., 550, 555 Deal, T. E., 320, 342

AUTHOR INDEX Dean, A., 270, 279 Dean, M. J., 295, 311 DeAngelis, C. D., 75, 76, 77, 89 Dearing, J. W., 207, 210, 215, 218, 219, 286, 307, 476, 610, 620 Dearing, W. J., 665, 672 Debakey, M., 515, 533 DeCarli, A., 610, 620 De Castro, L. D., 672 DeCiantis, M. L., 69, 84, 164, 178 Deckard, G. J., 354, 364 Decker, B. C., 591, 603 Decker, F. H., 357, 364 Decker, P. J., 426, 438 DeClemente, C. C., 501, 502, 511 Deeg, D. J. H., 270, 271, 283 Deering, C. G., 166, 177 Deering, M. J., 597, 602, 610, 621 Deetz, S., 54, 57, 243, 246, 247, 254, 258, 260, 404, 427, 438 DeFoe, J. R. F., 574, 576 Degner, L. F., 67, 83 DeGooyer, D., 395, 399 De Graeff, A., 273, 279 de Haas, J. C. J. M., 267, 284 De Haes, C. J. M., 64, 66, 86 DeHaes, J. C. J. M., 95, 105, 118 De Jarlais, D. C., 657, 672 DeJong, W., 452, 466, 470 de Jonge, J., 354, 364 de la Cruz, D. S., 213, 220 de la Rosa, G., 655, 679 Delbecq, A. L., 386, 402 De Leeuw, J. R., 273, 279 Delia, J. D., 288, 306 Dell, M. L., 173, 178 Dellinger, A., 474, 491 DeLongis, A., 271, 272, 279, 282 Delvin, M. C., 658, 675 Demi, A., 301, 303, 311, 312 Demissie, S., 501, 509, 597, 601 Demoraco, H. J., 381, 384, 386, 400 Den Boer, D. J., 501, 512, 597, 604 de Negri, B., 101, 111, 118 Dennis, B. P., 169, 170, 177 Dent, C., 476, 494 Department of Health and Human Services, 584, 598, 600, 601 dePyssler, B., 562, 568, 581 Deren, S., 299, 311 Deroisy, R., 543, 555 Derossis, A. M., 170, 175 Derr, W. D., 429, 438

691 de Ruiter, J. H., 267, 284 Dervin, B., 2, 5, 35, 57, 251, 258, 453, 470 Des Jarlais, D. C., 293, 295, 296, 307, 308, 311 DeSanctis, G., 432, 441, 530, 533 Desbiens, N. A., 153, 157 de Souza Briggs, X., 217, 218 de Tocqueville, A., 209, 218 DeVellis, B. M., 106, 110, 112, 115, 269, 282, 481, 494 DeVellis, R. F., 106, 110, 112, 115, 269, 282 Devers, K., 353, 361, 368 De Villiers, N., 349, 365 DeVita, M., 172, 173, 178 Devlin, B., 167, 180 De Vries, H., 500, 501, 502, 505, 509 Dewe, P. J., 425, 426, 438 Deyo, R. A., 501, 512 Dias, J. K., 69, 86 Diaz, R. M., 245, 248, 258, 659, 674 Diaz-Cotto, J., 245, 258 Dickie, G., 148, 156 Dickman, F. J., 431, 438 Dickson, D., 96, 117 DiClemente, C. C., 452, 453, 471, 501, 502, 512 DiClemente, L. L., 549, 555 DiClemente, R. J., 298, 307 Diehr, P., 208, 213, 217 Dielman, T. E., 504, 512 Diepgen, D. L., 76, 83 Dietrich, A. J., 143, 156 Dijkstra, A., 502, 509 Dillard, J. P., 452, 470, 478, 489, 490, 659, 673 Dilorio, C., 297, 309 DiMaggio, P. J., 321, 324, 340 DiMatteo, M. R., 141, 144, 145, 154, 156, 157, 164, 174, 177 Dimavicius, J., 167, 168, 180 Dionisopoulos, G. N., 565, 580 Di Palo, M. T., 142, 156 DiPrete-Brown, L., 101, 111, 118 Dirschka, T., 610, 621 D’Lugoff, B. C., 125, 138, 148, 160 Doak, C. C., 584, 593, 594, 598, 601 Doak, L. G., 584, 593, 594, 598, 601 Dobbs, L. K., 23, 31, 44, 56, 301, 306 Dodd, P. W. D., 276, 280 Doherty, K., 663, 677 Doherty, W. J., 150, 151, 158 Doll, L. S., 299, 311 Doll, R., 610, 624 Dollahite, J., 594, 601 Domhoff, 404n, 405 Donnelly, M. B., 167, 180

692 Donnelly, W. J., 11, 15, 32 Donner, A., 128, 139, 149, 160 Donohew, L., 50, 57, 452, 454, 467, 470, 471, 478, 494 Doodwin, J. S., 656, 676 Dooley, D., 274, 275, 283 Doorley, J. E., 173, 180 Dorfman, L., 465, 472, 561, 570, 577, 581, 669, 678 Dorn, L. D., 183, 185, 186, 200 Dornan, M. C., 142, 157 Dorsey, A. M., 287, 307, 478, 491 Dourard, J. W., 662, 663, 672 Douglas, J., 353, 354, 358, 366 Douglas, M., 227, 236, 661, 663, 672 Douglas, M. K., 354, 357, 364 Douglas, W., 288, 306 Doukas, D. J., 47, 57 Dovidio, J. F., 268, 269, 272, 274, 280, 283 Dow, M. G., 105, 107, 110, 112, 116 Dowd, T., 330, 340 Downs, 412, 413, 415 Doxiadis, S., 651, 672 Dozier, D. M., 498, 508 Drabek, T. E., 503, 509 Drabman, R. S., 563, 581 Draper, J., 96, 119 Drass, K. E., 195, 200 Dresser, K., 111, 117 Dreyer, J., 15, 32, 247, 258 Drinka, T. J. K., 372, 373, 376, 377, 379, 386, 388, 392, 394, 395, 398 Droge, D., 16, 20, 27, 31 Dronkers, J., 128, 135 Drossman, D. A., 167, 179, 381, 401 Drucker, E., 295, 308 Druckmiller, B., 544, 546, 553 Drumheller, 421 Dube, R., 78, 79, 87 Dubler, N. N., 300, 308 Ducanis, A. J., 372, 376, 377, 378, 390, 397, 398 Ducek, R., 73, 85 Duffy, B. K., 549, 554 Dugdale, D. C., 111, 116 Duggan, A., 166, 179, 337, 341, 351, 353, 366, 640, 641, 642, 644, 647, 648 Dull, V. T., 77, 85, 150, 158 Dunbar-Jacob, J., 113, 115, 116 Duncan, V., 166, 179, 647, 648 Dunham, P. J., 276, 280 Dunkel-Schetter, C., 267, 270, 280 Dunn, J. K., 504, 508

AUTHOR INDEX Dunn, S. M., 108, 111, 115 Dunnagan, T., 429, 439 Dunwoody, S., 44, 51, 58, 223, 236 DuPen, J., 585, 602 Du Pre, A., 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 347, 352, 358, 362, 364, 491, 549, 553, 563, 564, 577, 595, 596, 601 Durham, M., 660, 670 Durrah, T., 286, 309 Dwyer, J. J. M., 483, 489 Dwyer, R., 296, 308 Dye, 404n Dye, F. W., 358, 364 Dykes, J., 350, 365 Dykstra, W., 185, 186, 187, 204

E

Eagly, A. H., 486, 491, 510 Earle, R., 653, 672 Earle, T., 227, 236 Earp, J. A., 656, 662, 672 Easterbrook, G., 540, 553 Easterling, D. V., 267, 284, 477, 491 Eaton, L. G., 68, 83 Eaton, S., 655n, 678 Eberhardt, T. L., 167, 179 Eberly, S. 266, 279 Eckert, P., 287, 308 Eckles, A., 640, 641, 648 Edelman, 408, 413 Eden, S., 225, 236 Edgar, T., 297, 308, 478, 489, 490, 491 Edlich, R. F., 167, 177 Edlund, D., 614, 623 Edwards, J., 288, 308, 523, 533 Edwards, K. A., 171, 176 Egbert, L. D., 148, 156 Egbert, N., 641, 648 Egener, B., 73, 85 Eggleston, R., 25, 31 Eggly, S., 167, 177 Egli, E., 78, 83 Ehrich, B., 610, 622 Ehrlich, C. M., 67, 84, 195, 201 Ehrlich, D., 391, 402 Eich, P., 100, 117 Einsiedel, E., 221, 236 Eisdorfer, C., 188, 200 Eisenberg, 408 Eisenberg, E. M., 50, 56, 427, 438 Eisenberg, J. M., 78, 79, 87

AUTHOR INDEX Eisenberg, L., 12, 14, 32 Eisenhardt, K., 529, 533 Eiser, C., 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 200 Eiser, J., 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 200 Eiser, J. R., 186, 200, 478, 494 Ekachai, D., 552, 554 Eke, A., 301, 308 Ekstrum, J., 196, 202 Elashoff, R., 267, 280 el-Bassel, N., 297, 308 Elder, 408, 412, 413 Elder, C. G., 594, 602 Elder, J. P., 617, 620 Elderkin-Thompson, V., 67, 83, 152, 159 Eldredge, D. H., 377, 378, 384, 387, 396 Eldridge, G. D., 299, 312 Elford, R., 519, 533 Elite, A., 658, 677 Ell, K., 274, 280 Ellickson, P. L., 504, 510 Elliott, C., 99, 100, 104, 114, 118 Elliott, M. N., 497, 508 Ellis, B. H., 30, 34, 348, 349, 355, 359, 360, 362, 364, 365, 366, 425, 441 Ellis, C., 26, 32 Ellis, M. S., 77, 83 Ellis, N., 360, 366 Ellsworth, C., 276, 280 Elsberry, N. L., 185, 186, 200 Elwood, W. N., 244, 258 Emanuel, E. J., 95, 116, 122, 136, 164, 177 Emanuel, L. L., 95, 116, 122, 136, 164, 170, 171, 176, 177 Emel, J., 223, 236 Emerson, R. M., 126, 136 Emmers-Sommer, T., 193, 199 Emmons, K., 436, 442 Emmons, K. M., 595, 603 Employee Benefit Research Institute, 430, 438 Eng, E., 213, 219, 656, 657, 662, 672 Eng, T. R., 497, 509, 597, 602, 610, 620, 621 Engel, G. L., 42, 57, 121, 136 Engle, R., 80, 85 English, P. A., 382, 401 Ensel, W. M., 270, 279 Enthoven, 417 Entman, S. S., 149, 157 Enzmann, D., 350, 365 Eppel, E., 480, 490 Epstein, A. M., 69, 84, 164, 178 Epstein, R., 111, 116 Epstein, R. M., 164, 177, 195, 202 Erde, E. L., 396, 398

693 Erickson, B., 379, 398 Erickson, R. J., 355, 368 Erickson, W. A., 426, 439 Erikson, J. I., 381, 384, 386, 400 Ernst, J. A., 377, 379, 398 Ersek, M., 173, 177 Ershoff, D. H., 377, 381, 384, 386, 401 Escarce, J. J., 78, 79, 87 Espinoza, R., 669, 676 Espinoza, V., 217, 218 Estabrook, B., 658, 669, 672 Estrada, A., 297, 299, 300, 308 Estrada, C., 585, 602 Estroff, S., 30, 32 Ettema, J. S., 498, 509 Etzioni, A., 654, 672 Evans, B. J., 147, 156 Evans, G., 227, 228, 235 Evans, S. H., 172, 174, 176 Evans, S. J., 301, 302, 310 Everett, M. R., 339 Eyres, S. J., 264, 280 Eysenbach, G., 76, 83

F

Faden, R. R., 301, 308, 658, 672 Fadiman, A., 13, 32, 51, 52, 57, 78, 83 Fagerhaugh, S., 328, 331, 344 Fagin, L., 349, 365 Fahey, J. L., 267, 280 Fairbanks, J., 251, 252, 253, 258 Falke, R. L., 267, 280 Falkson, 413 Fallowfield, L. J., 100, 116, 148, 156, 167, 168, 177, 610, 621 Fan, D. P., 572, 578 Fanos, J. H., 302, 308 Farace, R. V., 129, 138 Farber, H. T., 300, 308 Farber, N. J., 300, 308 Faria, S. H., 363, 365 Farley, C., 664, 672 Farmer, E. W., 427, 443 Farnsworth, P., 300, 306 Farquhar, J. W., 452, 470, 484, 491, 610, 621, 664, 671 Farrell, D., 113, 117, 500, 510, 597, 601 Farrenkopf, M., 474, 491 Faulkner, A., 98, 99, 100, 114, 116, 118, 167, 168, 177 Fava, J. L., 501, 502, 512

694 Fawcett, J., 610, 623 Fawcett, S., 210, 213, 216, 217, 218 Fawcett, S. B., 250, 258 Fawzy, F. I., 148, 156, 267, 280 Fawzy, N. W., 148, 156, 267, 280 Fazal, B. A., 377, 379, 398 Fazio, R. H., 486, 491, 493 Feder, 418n Feder, J., 191, 200 Federman, D., 173, 177 Fehir, J., 252, 253, 259 Fehrenbach, S. N., 587, 592, 602 Fehrsen, G. S., 151, 157 Feigelman, S., 298, 299, 312, 656, 658, 672 Feigelson, H. S., 268, 279 Feiger, S. M., 376, 377, 380, 386, 387, 392, 398 Feighery, E., 223, 235 Feinstein, L. G., 267, 280 Feldman, D., 300, 308 Feldman, D. S., 72, 73, 83 Feldstein, P. J., 337, 340 Feller, J. R., 188, 203 Feng, Z., 430, 431, 437 Fennell, M. L., 320, 339 Ferguson, K. J., 287, 308 Ferguson, R., 243, 258 Ferguson, T., 610, 621 Ferrazzi, G., 215, 220 Ferris, M., 338, 340 Ferris, T. G., 151, 156 Fessenden-Raden, J., 222, 236 Festinger, L. A., 550, 553 Feussner, J. R., 377, 378, 384, 386, 397 Field, D., 400 Fields, M. L., 212, 217 Fields, S. A., 322, 324, 340 Figueroa, M. E., 493 Findeisen, N., 267, 277 Fineberg, H. V., 230, 238 Finerman, R., 660, 672 Fink, E. L., 297, 308 Finkelman, A. W., 352, 365 Finkelstein, D. M., 597, 603 Finkelstein, M. A., 274, 283 Finnegan, J. R., 40, 57, 452, 470, 471, 610, 622, 658, 664, 669, 672, 678 Finnegan, J. R., Jr., 504, 510 Fins, J. J., 173, 177 Fiore, J., 270, 280 Firth-Cozens, J., 350, 365 Fisch, R., 51, 61 Fischbach, R. L., 170, 171, 176 Fischhoff, B., 222, 226, 236, 238

AUTHOR INDEX Fish, D., 338, 339 Fishbein, L,. 549, 553 Fishbein, M., 452, 457, 469, 470, 473, 485, 489, 491, 499, 504, 508 Fisher, 436 Fisher, E. B., 656, 657, 658, 660, 672, 677 Fisher, G. G., 377, 380, 387, 398 Fisher, J., 485, 491 Fisher, J. D., 296, 299, 300, 308, 311 Fisher, S., 131, 136, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 203 Fisher, W. A., 296, 299, 300, 308, 311 Fisher, W. R., 14, 17, 26, 32, 549, 553 Fishman, L. K., 377, 381, 384, 386, 401 Fiske, S., 17, 32 Fiske, S. T., 491 Fitch, K., 271, 280 Fitchen, J. M., 222, 236 Fitzgerald, F. T., 666, 672 Fitzgerald, P., 299, 300, 308 Fitzpatrick, R., 293, 294, 298, 306 Flanagan, P., 293, 298, 306 Flanagin, A., 75, 76, 77, 89 Flavin, K. S., 105, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118 Flax, V., 656, 662, 672 Fleisher, L., 501, 512 Fleishman, A. R., 300, 308 Fleissig, A., 109, 116 Flocke, S. A., 73, 83, 144, 145, 151, 152, 158, 160, 161, 340 Flora, J., 223, 235, 450, 452, 470, 484, 491 Flora, J. A., 482, 493, 497, 498, 499, 501, 507, 509, 511, 512, 513, 610, 621, 637, 644, 649, 657, 672 Flora, J. L., 214, 218 Flores-Ortiz, Y. G., 244, 245, 257, 298, 308 Flory, J., 83 Flynn, D. B., 426, 439 Fogarty, J. S., 43, 57 Fogarty, L. A., 610, 621 Foley, K., 172, 173, 177 Folger, J. P., 392, 398 Folkman, S., 44, 58, 270, 271, 279, 280 Ford, D. E., 79, 83 Ford, L. A., 44, 51, 55, 57, 242, 251, 252, 253, 257, 258, 265, 280, 348, 349, 358, 360, 364, 365 Forester, J., 663, 672 Forrest, K. A., 298, 307 Forster, J., 654, 657, 663, 675 Forster, J. L., 211, 213, 220 Fortmann, S., 452, 470, 484, 491

AUTHOR INDEX Fortmann, S. P., 590, 602, 655, 664, 678 Foss, S. K., 566, 577 Foster, D., 426, 439 Foucault, M., 53, 57, 410, 568, 577, 661, 663, 672 Fountain, M. J., 375, 386, 392, 398 Fowle, J., 224, 237 Fox, E., 173, 177 Fox, J. C., 142, 156 Fox, R., 42, 58 Fox, R. A., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Fox, R. C., 369, 378, 392, 397 Fox, S., 497, 509 Fox, S. A., 196, 201, 474, 491, 610, 621 Francis, V., 1, 5, 125, 137, 141, 142, 158 Francis, W., 100, 104, 116 Francisco, V. T., 250, 258 Francke, A. L., 96, 117 Frank, A. W., 17, 20, 22, 32, 132, 136 Frank, E., 562, 577 Frank, G., 173, 176, 653, 670 Frank, H. J., 106, 111, 113, 114, 117, 148, 151, 157 Frank, K., 215, 218 Frank. L. K., 374, 388, 398 Frankel, R. M., 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 110, 116, 122, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 149, 150, 156, 158, 164, 176, 180, 596, 602 Frankish, C. J., 481, 491 Franz, T. M., 381, 388, 400 Fraser, V. H., 610, 621 Freddolino, P. P., 210, 219 Frederikson, L. G., 108, 110, 116 Fredrickson, D. D., 592, 594, 601 Freedberg, K. A., 302, 313 Freeman, B., 1, 5 Freeman, J., 338, 341 Freeman, K., 467, 470 Freeman, K. E., 293, 296, 297, 307 Freeman, R. C., 296, 308 Freeman, S. H., 74, 83 Freeman, T. R., 128, 133, 139, 143, 149, 160, 164, 180 Freemon, B., 125, 136 Freidenberg, J., 434, 442 Freidland, 405n Freidson, E., 73, 83, 121, 136, 319, 327, 340, 392, 398 Freimuth, V. S., 28, 33, 39, 57, 297, 308, 452, 453, 469, 473, 478, 489, 490, 491, 560, 574, 580, 596, 602, 657, 672 Freire, P., 126, 136, 211, 218, 245, 246, 249, 258

695 French, J. F., 296, 308 French, K. S., 593, 596, 602 Frenette, M., 453, 470 Frerichs, R. R., 270, 277 Fretwell, M. D., 401 Freudenberg, N., 658, 672 Frey, L. R., 27, 30, 246, 256, 336, 340, 630, 636 Frey, R. P., 143, 160 Friedell, G. H., 584, 593, 594, 598, 601 Friedman, H. S., 154, 156 Friedman, S. M., 44, 51, 58 Friedman, S., 223, 236 Friedman, S. R., 293, 295, 296, 307, 308, 310, 311 Friedmann, E., 128, 129, 137, 143, 157 Frizell, C., 349, 366 Froines, J. R., 428, 442 Frost, K., 562, 577 Fry, S., 173, 177 Frye, M., 243, 258 Fuchs, R., 504, 509 Fuller, J., 377, 380, 398 Fuller, M. G., 377, 380, 386, 398 Fullerton, J. T., 268, 279, 284 Furst, R. T., 295, 296, 311

G

Gaare, J., 377, 380, 398 Gabbard-Alley, A. S., 92, 93, 193, 194, 195, 201 Gabe, J., 568, 577 Gaertner, S. L., 272, 280 Gailiun, M., 518, 525, 534, 535 Galbraith, J., 231, 236, 656, 658, 672 Gale Research Company, 325, 340 Galinski, T. L., 426, 442 Gallagher, T. H., 73, 83 Gallion, K. J., 669, 676 Gallo, J. J., 79, 83 Gallo, M., 610, 620 Galtung, J., 211, 218 Gamble, K., 610, 621 Gambosi, J. R., 267, 280 Gamson, W. A., 210, 218 Gandek, B., 68, 69, 71, 74, 79, 85, 87 Gannon, L., 561, 569, 577 Ganster, D. C., 360, 368 Gantz, W., 450, 470 Ganz, P. A., 610, 621 Garber, J., 44, 54 Garcia, H. S., 592, 601 Garcia, J. A., 79, 84 Garcia de Alba, J. E., 485, 493

696 Gardiner, J. C., 101, 119 Garr, D. R., 77, 84 Garrity, T. F., 141, 144, 145, 157 Garska, T. A., 190, 201 Gask, L., 97, 98, 104, 114, 115, 117, 505, 509 Gater, R., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Gates, C., 234, 237 Gates, L., 15, 32 Gatz, M., 188, 201, 610, 623 Gaudette, C., 143, 160 Gawinski, B., 392, 400 Gay, D. D., 434, 439 Gazmararian, J. A., 268, 280, 587, 589, 592, 596, 600, 602 Geddes, D., 66, 84 Gehan, J. P., 211, 213, 220 Geist, P., 15, 32, 48, 52, 58, 72, 78, 84, 85, 247, 258, 321, 327, 334, 340, 342, 350, 351, 352, 359, 361, 365, 366, 391, 398 Geist-Martin, P., 22n, 3, 434, 438 Gelatin Drink May Reduce Arthritis Pain, 541, 553 Gelb, B. D., 610, 621 Gelberg, L., 141, 144, 145, 157 Geller, A. C., 610, 622 Gemin, J., 49, 58 Gemson, D. H., 505, 509 Gentry, E., 664, 677 George, R. B., 591, 592, 601 Georges, E., 395, 399 Gephart, M. A., 436, 438 Gerbner, G., 549, 553, 565, 578, 665, 673 Gerdes, E. P., 80, 84 Gerety, M. B., 377, 402 Gergen, K. J., 32 Gergen, M. M., 32 Gerlach, K. K., 562, 578 Gerlach, R. W., 267, 280 Germain, M., 380, 399 Gerrity, M., 353, 354, 358, 366 Gersh, B. J., 78, 79, 87 Gervey, R., 267, 278 Geyer, C., 67, 68, 70, 88 Ghadiri, A., 276, 277 Giacovelli, G., 543, 555 Gibson, G. J., 167, 180 Giddens, 406 Gielen, A. C., 301, 308 Gifford, J., 173, 176 Gifford, S., 294, 298, 312 Gil, A. G., 498, 513 Gilbert, F., 521, 533 Gilbride, J. A., 377, 380, 398

AUTHOR INDEX Gilchrist, V. J., 151, 152, 160 Giles, H., 66, 68, 84, 190, 203, 272, 279 Giligun, X., 129, 130, 139 Gillanders, W. R., 151, 152, 160 Gilles, P., 357, 366 Gillick, M. R., 666, 673 Gillotti, C., 129, 136 Gillotti, C. M., 167, 168, 174, 177 Ginzberg, E., 72, 84 Giroux, H. A., 242, 248, 258 Githens, P. B., 149, 157 Given, C., 362, 365 Given, R., 353, 361, 368 Gladwell, M., 213, 218 Gladwin, T., 122, 136 Glantz, S. A., 661, 673 Glanz, K., 245, 259, 435, 439, 484, 491, 505, 509, 655, 656, 657, 673, 675 Glaser, R., 272, 277, 434, 441 Glasgow, R. E., 78, 80, 84, 432, 436, 438 Glass, J., 588, 591, 596, 601 Glasser, B., 109, 116 Glasser, M., 192, 201 Glassman, B., 610, 622, 623 Gleicher, F., 452, 471 Glick Schiller, N., 663, 673 Glik, D., 573, 574, 578 Glober, G. A., 101, 104, 115 Gloe, B., 658, 669, 672 Glover, J., 43, 55 Glynn, S. M., 504, 509 Goble, R., 223, 236 Godbold, L. C., 489, 490 Godfrey, A. B., 321, 336, 339 Goepplinger, J., 480, 491 Goetz, E., 526, 534 Goffman, E., 166, 177, 301, 308 Goggin, 416n Gold, D. P., 189, 201 Gold, J., 296, 308, 350, 365 Gold, M., 73, 84 Gold, N., 559, 566, 576 Gold, R., 667, 673 Gold, W. R., 81, 88, 610, 623 Goldberg, A., 528, 533 Goldberg, D., 98, 104, 117, 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Goldberg, D. P., 97, 104, 114, 115, 136 Goldberg, H. I., 501, 512 Goldberg, R. J., 501, 511 Goldenhar, L., 640, 641, 642, 644, 646, 648 Goldernberg, R. L., 267, 278 Golding, D., 226, 227, 237

AUTHOR INDEX Goldman, A. H., 165, 166, 167, 169, 174, 177 Goldman, S. L., 184, 201 Goldsmith, C. H., 658, 675 Goldsmith, D. J., 263, 264, 265, 271, 272, 273, 277, 278, 280, 287, 306 Goldstein, E., 669, 673 Goldstein, K., 403, 422 Goldstein, M., 100, 115 Goldstein, M. G., 101, 104, 115, 610, 622 Goldston, W. P., 425, 441 Golin, A. K., 372, 376, 390, 398 Golin, C. E., 141, 144, 145, 153, 157 Golladay, G. J., 497, 508 Gombash, L., 376, 379, 386, 397 Gomez, C. A., 669, 673 Gomez, H., 434, 442 Gonzales, J. J., 79, 83 Gonzalez, M., 660, 670 Gonzalez, M. C., 434, 438 Gonzalez, R. E., 474, 491 Gonzalez, V., 480, 491 Good, B., 12, 14, 32 Good, B. J., 14, 32 Goodall, H. L., 427, 438 Goodhart, F. W., 485, 492 Goodman, K. W., 652, 654, 668, 671 Goodman, L. E., 658, 673 Goodman, M. J., 658, 673 Goodman, R., 213, 220 Goodman, R. M., 208, 213, 214, 218, 220, 253, 257 Goodwin, J. M., 69, 85 Goodwin, J. S., 69, 85 Goodwin, M. A., 151, 152, 160 Goodwin, R., 264, 281 Googins, B., 431, 438 Goold, S. D., 72, 84, 111, 116 Gorawara-Bhat, R., 73, 85 Gordon, G. H., 84, 96, 99, 104, 117, 172, 173, 178 Gordon, L., 573, 574, 578 Gorer, G., 42, 58 Gossett, C., 543, 555 Gostin, L. O., 173, 174, 178 Gotcher, J. M., 267, 281 Gottheil, E., 148, 159, 267, 284 Gottlieb, B. H., 269, 272, 274, 275, 281 Gottlieb, N. H., 651, 652, 671, 675 Gould K. L., 275, 283 Gouldner, A. W., 126, 137 Gourevitch, P., 263, 281 Gowen, L. K., 659, 674 Gozzi, E. K., 1, 5, 125, 137, 141, 142, 158 Gracely, E., 72, 73, 83

697 Grado, J., 655n, 678 Graham, J. R., 167, 178 Graham, W., 346, 438 Granade, P., 521, 533 Graney, M. J., 350, 367 Granger, J., 184, 201 Granovetter, M. S., 217, 218 Grant, L., 353, 354, 368 Graves, M. C., 561, 580 Gray, B., 332, 340, 343 Gray, B. H., 332, 341 Gray, C., 297, 309 Gray, D. P., 152, 157 Gray, G., 224, 237 Gray, J. L., 359, 366 Gray, L. A., 478, 491 Grayson, M., 97, 104, 118 Greatbatch, D., 132, 137 Grecas, V., 491 Greco, M., 100, 104, 116 Green, D. C., 587, 592, 602 Green, K., 233, 237 Green, L., 210, 216, 217, 673 Green, L. W., 424, 443, 655, 666, 673 Greenbaum, R. B., 101, 119 Greenberg, B., 450, 463, 470 Greenberg, L. W., 103, 104, 119 Greenberg, M., 228, 236 Greene, J. O., 66, 68, 84 Greene, K., 166, 178 Greene, M. G., 66, 68, 84, 128, 129, 136, 137, 143, 146, 157, 192, 198 Greener, S., 480, 490, 561, 580 Greenes, R. A., 331, 341 Greenfield, M. L., 497, 508 Greenfield, S., 68, 69, 70, 71, 79, 84, 85, 95, 106, 107, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 127, 137, 141, 147, 148, 150, 157, 158, 164, 178, 609, 621 Greenspon, P., 28, 33 Greenwood, D. J., 230, 234, 236 Greenwood, K. M., 382, 386, 402 Greer, A. L., 218 Greider, 404 Greisinger, A. J., 101, 104, 115 Griffin, M. I., 296, 308 Grigsby, B., 519, 523, 532, 534 Grigsby, J., 516, 517, 518, 523, 520, 534 Grimm, R., 452, 471 Grob, J. J., 610, 620 Grodin, D., 576, 579 Groenveld, J., 431, 442 Grogan, 416 Grognard, C., 610, 620

698 Grosjean, F., 610, 620 Gross, D. A., 151, 152, 157 Gross, H., 327, 334, 341 Gross, L., 549, 553, 565, 578, 665, 673 Gross, R., 125, 138, 148, 160 Grossberg, L., 35, 57, 557, 558, 559, 560, 578 Grossman, G., 411, 422 Grove, S. J., 550, 553 Grumbach, K., 69, 72, 73, 84, 87 Grund, J-P. C., 295, 308 Grunig, J. E., 476, 492, 499, 510, 547, 551, 554 Gubrium, J. F., 23, 32, 328, 341 Gudykunst, W. B., 77, 84 Guerra, F. A., 212, 217 Guidi, E. J., 80, 84 Guillaume, J. C., 610, 620 Guillory, J., 301, 303, 311 Guinan, J. J., 350, 365 Gunter, E. W., 286, 309 Gurevitch, M., 35, 58, 59 Gusella, J., 276, 280 Gustafson, D. H., 276, 281, 497, 509, 597, 602, 610, 614, 620, 621, 623 Gusy, B., 350, 365 Guthrie, D., 267, 280 Gutierrez, L. M., 244, 254, 257, 259, 659, 670 Gutske, S., 524, 534 Guttman, N., 212, 218, 477, 492, 635, 636, 640, 641, 648, 655, 657, 661, 673 Gwyn, R., 571, 578

H

Ha, N., 252, 257 Haas, S. M., 23, 31, 44, 56, 301, 306 Habiba, M. A., 656, 673 Hacker, 403, 414 Hacker, J. S., 336, 341 Hackman, J. R., 383, 385, 399 Haddad, S., 664, 672 Hafer, C. L., 503, 510 Hafferty, F. W., 356, 365 Hahn, D. F., 656, 674 Hahn, E., 474, 492 Haigh, V. H., 126, 128, 129, 137 Haignere, C. S., 667, 673 Hale, C. L., 287, 313 Hale, J., 452, 470 Hale, J. L., 659, 673 Hales, D., 111, 118 Hall, A., 100, 116, 148, 156

AUTHOR INDEX Hall, J. A., 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 75, 79, 84, 86, 99, 104, 118, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 142, 147, 148, 157, 159, 164, 178, 180, 194, 195, 201, 610, 621 Hall, J. R., 51, 56, 486, 490 Hall, S., 565, 567, 578 Haller, K. B., 172, 180 Hallum, A., 167, 178 Halpern, M. T., 320, 339 Halsey, J., 273, 277 Halstead, L. S., 384, 399 Hamburger, 416 Hamby, J., 186, 201 Hamer, R. L., 339 Hamilton, P. K., 547, 554 Hammer, J. C., 299, 300, 308 Hammer, M., 269, 281 Hammond, S. K., 443 Hammond, S. L., 297, 308, 478, 491 Hampson, S. E., 78, 80, 84 Hampton, J., 110, 117 Hancock, T., 245, 259 Handy, C., 438 Hane, A. C., 474, 492 Hannan, M. T., 338, 341 Hannan, P., 664, 678 Hansen, M. C., 372, 399 Hansmann, H., 327, 341 Hanson-Divers, E. C., 591, 592, 602 Hardesty, 350, 352, 361, 365 Hardesty, M., 321, 327, 340, 391, 398 Harding, C., 445, 448 Hardoff, D., 103, 117 Hargie, O., 96, 117 Hargraves, J. L., 194, 195, 201 Harlan, C., 657, 672 Harless, W., 78, 79, 87 Harlock, S., 2, 5 Harlow, L. L., 502, 511 Harmon, A., 467, 470 Harmon, C. C., 186, 201 Harrington, N., 454, 471 Harrington, N. G., 16, 33, 287, 309 Harris Interactive, 497, 510 Harris, G., 544, 554 Harris, I. B., 80, 84 Harris, J. S., 423, 429, 438, 441 Harris, R., 398 Harris, R. M., 298, 299, 309 Harris, T. M., 569, 578 Harris, W. S., 15, 20, 25, 34 Harrison, J. K., 353, 354, 365 Harrison, J. S., 299, 311

AUTHOR INDEX Harrison, L., 298, 309 Harrison, M., 111, 117 Harrison, R., 430, 440 Hart, G., 293, 294, 298, 306, 589, 590, 605 Hart, R., 131, 140 Harter, L. M., 48, 58 Hartsell, H., 246, 260 Harvey, B., 585, 602 Harvey, I., 146, 147, 158 Harvie, P., 349, 366 Harwicke, N. J., 380, 399 Harwood, J., 189, 202 Hasek, G., 428, 439 Hasenberg, N. M., 171, 176 Haskell, W., 452, 470, 484, 491 Hauer, L. B., 302, 307 Haug, M. R., 67, 84, 85, 123, 135, 137, 191, 192, 201 Havermans, T., 185, 186, 200 Havlicek, P. L., 322, 323, 326, 341 Hawes, L. C., 289, 309 Hawkins, A. H., 17, 32 Hawkins, K., 474, 492 Hawkins, R. P., 276, 281, 610, 614, 621, 623, 664, 679 Hawkins, W. E., 297, 309 Hawke, B. L., 476, 490 Hayden, J., 614, 624 Hayden, S., 558, 578 Hayes, 410 Hayes, J., 525, 532 Hayes, P. A., 372, 399 Hayes, R. P., 173, 178 Haylock, D. W., 584, 602 Haynes, G. W., 429, 439 Haynes, K. M., 669, 671 Haynes, R. B., 664, 674 Hays, R. B., 656, 666, 674 Hays, R. D., 78, 86, 154, 156, 504, 510 Hazelton, M., 564, 567, 578 Headache Study Group of the University of Western Ontario, 141, 147, 148, 157 Healthcare PR and Marketing News, 543, 554 Heaney, C. A., 264, 268, 281, 638, 649 Heaney, D. J., 151, 152, 157 Hearth-Holmes, M., 594, 602 Heath, C., 132, 137 Heath, J. S., 222, 236 Heath, R. L., 434, 439, 539, 552, 554, 566, 581 Heath, R. P., 578 Heatherington, L. T., 552, 554 Hebert, J. R., 435, 439, 443 Hecht, M. L., 287, 305

699 Hedge, A., 426, 439 Heenan, P. J., 640, 648 Heeter, C., 506, 510 Heidrich, F., 67, 87 Hejl, J., 73, 88 Heller, K., 275, 281 Heller, T., 276, 281 Helman, C. G., 164, 178 Helmreich, R. L., 349, 368 Helms, L. J., 67, 68, 82, 195, 199 Helpmann, E., 411, 422 Henbest, R. J., 70, 85, 128, 130, 137, 151, 157 Henderson, A., 356, 365 Henderson, D. A., 334, 341 Henderson, G. M., 207, 218, 610, 620 Hendriks, S., 254, 259 Henery, R., 97, 119 Henley, N., 294, 309 Hennessy, C. H., 380, 399 Hennessy, M., 297, 309 Hennrikus, D. J., 126, 137, 144, 145, 147, 148, 158, 159 Henrotin, Y., 543, 555 Henry, D., 588, 603 Henske, J., 504, 508 Henwood, K., 190, 203 Hepburn, S. J., 53, 58 Herbst, M., 592, 594, 601 Herek, G. M., 656, 673 Herman, J., 152, 157 Hernandez, O., 101, 111, 118 Hernson, P., 403, 422 Hertog, J. K., 504, 510, 572, 578 Herzberg, B., 47, 56 Herzog, J., 73, 88 Hess, K. R., 125, 138, 148, 160, 170, 179 Heszen-Klemens, I., 147, 148, 157 Hetherington, R. W., 369, 373, 386, 387, 401 Hetherington, S. E., 298, 299, 309 Hewitt, N., 504, 510 Hewitt Associates, LLC, 430, 439 Hewson, S., 658, 675 Heyward, W., 301, 309 Hickam, D. H., 96, 99, 104, 117 Hickson, G. B., 149, 157 Higdon, J., 585, 602 Higgins, P. G., 268, 281 High, P., 293, 298, 306 Hill, D., 610, 622 Hillhouse, J., 349, 365 Hillier, L., 298, 309 Hillier, V., 99, 100, 114, 118 Hilty, D., 525, 533

700 Himle, D., 360, 365 Himmelstein, J. S., 443 Hines, S. C., 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 51, 55, 58, 164, 174, 176, 358, 359, 364 Hingson, R., 302, 313 Hirokawa, R., 395, 399 Hirschman, 416 Hirschmann, K., 132, 137 Hiskes, R., 227, 229, 236 Hixson, M. L., 435, 439 Hjortdahl, P., 76, 85 Hoberman, H. M., 270, 279 Hochbaum, G. M., 473, 492 Hochschild, A. R., 355, 365, 435, 439 Hochstadt, N. J., 380, 399 Hodges, A., 492 Hodgetts, D., 569, 578 Hoff, R. G., 597, 603 Hoff, T., 572, 577 Hoffman, G., 585, 601 Hoffman, S., 68, 84 Hoffman-Goetz, L., 562, 578 Hoffmann, A., 610, 621 Hoffmann, K., 610, 621 Hogan, D. B., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Holbrook, J. H., 111, 118 Holden, P., 151, 160 Holder, C., 373, 374, 386, 390, 400 Holladay, S. J., 545, 553 Hollenbach, K. A., 268, 279 Hollender, M. H., 121, 139 Holley, J., 43, 55 Hollingshead, A.B., 276, 277 Holloway, I. M., 166, 177 Holloway, R. L., 74, 85 Holm, K., 561, 569, 577 Holman, D. C., 640, 648 Holman, H., 482, 492 Holmes, J., 301, 302, 303, 309 Holstein, J. A., 23, 32 Holsti, O. R., 559, 578 Holt, E., 223, 238 Holt, R., 301, 302, 303, 309 Holtan, A., 525, 534 Holzer, C. E., 188, 201 Homles-Rovner, M., 68, 85 Honess-Morreale, L., 597, 601 hooks, b., 245, 259 Hooks, P. C., 504, 508 Hooper, E. M., 69, 85 Hoos, A. M., 64, 66, 86, 95, 105, 118 Hope, A., 434, 439 Hopf, G., 589, 598, 603

AUTHOR INDEX Hoppe, R. B., 97, 119 Hopton, J. L., 151, 152, 157 Hordijk, G. J., 273, 279 Hornberger, J., 151, 157 Hornik, R., 457, 470, 497, 510, 652, 655, 673 Horswell, R., 614, 624 Horwitz, J. J., 388, 392, 399 Hospers, H., 597, 604, 610, 623 Hospers, H. J., 501, 512, 597, 604 Hospice Association of America, 328, 341 House, J. S., 263, 264, 281, 428, 439 Houston, K. L., 377, 380, 399 Howard-Pitney, B., 590, 602, 655, 678 Howe, G. W., 426, 439 Howell, W. S., 48, 58 Howell-Koren, P. R., 68, 85 Howie, J. G., 151, 152, 157 Hoy, D., 286, 309 Hoyle, R. H., 478, 494 Hoynes, W., 558, 572, 577 Hrudey, S., 223, 236 Hsieh, K., 276, 281 Hu, P., 526, 534 Hudson, A., 377, 400 Huebner, W. W. , 434, 440 Huerta, E. E., 244, 248, 259 Huff, T., 647, 648 Hugentobler, M. K., 428, 440 Hughart, N., 223, 238 Hughes, E., 352, 365 Hughes, K., 96, 117 Hulka, B. A., 147, 157 Hull, F. M., 151, 152, 158 Hull, F. S., 151, 152, 158 Hullett, C. R., 360, 365 Hulley, S., 452, 470, 484, 491 Hulsman, R. L., 96, 117 Hummert, M. L., 189, 190, 201, 202 Humphrey, R. H., 355, 363 Hunnicut, 436 Hunt, J., 186, 187, 200 Hunt, M., 436, 442 Hunt, M. K., 434, 435, 436, 439, 443, 595, 603 Hunt, T., 547, 551, 554 Hunter, F., 404 Hunter, K. M., 14, 32 Hurrell, J. J., Jr., 423, 424, 425, 426, 441, 442 Hurshman, A., 276, 280 Husaini, B. A., 270, 281 Hussey, J., 476, 492 Hutchinson, J., 614, 624 Hutson, A. D., 377, 378, 384, 387, 396 Hutter, B. M., 432, 439

AUTHOR INDEX Hutton, J. G., 538, 554 Hwang, W. T., 133, 140 Hyams, T. S., 661, 671 Hyde, J. S., 299, 309 Hyde, M. J., 558, 565, 578 Hyun, C. S., 148, 156, 267, 280

I

Iacono, S., 522, 527, 534 Iacovino, V., 274, 281 Ibarra, L., 573, 574, 578 Illich, I., 662, 663, 673 Imahori, T. T., 297, 310 Imershein, 407n Imm, P., 213, 218 Infante-Rivard, C., 274, 278 Ingber, M., 74, 88 Insko, C. A., 478, 492 Insko, V. M., 478, 492 Institute of Medicine, 331, 341 Institute of Office Management and Administration, 427, 439 Inui, T. S., 68, 69, 80, 85, 86, 88, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133, 135, 137, 138, 143, 159, 164, 181, 195, 203 Ireland, S. J., 298, 310 Irey, K. V., 263, 277 Irish, J. T., 67, 84, 195, 201, 610, 621 Irving, L. M., 585, 602 Irwin, 416n Irwin, M. M., 267, 277 Israel, B. A., 213, 219, 264, 268, 271, 274, 275, 279, 281, 428, 440, 637, 648

J

Jackman, M. F., 428, 439 Jackson, B., 501, 509, 597, 601 Jackson, C., 610, 620 Jackson, D. D., 50, 61 Jackson, G., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Jackson, L. D., 300, 302, 309, 334, 340, 549, 554 Jackson, R. H., 588, 591, 592, 596, 601, 603 Jackson, R. S., 253, 259 Jackson-Elmoore, C., 210, 219 Jacob, M. C., 126, 139 Jacobs, D., 452, 471 Jacobson, K. L., 595, 602 Jacobson, L. D., 151, 158 Jadack, R. A., 299, 309

701 Jaen, C. R., 151, 152, 160 Jaffe, D., 72, 73, 84 Jaffe, D. T., 425, 442 Jaffee, K. D., 268, 283 Jaffrey, F., 523, 532 Jakobi, P. L., 656, 676 James, S. A., 139, 654, 674 Janoska, J., 330, 340 Janz, N. K., 51, 58, 452, 470, 473, 483, 492, 503, 510 Japp, P. M., 48, 58 Jardine, C., 223, 236 Jarvenpaa, S., 531, 534 Jasanoff, S., 229, 236 Jason, J., 452, 471 Jastak, S., 591, 592, 602 Jatulis, D., 664, 678 Jayaratne, S., 354, 360, 365, 368 Jeanneret, O., 665, 677 Jefferson, G., 70, 87, 131, 138, 272, 281 Jeffery, R., 452, 471 Jemmott III, J. B., 504, 510 Jemmott, L. S., 504, 510 Jenike, M., 518, 532 Jenkins, C. N., 660, 677 Jenkins, D. J. A., 43, 58 Jenkins, L., 586, 603 Jenkins, V., 610, 621 Jenks, E. B., 15, 16, 34 Jenks, S., 588, 590, 591, 602 Jennings, B., 652n, 671 Jennings, P. D., 334, 342 Jensen, D. W., 429, 439 Jensen, V., 674 Jernigan, D., 561, 581 Jernigan, J. C., 173, 179 Jex, S. A., 169, 181 Jick, T. D., 216, 218 Jinnett, K., 376, 377, 378, 381, 384, 386, 387, 389, 396, 400 Jodaitis, N., 660, 670 Johannesen, 654, 659 John, C., 69, 85 Johnson, A. J., 480, 483, 493 Johnson, B., 222, 236 Johnson, B. T., 502, 503, 510, 511 Johnson, C., 300, 308 Johnson, C. A., 476, 494 Johnson, G. M., 244, 259 Johnson, J. D., 610, 621 Johnson, J. E., 148, 158 Johnson, K. K., 585, 600 Johnson, M., 289, 309

702 Johnson, R., 133, 140, 382, 402 Johnson, S., 467, 470 Johnson, S. B., 167, 180, 202 Johnson, S. J., 296, 297, 307 Johnson, V. E., 291, 310 Johnston, D., 436, 442 Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, 324, 328, 341 Jonas, A. P., 105, 116 Jones, 406, 409, 410, 411, 413n, 414 Jones, A., 98, 116, 167, 168, 177 Jones, A. H., 16, 32 Jones, B., 99, 104, 114, 118, 426, 439 Jones, B. A., 186, 200 Jones, K., 640, 641, 646, 648 Jones, M. C., 573, 574, 578 Jones, Q. J., 108, 111, 115 Jones, R., 502, 508 Jones, R. A., 42, 44, 58 Jones, R. B., 501, 509 Jones, T. F., 286, 309 Jones-Webb, R., 211, 213, 220 Joos, S. K., 96, 99, 104, 117 Jordan, J., 149, 160 Jordan, M. L., 377, 380, 386, 398 Jorgensen, C. M., 660, 677 Jose, B., 295, 296, 311 Joseph, L., 16, 33, 351, 353, 354, 366, 375, 400 Josephson, K. R., 382, 401 Journal of Applied Communication Research, 361, 365 Juanillo, N. K., 229, 236 Julesberg, K. E., 614, 621 Julia, M. C., 370, 372, 399 Jungeblut, A., 586, 603

K

Kaaya, S., 98, 104, 117 Kadushin, G., 302, 309 Kaehny, M., 516, 534 Kagarise, M. J., 168, 169, 174, 178 Kagawa-Singer, M., 173, 177 Kahl, M., 640, 648 Kahler, J., 14, 33 Kahn, 404 Kahn, J. G., 657, 674 Kahn, R. L., 264, 281, 351, 365, 427, 439 Kahn, W. A., 355, 358, 365 Kahneman, 421 Kahneman, D., 172, 174, 179

AUTHOR INDEX Kaiser, R. M., 167, 168, 178 Kalbfleisch, P. J., 265, 281, 569, 578 Kalichman, S. C., 299, 309, 480, 492, 587, 589, 596, 602, 603 Kalisky, E. M., 504, 510 Kaljee, L., 656, 658, 672 Kaluzny, A. D., 373, 399 Kamenga, M., 301, 309 Kananagh, K. H., 298, 299, 309 Kanavos, P., 329, 341 Kane, R. L., 382, 401 Kang, S. Y., 299, 310 Kanouse, D. E., 497, 508 Kao, A., 73, 85 Kaplan, 417 Kaplan, B., 269, 282 Kaplan, C., 195, 202 Kaplan, C. D., 295, 308 Kaplan, C. P., 267, 281 Kaplan, S. H., 68, 69, 70, 71, 79, 84, 85, 95, 106, 107, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 127, 137, 141, 147, 148, 151, 157, 158, 164, 178, 610, 621 Kar, S. B., 251, 259 Karasek, R., 427, 439 Karel, M. J., 188, 201 Karren, J., 436, 438 Kasch, C. R., 44, 45, 51, 55, 164, 174, 176, 358, 359, 364 Kasen, S., 504, 510 Kasl-Godley, J. E., 188, 201 Kasoleas, D. C., 479, 492 Kasper, J. F., 172, 178 Kasperson, R. E., 223, 226, 236 Kass, P. H., 79, 84 Kassekert, R., 78, 83 Kassirer, J. P., 497, 510 Kastenbaum, B., 173, 177 Kastenbaum, R. J., 190, 202 Katon, W., 377, 380, 384, 399 Katz, 404 Katz, A., 302, 309 Katz, J., 44, 47, 58 Katz, J. E., 75, 76, 82 Katz, N., 124, 125, 127, 132, 133, 137, 138 Katz, N. R., 64, 79, 86, 164, 180, 194, 201 Katz, S., 381, 399 Kaufert, P. A., 558, 569, 578 Kaufman, H. E., 209n, 218 Kaufmann, G. M., 270, 282 Kay, B. J., 252, 253, 257 Kay, K. L., 299, 311 Kazoleas, P., 272, 282 Keane, V., 223, 238

AUTHOR INDEX Kearl, M. C., 42, 58 Kearn, T. J., 596, 602 Keeley, M. P., 265, 282 Keen, J. H., 185, 186, 187, 198 Keeney, R. L., 661, 674 Kegeles, S. M., 656, 666, 674 Keger, M., 213, 218 Keijsers, G. J., 426, 442 Keintz, M. K., 501, 512 Keith, B., 267, 278 Keith, R. A., 377, 383, 387, 388, 390, 399 Kellar-Guenther, Y., 287, 313 Kelleher, C., 434, 439 Keller, M. L., 299, 309 Keller, P. A., 480, 490 Kelley, S. D. M., 268, 282 Kellner, H., 289, 306 Kelloway, E. K., 426, 439 Kelly, J. G., 213, 219 Kelly, K., 223, 237 Kelly, R., 223, 236 Kelly, R. B., 151, 152, 160 Kemper, S., 189, 202 Kemp-White, M., 73, 85 Kendal, N., 484, 489 Kennedy, C. A., 298, 309 Kennedy, G. E., 562, 578 Kennet, R. L., 75, 76, 77, 89 Kenny, J. T., 550, 553 Keram, E., 381, 401 Kercsmar, C., 70, 89, 127, 128, 140 Kerkstra, A., 96, 117 Kern, D. E., 97, 99, 104, 118, 147, 148, 159 Kern, R., 565, 566, 577 Kerner, J. F., 78, 79, 87 Kerr, C., 73, 85 Kerridge, I. H., 172, 178 Kessler, R. C., 270, 271, 284 Key, 419 Keyes, L., 378, 386, 393, 396 Keynette, D., 189, 202 Keys, H., 148, 158 Keyserlingk, E. W., 170, 178 Keyton, J., 548, 548, 555 Kickbusch, I., 669, 674 Kidd, P., 474, 492 Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., 264, 266, 272, 277, 284, 434, 441 Kiellerup, F. D., 147, 156 Kiernan, J. K., 435, 440 Kiesler, C. A., 275, 282 Kiesler, S., 276, 282 Kilgore, M., 568, 570, 578, 647, 648

703 Kilker, K. M., 590, 603 Kilpatrick, A. O., 350, 367 Kilpatrick, M. G., 610, 621 Kim, B., 170, 175 Kim, S., 78, 79, 85 Kimball, M., 377, 380, 399 Kimble, D. L., 294, 297, 299, 313 Kime, C., 167, 178 Kimmel, S., 640, 649 Kincaid, D. L., 286, 311, 476, 492 King, A., 655, 678 King, D., 377, 380, 398 King, G., 49, 59 King, K. B., 148, 158 King, L., 381, 399 Kingdon, J., 409, 410, 411, 412, 413n, 414, 415n, 417, 418 Kingsbury, L., 210, 211, 217, 251, 253, 257 Kinlaw, K., 173, 178 Kinnersley, P., 146, 147, 158 Kinsella, J., 286, 291, 309 Kirby, S. D., 476, 492, 652, 666, 674 Kirk, L. M., 145, 155 Kirkeeide, R. L., 275, 283 Kirkwood, W. G., 19, 32, 660, 674 Kirsch, I., 586, 603 Kirsch, M., 170, 171, 178 Kirscht, 484 Kirton, C. A., 293, 294, 312 Kiss, A., 100, 117 Kissinger, P., 303, 305 Kiviniemi, M. T., 223, 238, 585, 604 Kjellgren, K. I., 144, 145, 158 Kjellson, N., 572, 577 Klatch, 407 Kleiber, D., 350, 365 Klein, R. C., 264, 282 Kleinke, 403, 417, 418 Kleinman, A., 12, 14, 32, 78, 85, 434, 440 Kleinman, D. V., 498, 511 Kleinman, S., 356, 368 Kligman, E. W., 605 Kline, F. G., 452, 471 Kline, K. N., 29n, 32, 38, 45, 53, 55, 478, 489, 492, 561, 564, 568, 570, 575, 576, 578, 579 Klingle, R. S., 78, 79, 85, 336, 341 Knapp, M. L., 359, 366, 377, 381, 384, 400 Knight, M., 400 Knoeffel, F., 380, 399 Knoke, 404 Knoll, K., 531, 534 Knowles, J. H., 660, 674 Knuf, J., 48, 58

704 Kobrin, S., 501, 512, 597, 604 Koch, M. W., 329, 341 Koch, P. B., 297, 309 Koenig, B. A., 173, 177, 395, 400 Koepsell, T., 208, 213, 217, 218 Kogan, M. D., 268, 279 Koh, H. K., 610, 622 Kohane, I. S., 76, 77, 86 Koinis, C., 170, 171, 179 Kok, G., 505, 509 Kolb, K. J., 426, 437 Kolker, A., 14, 30, 424, 437 Kolodny, R. C., 291, 310 Kolody, B., 270, 279 Kolstad, A., 586, 603 Kong, B. W., 253, 259 Kongstvedt, P. R., 332, 341 Konrad, T. R., 353, 354, 358, 366 Koontz, T., 225, 233, 236 Kopel, S. J., 200 Kopfman, J. E., 479, 492 Koplan, J. P., 212, 217, 268, 280, 587, 592, 602 Korhonen, H. J., 610, 621 Korhonen, T., 610, 621 Korsch, B. M., 1, 3, 5, 93, 93, 105, 117, 125, 136, 137, 141, 142, 158, 445, 448 Korsgaard, A., 67, 71, 86, 195, 203, 610, 623 Kosinski, M., 74, 87 Kotler, P., 498, 510 Kott, A., 296, 307 Kowaloff, H. B., 597, 603 Koza, M. P., 530, 534 Kraemer, H. C., 148, 159, 655, 678 Krahn, G. L., 167, 178 Kramer, A., 516, 534 Kramer, B. J., 373, 374, 377, 384, 402 Kramer, H. C., 267, 284 Kramer, P. D., 41, 58 Krantz, M., 542, 554 Kraus, N., 323, 341 Kraut, R., 276, 282 Kravitz, R. L., 80, 85, 497, 508 Kreps, G. L., 2, 3, 5, 39, 58, 335, 341, 424, 440, 594, 603, 609, 611, 617, 619, 621, 622, 658, 674 Kresevic, D., 373, 374, 386, 389, 400 Kreuter, M. W., 113, 117, 215, 219, 500, 501, 503, 509, 510, 512, 597, 601, 604, 655, 673 Kriebel, 410 Kriegsman, D. M. W., 270, 271, 283 Krikorian, D. H., 336, 342, 375, 376, 392, 400 Krimsky, S., 225, 226, 227, 237 Krippendorff, K., 559, 579

AUTHOR INDEX Krishman, S. P., 286, 309 Krishnaswamy, J., 276, 277 Kristal, A., 208, 213, 217, 218 Kristeller, J. L., 501, 511 Kritjanson, L. J., 610, 621 Kroger, F., 452, 471, 664, 677 Kroll, J., 68, 85 Krone, K. J., 355, 356, 367 Kronenfeld, 416 Kruijver, I. P. M., 96, 117 Ku, L., 597, 604 Kubler-Ross, E., 167, 177 Kuczewski, M. G., 172, 173, 178 Kudelka, A. P., 100, 101, 104, 115 Kuhn, S., 425, 440 Kuhnert, K. W., 426, 440 Kuklinski, 421 Kukull, W. A., 126, 128, 129, 137 Kumekawa, E., 245, 258 Kunimoto, E. N., 594, 603 Kunkel, A. D., 424, 435, 440 Kunkel, A. W., 53, 59 Kuperman, G., 523, 532 Kupper, L. L., 147, 157 Kupst, M. J., 111, 117 Kurtz, S., 96, 119 Kwan, J., 102, 104, 114, 119

L

Laband, D. N., 550, 553 Labonte, R., 208, 212, 219, 254, 257, 659, 670 Labrecque, M. S., 192, 202 Lachman, M. E., 664, 679 Lai, N. A., 377, 402 Laidley, T. L., 171, 176 Laitman, L., 485, 492 Lake, E. T., 337, 339 Lakey, B., 270, 283 Lakoff, G., 289, 309 Lalonde, B., 658, 674 Lammers, J. C., 48, 58, 72, 85, 326, 327, 334, 336, 337, 341, 342, 344, 351, 353, 366, 375, 376, 392, 400 Lammes, F. B., 64, 66, 86, 95, 105, 118 Lampert, K., 196, 202 Lampic, C., 610, 622 Landen, M., 196, 202 Landisberg, P. A., 428, 440 Landolt, P., 214, 219 Landrigan, P. J., 428, 442 Lands, L. C., 170, 178

AUTHOR INDEX Lang, J., 186, 200 Lang, N. G., 302, 309 Langa, D., 151, 152, 161 Langa, D. M., 151, 152, 160 Langan, E. J., 287, 313 Lange, U., 296, 308 Langewitz, W. A., 100, 117 Langford, I., 227, 228, 237 Langstaff, J. E., 301, 302, 310 Lanken, P. N., 173, 177 Lantz, P. M., 571, 579 Lanutti, P. J., 286, 311 Lanza, A. F., 275, 282 Lapinska, E., 147, 148, 157 Lapinski, M. K., 481, 495, 543, 554 Lapotin, 408n Lara, M., 497, 508 Lare, K. M., 77, 85 Larkey, K. L., 388, 400 Larkey, L., 610, 620 Larrabee, J. H., 593, 596, 602 Larson, D. E., 80, 85 Larson, J. R., Jr., 381, 388, 400 Larson, R. S., 210, 215, 218, 219 Larson, S., 128, 133, 138, 140 Larsson, G., 610, 622 Lashley, M., 170, 178 Lasky, E. Z., 503, 511 Last, J., 666n, 674 Laster, L., 350, 366 Latella, D., 373, 374, 400 LaTourette, S., 338, 342 Lau, 421 Laub, C. L., 659, 674 Laumann, 404 Laurence, L., 558, 579 Laurent, C., 167, 178 Lauver, D., 148, 158 LaVallee, R., 372, 386, 400 Lavery, J., 357, 363 Lavin, B., 67, 85, 123, 135, 137 Law, S., 659, 676 Lawrance, L., 504, 510, 511 Lawrence, S. L., 77, 87, 150, 159 Lawrence, T., 334, 342 Lawson, D., 79, 88 Lawson, E. J., 145, 157 Lazaras, W., 598, 603 Lazaro, C. G., 81, 85 Lazarus, R., 270, 280 Lazarus, R. S., 40, 44, 58, 264, 270, 271, 279, 283 Leaf, P. J., 188, 201 Leahy, L., 518, 524, 532, 533

705 Leaman, T., 350, 353, 368 Leaman, T. L., 72, 73, 87 Leape, L. L., 381, 384, 386, 400 Lear, D., 298, 299, 310 Leary, J., 349, 365 Leatt, P., 386, 400 Lebow, M. A., 561, 579 Lederman, L. C., 485, 492 Lederman, R., 436, 439 Lee, C., 223, 237 Lee, F., 432, 442 Lee, J. L., 381, 399 Lee, P. P., 591, 596, 603 Lee, R. L., 543, 555 Lee, R. T., 349, 359, 366 Leek, K. M., 501, 512 Lees, S., 360, 366 Lehman, D. R., 264, 284 Leichty, G., 548, 554 Leichty, G. B., 548, 555 Leidner, D., 531, 534 Leigh, J. P., 430, 440 Leiter, M. P., 349, 366, 426, 427, 428, 440 Lejeune, E., 543, 555 Lengel, R., 525, 530, 533 Lennox Holt, P. J., 185, 186, 187, 198 Lenzi, R., 100, 101, 104, 115 Leopold, N., 95, 117 Leppin, A., 270, 284 Leppin, R., 270, 282 Lerman, C., 81, 85, 656, 673 Lesser, C., 334, 340 Lester, G. W., 141, 142, 149, 158 Letvak, S., 353, 357, 366 Levens, M., 428, 443 Levenson, S. M., 302, 313 Levenstein, C., 425, 440 Levenstein, J. H., 128, 135, 137 Leventhal, E., 223, 237 Leventhal, H., 223, 237, 267, 284, 477, 481, 491, 492, 550, 554 Levi, L., 426, 440 Levick, D., 353, 366 Levin, K. D., 502, 503, 511 Levin, M., 230, 234, 236 Levine, D., 228, 238 Levine, H., 467, 471 Levinson, D., 550, 554 Levinson, S. C., 166, 176 Levinson, W., 67, 73, 77, 80, 84, 85, 98, 102, 104, 111, 115, 117, 131, 140, 149, 150, 158, 171, 176 Leviton, L., 658, 669, 672

706 Levy, K. B., 569, 577 Levy, M. R., 35, 58, 59 Levy, R. K., 502, 511 Levy, S. R., 504, 510 Lew, R. A., 484, 491, 610, 622 Lewellen, D., 663, 673 Lewin, A. Y., 530, 534 Lewin, K., 209n, 219, 225, 237 Lewis, 488 Lewis, C., 67, 82, 194, 195, 199, 203 Lewis, C. C., 97, 107, 110, 112, 114, 117 Lewis, C. E., 80, 85 Lewis, D., 641, 645, 646, 648, 649 Lewis, E. A., 244, 259 Lewis, J. E., 298, 310 Lewis, L. K., 287, 310, 337, 342, 432, 440 Lewis, M., 172, 178 Lewis, R. J., 434, 440 Lewis, S., 224, 237 Lewis, S. E., 213, 219 Ley, P., 144, 158, 481, 494 Ley, P. L., 105, 111, 117 Leyerle, 418 Lezin, N. A., 215, 219 La Fond, J. Q., 173, 180 Li, S., 561, 569, 577 Lia-Hoagberg, B., 268, 283 Libbus, K., 299, 310 Lichtenberg, P. A., 381, 400 Lichtenstein, E., 482, 490 Lichtenstein, R., 376, 377, 378, 381, 384, 386, 387, 389, 396, 400 Lichtenstein, S., 222, 226, 238 Lichtman, R. R., 267, 282 Lieberman, D., 464, 470, 610, 622 Lieberman, D. A., 669, 674 Light, 414, 417 Light, S. C., 270, 282 Lilford, R. J., 126, 135 Lin, E., 377, 380, 384, 399 Lin, N., 214, 219, 270, 282 Lindberg, L., 597, 604 Lindblom, 405n, 408, 410 Lindlof, T. R., 130, 137, 576, 579 Linn, B. S., 143, 144, 146, 158 Linn, M. W., 143, 144, 146, 158 Linnan, L., 435, 439 Linzer, J. L., 353, 354, 358, 366 Lipkin, M., Jr., 67, 68, 71, 72, 84, 86, 100, 111, 116, 127, 138, 143, 159, 167, 179, 195, 203, 610, 623 Lipkus, I. M., 610, 622 Lippincott, P., 69, 88

AUTHOR INDEX Lippman, A., 568, 576 Little, C. E., 299, 312 Little, V., 640, 649 Littlejohn, S. W., 36, 59 Litwin, E., 276, 280 Liu Sheng, O., 526, 534 Liu, H., 78, 86, 153, 157 Liu, Y., 377, 381, 384, 386, 401 Lloyd, M., 109, 116 Lo, B., 72, 73, 83, 85 Lock, M., 558, 569, 578 Locke, S. E., 597, 603 Lockshin, M., 426, 439 Loemker, V., 195, 199 Loeser, J. D., 40, 59 Loftin, L. P., 173, 178 Loftus, L., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Logan, R., 39, 60 Logue, E., 502, 509 Long, B. E. L., 66, 83 Long, K., 173, 177 Long, S. W., 591, 592, 601 Longhway, C. H., 170, 178 Longmate, M. A., 166, 176 Loomis, A., 173, 178 Lorch, E. P., 478, 494 Lorde, A., 23, 32, 243, 259 Lorenz, A. D., 392, 400 Lorig, K., 480, 482, 491, 492 Lorimor, R., 268, 278 Loring, K., 473, 492 Los Angeles Times, 542, 554 Louis, T. A., 194, 195, 201 Louria, D. B., 298, 309 Lourie, K. J., 293, 298, 306 Lovato, C. Y., 481, 491 Love, R., 267, 284 Love, R. R., 664, 679 Lovejoy, F., 295, 311 Lovett, J., 534 Lovrich, N., 229, 237 Lowe, M., 172, 178 Lowell, M. E., 660, 670 Lowenstein, A., 301, 312 Lowenstein, E., 173, 177 Lowi, 419 Lown, B., 163, 167, 174, 178 Lu, Y., 234, 238 Lubin, B., 431, 440 Luchterhand, C., 267, 284 Luckmann, R., 102, 116 Luckmann, T., 10, 31, 289, 306 Ludman, E., 377, 380, 384, 399

AUTHOR INDEX Ludwig, M. J., 255, 257 Luepker, R., 452, 471 Luepker, R. V., 498, 509, 664, 678 Luepker, V., 658, 669, 672 Luff, P., 132, 137 Lugo, N. R., 252, 253, 259 Luhrmann, T. M., 41, 59 Lukes, 406 Lund, C. A., 376, 379, 397 Lundmark, V., 276, 282 Lupton, D., 53, 59, 246, 247, 256, 259, 300, 310, 557, 558, 560, 565, 566, 570, 571, 572, 577, 579, 580, 661, 674 Lurie, N., 196, 202 Lyles, J., 354, 359, 360, 366 Lyles, J. S., 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 119, 425, 441 Lyna, P. R., 610, 622 Lynch, J. J., 286, 310 Lynn, J., 153, 157, 173, 177 Lyons, R. F., 272, 282

M

Macario, E., 244, 248, 259, 595, 603 Macaskill, P., 610, 622 Maccoby, N., 452, 470, 484, 491, 610, 621 MacDonald, L. A., 664, 674 MacDonald, M., 244, 259, 562, 578 MacElveen-Hoehn, P., 264, 280 MacGeorge, E. L., 271, 280 Machlowitz, M., 427, 440 MacKay, D. G., 189, 199 Mackey-Kallis, S., 656, 674 Mackintosh, D., 342 Macklin, R., 653, 674 Macnee, C., 150, 158 MaCurdy, T., 151, 157 Madden, T. J., 489 Madison, E. M., 597, 601 Madsen, R., 212, 217, 665, 670 Maduschke, K. M., 101, 119 Maestro-Scherer, J., 230, 235, 237, 238 Magazine Publishers of America, 558, 579 Maguire, C. P., 148, 156 Maguire, P., 99, 100, 104, 114, 115, 118 Magura, S., 299, 310 Maibach, E. W., 286, 310, 452, 470, 482, 484, 492, 493, 504, 511, 562, 577, 640, 648 Majerovitz, D., 146, 157 Makau, J., 653, 674 Makinwa, B., 245, 257 Makoul, G., 15, 33, 96, 118

707 Maler, H., 640, 648 Malik, T. K., 164, 176 Malone, J., 544, 554 Maloney, B. D., 310 Maloney, S. K., 664, 678 Malow, R. M., 298, 310 Malterud, K., 131, 137 Malulu, M., 301, 309 Managed Care Efforts That Resonate with Consumers, 543, 554 Mandell, K. L., 476, 494 Mandl, K. D., 76, 77, 86 Manguel, A., 583, 603 Mann, O. E., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Manning, J., 430, 431, 440 Manning, R., 654, 674 Manning, T., 67, 68, 70, 88, 526, 534, 610, 623 Mansergh, G., 302, 303, 310 Manteuffel, B., 297, 309 Manton, K. G., 188, 202 Marantz, P. R., 661, 675 March, J., 408 March, V., 67, 83 Marcus, A. C., 617, 623 Marcus, P. M., 574, 579 Marder, W., 327, 345 Margen, S., 658, 677 Margillo, G. A., 297, 310 Margolis, K., 196, 202 Marin, B. V., 298, 310 Marin, G., 298, 310 Marinelli, T. M., 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116 Marino, C., 562, 578 Mark, B. A., 355, 368 Mark, M. M., 610, 622 Markakis, K. M., 77, 82, 131, 139, 141, 149, 156, 164, 176 Markens, S., 558, 569, 579 Markin, S., 483, 489 Marks, D., 429, 438 Marks, G., 301, 302, 303, 310, 312 Marks, S., 658, 675 Marmor, 413, 414, 415n, 416, 417, 418n, 419, 420, 421 Marmor, T. R., 336, 341 Marra, E. G., 378, 397 Marris, C., 227, 228, 237 Marsh, F. J., 77, 84 Marshall, A. A., 98, 99, 101, 104, 119, 243, 244, 259 Marshall, J. R., 654, 675 Marsick, V. J., 436, 438

708 Martell, D., 473, 474, 495 Martin, E., 41, 59, 524, 533, 661, 675 Martin, I. M., 662, 677 Martin, M., 645, 649 Martinez, R., 15, 31 Marton, K. I., 143, 156 Marvel, M. K., 150, 151, 158 Marwick, C., 590, 603 Maslach, C., 426, 427, 428, 440 Mason, A. T., 233, 237 Mason, D. J., 353, 364 Mason, H. R., 302, 312 Mason, H. R. C., 301, 302, 310 Massett, H. A., 493 Masters, W. H., 291, 310 Masuch, 408n Maternal and Child Health Services, 268, 282 Matheny, A., 228, 229, 239 Matheus, R., 329, 342 Mathews, D., 212, 219 Mathios, A., 563, 579 Mathis, 407n Matsen, K., 298, 311 Matson, C. G., 74, 85 Matthews, C. K., 16, 33 Matthews, R., 377, 380, 399 Matthews, Z., 146, 147, 159 Mattson, M., 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 59, 335, 342, 424, 435, 440, 474, 478, 489, 492, 493, 575, 579 Mauksch, L. B., 392, 400 Maxfield, A., 452, 470, 597, 602, 610, 621 Maxwell, A. E., 298, 310 May, R., 232, 233, 237 May, S. K., 431, 433, 440 Mayeaux, E. J., 588, 591, 592, 601, 602 Mayer, G., 350, 366 Mayes, R., 332, 342 Maynard, D. W., 167, 178 Mayne, L., 656, 662, 672 Mayo, F., 147, 157 Mayor, F., 228, 230, 237 Mays, V. M., 294, 297, 310 Maysent, M., 426, 440 Mbu, L., 301, 309 Mbuyi, N., 301, 309 McAdams, D. P., 33 McAliser, A., 669, 676 McAllister, J., 211, 219 McAlpine, D. D., 74, 86 McArdle, F. B., 587, 590, 603 McArdle, R. M., 173, 180 McBride, D. L., 154, 159 McCain, T., 525, 534

AUTHOR INDEX McCallum, D., 228, 237 McCallum, L. W., 350, 365 McCann, S., 108, 110, 118 McCarthy, C., 276, 278 McCarthy, J. D., 210, 219 McCarthy, S., 300, 310 McCarty, T., 170, 171, 179 McCaughan, W., 525, 534 McCaul, K. D., 432, 436, 438 McClelland, M., 392, 401 McClendon, M. J., 276, 278 McClintock, M. K., 266, 278 McClure, L., 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116 McCombs, M., 564, 579, 665n, 675 McCombs, S. L., 268, 284 McConnell, R. L, 377, 379, 398 McCracken, E. C., 128, 135, 137 McCrone, P., 377, 381, 384, 400 McCubbins, 411n McCue, J. D., 173, 179 McDanel, H. J., 667, 673 McDermott, M. A., 266, 279, 329, 342 McDermott, V. M., 263, 264, 273, 280 McDonald, D. A., 297, 308 McDonnell, K., 610, 621 McDowell, T., 81, 88 Mcelfatrick, S., 349, 365 McElroy, K., 213, 218 McFarlane, J., 252, 253, 259 McGarrey, S. T., 401 McGee, D. L., 524, 533, 589, 590, 605 McGee, D. S., 164, 179 McGehee, L. J., 425, 441 McGill, J. B., 105, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118 McGlynn, E. A., 497, 508 McGovern, J., 100, 104, 116 McGovern, P., 196, 202 McGrath, C., 426, 439 McGrath, G., 97, 104, 114, 115 McGrath, J. E., 385, 400 McGuire, W. J., 452, 455, 466, 471, 550, 554 McHorney, C. A., 74, 87 MCIC Releases “Health Care and the Internet,” 543, 554 McIntosh, W. D., 563, 579 McKaganey, N., 295, 310 McKenzie, J., 42, 44, 58 McKenzie, N. J., 166, 181, 244, 258, 286, 296, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 307, 424, 434, 437 McKeon, J. K., 243, 244, 259 McKewon, T., 423, 441 McKinlay, J. B., 327, 342

AUTHOR INDEX McKnight, J., 246, 259 McKnight, J. L., 209, 219 McLachlan, H. V., 661, 675 McLanahan, S. M., 275, 283 McLane, C. G., 144, 145, 158 McLauchlan, C. A. J., 167, 179 McLaughlin, C., 334, 340 McLaughlin, C. P., 372, 386, 400 McLaughlin, E., 659, 671 McLean, J., 293, 294, 298, 306 McLellan, L., 73, 88 McLeroy, K., 607, 608 McLeroy, K. B., 651, 671 McLeroy, K. R., 245, 259, 269, 282, 638, 648, 652, 654, 655, 657, 663, 675 McLerran, D., 430, 431, 437 McMilan, J. J., 360, 365 McMillan, D. W., 246, 259 McMillan, S. J., 558, 579 McMurray, J. E., 353, 354, 358, 366 McNair, L. D., 297, 306 McNeil, B. J., 69, 84, 164, 178 McNeilis, K. S., 105, 116, 129, 130, 136, 137, 168, 177, 506, 512, 524, 533 McNew, R., 594, 601 McPhee, R., 342 McPhee, S. J., 167, 168, 175, 179, 252, 257 McQuail, D., 599, 603 McTavish, F., 276, 281 McTavish, F. M., 614, 621 McVey, L. J., 377, 378, 384, 386, 397 McWhinney, I. R., 11, 33, 121, 128, 128, 133, 135, 137, 139, 143, 149, 160, 164, 177, 180 McWilliam, C. L., 128, 139, 143, 149, 153, 158, 160, 164, 180 Meachen, S. E., 268, 282 Mead, N., 128, 129, 137 Meade, C. D., 584, 593, 594, 598, 601 Mechanic, D., 73, 74, 86, 154, 158, 286, 310 Medalie, J. H., 151, 152, 160 Medical Group Management Association, 327, 342 Medved, C. E., 210, 215, 219 MeElhaney, J. E., 373, 400 Meeuwesen, L., 67, 71, 86, 126, 137, 194, 195, 202 Mehrabian, A., 489, 493 Meisel, A., 173, 179 Mekhjian, H., 525, 534 Melani, D., 550, 554 Melber, 413 Meleis, A. I., 354, 357, 364 Mellen, A., 484, 489

709 Mellor, V. P., 185, 186, 187, 198 Melton, R. J., 212, 217 Melzack, R., 40, 59 Mendel, P. J., 319, 320, 337, 344 Merideth, E., 251, 252, 259 Merkel, W. T., 106, 110, 118 Merriam, P. A., 501, 511 Mesquita, F., 295, 310 Metcalfe, D., 194, 199 Metcalfe, K. A., 301, 302, 310 Metter, J., 481, 490 Mettger, W., 657, 672 Mettler, J. A., 98, 99, 101, 104, 119 Metts, S., 272, 282, 359, 366 Metzger, J., 548, 555 Meyboom-de Jong, B., 610, 623 Meyer, D., 550, 554 Meyer, G., 207, 218, 473, 474, 480, 483, 493, 495, 610, 620 Meyer, J. W., 319, 320, 321, 330, 334, 342, 344 Meyer, T. J., 610, 622 Meyerowitz, B. E., 479, 493, 610, 623 Meyers, R. A., 288, 312 Meyerson, D. E., 356, 366 Micciolo, R., 610, 620 Michal-Johnson, P., 294, 306, 658, 675 Michel, V., 173, 176, 653, 670 Michell-Nunn, S., 230, 238 Michels, R., 404 Michielutte, R., 592, 601 Michigan Department of Community Health, 484 Mick, S. S., & Associates, 320, 342 Mickler, S., 298, 307 Middlebrook, C., 17n, 33 Mientus, J. M., 377, 379, 398 Mijhuis, F. J., 354, 364 Mikhail, B. L., 267, 282 Milardo, R. M., 264, 282 Milburn, M. A., 68, 84 Miles, A., 558, 580 Miles, L., 298, 311 Miliband, 405 Milio, N., 213, 219, 661, 675 Millar, T., 97, 104, 114, 115 Millay, 409, 417 Millay, B., 70, 81, 88, 129, 130, 133, 139 Miller, 403 Miller, A., 540, 554 Miller, C. S., 149, 157 Miller, D., 357, 366 Miller, D. J., 172, 180 Miller, D. R., 610, 622 Miller, G., 452, 469

710 Miller, G. R., 288, 311 Miller, K. I., 16, 33, 37, 46, 48, 59, 337, 342, 343, 350, 351, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 359, 360, 362, 364, 365, 366, 367, 375, 425, 400, 441, 478, 491 Miller, L. H., 67, 84, 195, 201 Miller, M. E., 296, 308 Miller, R. V., 499, 509 Miller, W. L., 151, 152, 160 Miller-Day, M., 132, 139 Miller-Rassulo, M. A., 287, 305 Mills, C. W., 404 Mills, S., 500, 508 Mills, S. L., 562, 578 Milo, L., 502, 509 Milstein, A., 74, 87 Minassian, L., 573, 574, 578 Miner, M. E., 267, 281 Mines, J., 170, 171, 179 Minichiello, V., 294, 295, 306 Minicucci, R., 426, 441 Minkler, M., 243, 244, 246, 259, 260, 276, 283, 436, 441, 660, 661, 666, 668, 675 Minuchin, S., 50, 59 Miranda, D. R., 426, 442 Miranda, J., 167, 179 Mirin, S. M., 296, 308 Mirvis, D. M., 350, 367 Mishel, M. H., 44, 59 Mishler, E. G., 11, 33, 52, 59, 122, 131, 132, 137 Misovich, S. J., 296, 311 Mitchell, H., 70, 89, 127, 128, 140 Mitchell, J., 523, 532 Mitchell, P. H., 377, 378, 384, 387, 396 Mitchell, S., 170, 171, 179 Mitchell, T., 546, 554 Mitchell-Dicenso, A., 658, 675 Mitsuya, H., 166, 179 Mittlemark, M., 452, 471 Mittman, R., 75, 86, 669, 675 Mizrahi, T., 377, 378, 386, 388, 392, 396 Mizuno, Y., 301, 312 Mo, B., 657, 675 Mody, B., 659, 675 Mogielnicki, R. P., 143, 160 Mohr, B., 70, 89, 127, 128, 140 Mohr, L. B., 575, 580 Mokros, H. B., 243, 246, 247, 260 Molin, J. P., 148, 159 Monaco, R., 330, 340 Monahan, J. L., 286, 311, 478, 483, 491, 493, 641, 648 Moneyham, L., 301, 303, 311, 312

AUTHOR INDEX Monge, P., 530, 533 Mongeau, P. A., 477, 490 Monsees, B. S., 656, 660, 677 Montague, S. N., 561, 580 Montgomery, B. M., 45, 55 Montgomery, K. C., 478, 493, 573, 580 Moody-Ayers, S., 79, 83 Moon, 403, 413, 415n, 418n, 420, 421 Moon, M., 191, 200 Moore, J., 224, 237, 299, 311 Moore, M., 584, 605 Moore, S., 294, 298, 312 Moore, T., 268, 284 Mora, F., 598, 603 Morales, L. S., 78, 86, 497, 508 Morgan, D. L., 192, 202 Morgan, E. R., 100, 118 Morgan, G., 565, 566, 577 Morgan, J. M., 355, 356, 367 Morgan, M., 151, 159, 549, 553, 565, 578, 665, 673 Morgan, W. P., 425, 441 Morman, T., 479, 493 Morone, 408, 416n, 421 Morone, J. A., 675 Morra, M., 617, 622 Morreim, E. H., 352, 367 Morrell, D. C., 150, 159 Morrill, C., 610, 620 Morris, C. G., 385, 399 Morris, D. B., 12, 33 Morris, G. H., 131, 132, 137 Morris, R. W., 150, 151, 159 Morrison, K., 210, 215, 219 Morrison, P., 166, 176 Morrissey, E., 213, 218 Mortensen, C. D., 273, 282 Morton, D. L., 267, 280 Morton, S., 301, 313 Mosavel, M., 276, 277 Moscovici, S., 288, 311 Moskowitz, R. W., 381, 399 Moss, A. J., 42, 43, 44, 47, 55, 58, 266, 279 Moss, D., 210, 216, 217 Moss, F., 350, 365 Moss, G. E., 263, 264, 265, 282 Mossialos, E., 329, 341 Mota, P., 295, 296, 311 Motta, C., 523, 533 Mowad, L. Z., 614, 623 Mowlana, H., 211, 219 Moyer, A., 480, 490, 561, 580 Mrazek, M., 329, 341

AUTHOR INDEX Muijen, M., 377, 400 Mukopadhyay, T., 276, 282 Mulder, M. J., 354, 364 Mullen, P. D., 268, 278 Mulley, A. G., 172, 178, 501, 512 Mullis, R., 452, 471 Mullooly, J. P., 77, 85, 102, 104, 115, 150, 158 Mumby, D. K., 245, 247, 260, 355, 361, 367 Mun, S. K., 528, 529, 531, 534 Mundy, A. K., 263, 277 Munoz, J. A., 497, 508 Munro, N. C., 167, 180 Murphy, A., 484, 489 Murphy, D. A., 482, 493, 504, 511 Murphy, E. C., 353, 354, 355, 367 Murphy, L. R., 424, 426, 427, 437, 441 Murphy, M., 353, 354, 355, 367, 524, 533 Murphy, P. W., 591, 592, 594, 601, 602, 603 Murphy, R., 663, 677 Murphy, R. F., 23, 33 Murphy, S. T., 173, 176, 653, 670 Murray, A. W., 427, 441 Murray, D., 452, 471 Murray-Johnson, L., 467, 471, 484, 488, 489, 493, 494 Mushlin, A. I., 377, 378, 384, 387, 396 Muskin, P. R., 172, 174, 180 Myers, E. G., 100, 101, 104, 115 Myrick, R., 251, 252, 260, 655, 656, 657, 675 Mystakidou, K., 166, 179

N

Nachimson, D., 299, 309 Nagi, S. Z., 370, 377, 387, 392, 400 Nail, L. M., 148, 158 Nairn, R. G., 566, 567, 576 Najberg, G. E., 195, 202 Najera, L.G., 252, 253, 257 Nakajima, H., 228, 230, 237 Nakazono, T., 301, 313 Nandy, B. R., 559, 580 Nandy, I., 588, 591, 594, 596, 601, 602 Nanni, C., 70, 88, 107, 110, 111, 119, 148, 160 Narayan, S., 172, 178 Nass, C., 482, 493 National Academy of Social Insurance, 429, 441 National Association for Home Care, 323, 238, 342 National Association of County Health Officials, 329, 342 National Cancer Institute, 592, 595, 603, 613, 622

711 National Center for Health Statistics, 188, 202, 324, 328, 342, 343 National Hospice Organization, 328, 343 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 441 National Institutes of Health, 196, 202 National Research Council, 222, 224, 237 National Technology Infrastructure Administration, The, 610, 622 Navarro, 415 Navarro, V., 321, 343 Naylor, A., 664, 678 Neaigus, A., 295, 296, 311 Neal, R. D., 151, 160 Needham, D., 353, 364 Neely, 413 Neff, J. A., 270, 281 Negrete, V., 125, 136 Negrete, V. F., 1, 5, 105, 117 Neidig, J. L., 23, 31, 44, 56, 265, 278, 301, 306 Nelkin, D., 223, 237 Nelson, 412 Nelson, D. L., 423, 425, 426, 442 Nelson, N. J., 543, 554 Nelson, R. M., 15, 31 Nerenz, D., 550, 554 Nerney, M. P., 656, 671 Nesbitt, T., 525, 533 Nessa, J., 131, 137 Netting, N. S., 293, 311 Neuendorf, K. A., 563, 564, 572, 580 Neuling, S. J., 266, 282 New York Herald Tribune, 419 Newbrough, J. R., 270, 281 Newhagen, J. E., 506, 511 Newhauser, L., 658, 677 Newman, S., 143, 160 Newton, 405 Newton, D. A., 288, 311 Ngoh, L. N., 594, 603 Nicholas, J. J., 377, 379, 398 Nichols, D. R., 502, 503, 511 Nichols, K., 349, 368 Nichter, M., 186, 202 Nierenberg, B. P., 106, 110, 118 Noble, C., 428, 441 Nodding, N., 662, 675 Nolan, M. T., 173, 179 Norcross, J. C., 502, 511 Norgaard, L., 655n, 678 North, D., 224, 237 Northouse, L. L., 50, 59, 267, 282 Northouse, P. G., 50, 59

712 Norton, R., 66, 86 Nott, K. H., 301, 302, 303, 309 Novack, D., 100, 101, 104, 115 Novack, D. H., 72, 73, 83, 167, 179, 195, 202 Novak, M., 357, 364 Novello, A. C., 498, 511 Nuland, S. B., 42, 59 Nurss, J., 589, 592, 600 Nurss, J. R., 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 592, 594, 596, 598, 603, 604, 605 Nussbaum, J. F., 4, 5, 39, 59, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 201, 202, 204, 328, 343 Nutbeam, D., 584, 585, 593, 603, 669, 675 Nylenna, M., 76, 85 Nzyuko, S., 37, 59, 481, 495

O

Oakes, D., 377, 378, 384, 387, 396 Oates, J., 128, 139, 149, 160 Obenshain, S. S., 170, 171, 179 Obertynski, M. A., 503, 510 Obregon, R., 245, 248, 257 O’Brien, K., 189, 202 O’Brien, M., 355, 367 O’Brien, T. B., 272, 282 O’Brien-Hallstein, D. L., 653, 654, 675 O’Campo, P., 301, 308 Occupational Safety and Hazards Administration, 428, 429, 441 Ochs, L., 213, 220 Ockene, I. S., 501, 511 Ockene, J. K., 434, 443, 501, 511 O’Connor, D., 234, 237 O’Connor, M., 434, 439 O’Connor, P. J., 545, 554 Odets, W., 665, 675 O’Driscoll, M. P., 429, 425, 426, 438, 441 Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 286, 311 Ogar, D., 658, 677 Ogland-Hand, S. M., 373, 374, 386, 389, 390, 395, 400 O’Hair, D., 609, 622 Ohanian, E., 224, 237 O’Hanlon, J., 389, 395, 397 O’Keefe, B. J., 35, 57 O’Keefe, C., 167, 168, 177 O’Keeffe, C., 98, 116 O’Laughlen, J., 518, 524, 532, 533 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 48, 59 Olevitch, L., 113, 117, 500, 510

AUTHOR INDEX Olson, 408, 414 Olson, C., 127, 139 Olson, J. T., 662, 678 Olson, R. M., 589, 598, 603 O’Malley, P., 349, 365 Omar, M. A., 268, 282 Omenn, G., 224, 237 Ong, G. J., 233, 237 Ong, L. M. L., 64, 66, 86, 95, 105, 118 Ontiveros, J. A., 656, 676 Oppenheim, A., 173, 180 Opper, F. H., 377, 380, 387, 398 Orav, E. J., 194, 195, 201 Orbe, M. P., 49, 59 Orbell, S., 299, 312 Organista, K. C., 485, 493 Organista, P. B., 485, 493 O’Riordan, T., 227, 228, 237 Orlandi, M., 223, 237 Orleans, C. T., 501, 512 Ornish, D., 275, 283 Ornish, D. M., 275, 278 Orsak, K.C., 434, 437 Orth, J. E., 126, 137, 147, 148, 158 Ortony, A., 477, 493 Ory, M. G., 191, 192, 201 Osborn, G. G., 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 119 Osgood, D., 436, 438 Osmond, D., 72, 73, 84 O’Sullivan, J., 377, 380, 398 Oswald, D. L., 501, 503, 510 Oswalt, R., 298, 311 Otero-Sabogal, R., 252, 257 Oterso-Sabogal, R., 660, 677 Ott, B. B., 173, 179 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, The, 255, 260 Otway, H., 224, 237 Owen, P. A., 151, 158 Owens, B., 276, 281 Oye, R. K., 153, 157

P

Padian, N. S., 657, 672 Padonu, G., 68, 85 Page, J. B., 656, 678 Page, P. L., 597, 603 Paine-Andrews, A., 250, 258 Painter, L., 350, 365 Paisley, W. J., 450, 471, 656, 676 Palmer, J. M., 173, 176

AUTHOR INDEX Palmer, R. F., 297, 309 Palmer, R. H., 194, 195, 201 Palmgreen, P., 454, 471, 478, 494 Palombo, R., 435, 439, 443 Palosky, C. S., 544, 555 Pan, C. S., 426, 442 Pancoast, D., 275, 279 Pant, L., 659, 676 Pantell, R. H., 67, 69, 82, 86, 97, 107, 110, 112, 114, 117, 194, 195, 199, 203 Pantilat, S. Z., 111, 116 Papa, M. J., 659, 676 Paperny, D. M. N., 501, 511 Parasuraman, A., 550, 555 Parcel, G., 223, 235 Paredes, P., 484, 494 Parikh, N. S., 586, 587, 596, 604, 605 Park, H. S., 78, 79, 85 Parker, E. A., 213, 218, 219, 637, 648, 657, 672 Parker, M., 572, 577, 654, 676 Parker, R. M., 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 592, 594, 596, 598, 600, 602, 603, 604, 605 Parker, R. W., 126, 135 Parkinson, M.G., 552, 554 Parks, M., 272, 280 Parks, M. R., 269, 283 Parrott, R. L., 44, 59, 91, 93, 105, 118, 166, 179, 193, 203, 286, 310, 286, 313, 452, 470, 480, 483, 493, 558, 560, 562, 568, 575, 577, 580, 640, 641, 642, 644, 645, 646, 647, 648, 649, 660, 676 Parsons, T., 121, 137, 225, 237, 404 Partridge, E., 449, 471 Pascoe, G. C., 142, 143, 158 Pasick, R., 660, 677 Patel, D., 417, 418, 463, 470 Patel, K. M., 103, 104, 119 Patent Fairness Act of 1999, 330, 343 Paterson, B. L., 63, 88 Paterson, H. M., 301, 302, 310 Patrick, D. L., 208, 213, 217, 218, 430, 431, 437 Patrick, K., 597, 602, 610, 621 Patterson, D., 184, 200 Patterson, J. D., 527, 535 Patterson, M., 276, 282 Patterson, M. L., 66, 68, 86 Patton, P., 588, 603 Paul, M. H., 111, 117 Paul, S. M., 354, 357, 364 Paulanka, B. J., 434, 442 Pavlik, J. V., 610, 622 Payer, L., 13, 33 Payne, C. A., 210, 219

713 Payne, J. G., 39, 60, 493 Pe’rez-Stable, E. J., 660, 677 Pear, R., 541, 555 Pearlman, D. N., 610, 622 Pearse, P., 167, 179 Pearson, J., 501, 509 Pearson, S., 172, 178 Pearson, V., 172, 178 Pecchioni, L. L., 188, 190, 191, 192, 202, 362, 364 Pechacek, T., 452, 471 Peck, E., 489, 490 Pellegrino, E. D., 653, 662, 676 Pelletier, K. R., 427, 431, 441 Penchansky, R., 150, 158 Pendleton, D. A., 66, 71, 86, 95, 105, 118 Pennebaker, J. W., 434, 441 Penner, L. A., 268, 269, 274, 283 Pennington, J., 663, 677 Pennix, B. W. J. H., 270, 271, 283 Pentz, R. D., 170, 179 Pepicello, J., 353, 354, 355, 367 Peppers, D., 501, 511 Perednia, D., 516, 520, 534 Pereles, L., 152, 159 Perelman, C. H., 48, 59, 175, 179 Perez, T. L., 565, 580 Perkins, D., 249, 256, 260 Perkins, M., 379, 398 Perkins, R., 295, 311 Perloff, J. D., 268, 283 Perloff, R. M., 480, 493 Perlstadt, H., 210, 219 Perrin, E. C., 184, 203 Perrin, J. M., 184, 203 Perry, C., 452, 471 Perry, D., 73, 85 Persici, P., 610, 620 Peters, R., 228, 237 Peters, S., 153, 159 Peters, T. J., 146, 147, 158 Petersen, D. J., 268, 279 Peterson, 415, 417n Peterson, C., 522, 534 Peterson, E. E., 49, 60 Peterson, J. L., 276, 277 Peterson, L. W., 183, 185, 199, 360, 367 Peterson, M. C., 111, 118 Pettegrew, L. S., 2, 5, 20, 34, 39, 60 Pettey, G. R., 164, 176 Petty, R., 452, 471, 550, 555 Petty, R. E., 503, 511 Pew Internet & American Life Project, 585, 604

714 Pfau, M., 640, 649, 660, 676 Pfeffer, J., 324, 343 Pfeffer, R. M., 428, 442 Pfizer Inc., 598, 604 Phares, V., 287, 312 Phibbs, C., 67, 82, 194, 195, 199, 203 Philadelphia Inquirer, 541, 555 Phillips, A., 149, 160 Phillips, N., 319, 343 Phillips, R. S., 153, 157 Piaget, J., 184, 185, 203 Pickett, G. M., 550, 553 Pickett, S. A., 276, 281 Pierce, G. R., 264, 283 Pierce, J., 229, 237 Pierce, J. P., 610, 622 Pierce, J. W., 664, 676 Pierson, R. M., 657, 672 Pietri, M., 244, 245, 260 Pilisuk, M., 211, 219, 276, 283 Pinciroli, F., 523, 532 Pingree, S., 276, 281, 610, 621, 623 Pino, L. G., 268, 284 Piotrow, P. T., 286, 311 Pirie, P., 452, 471 Pisetsky, I., 381, 401 Pistone, M., 610, 620 Pitkin, K., 586, 587, 596, 605 Pivnick, A., 298, 299, 311 Pizarro, J., 614, 623 Piziak, V., 73, 88 Plas, J. M., 213, 219 Plato, 10, 33, 121, 138 Plaza, S. H., 264, 281 Pleck, J., 597, 604 Plein, L. C., 233, 237 Plimpton, S., 505, 604 Pliskin, K. L., 299, 311 Plotnick, C., 28, 33 Plotnick, C. A., 489, 490 Plough, A., 210, 216, 217, 225, 237 Plsek, P., 337, 343 Plumridge, E., 294, 306 Poirier, S., 14, 33 Politics & Polity, 541, 555 Pollack, D., 376, 397 Pollack, M. M., 103, 104, 119 Pollard, C. L., 377, 379, 398 Pollay, R. W., 658, 666, 669, 676 Pollio, H. R., 41, 60 Pollitz, K., 73, 85 Polonsky, T. S., 656, 671 Pomaville, K., 655n, 678

AUTHOR INDEX Pomrehn, P. R., 287, 308 Poole, 408n Poole, D. L., 256, 260 Poole, M. S., 392, 398, 432, 438, 441, 530, 533 Pope, R. S., 210, 218 Popovsky, M. A., 597, 603 Poppe, P. R., 484, 494 Porter, A. M., 151, 152, 157 Porter, M., 323, 341 Porter-O’Grady, T., 352, 354, 367 Portes, A., 214, 219 Ports, T. A., 275, 283 Post, D., 105, 116 Post, D. M., 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 352, 353, 367 Post, L. F., 300, 308 Potenziani, D., 501, 509, 597, 601 Potter, G. C., 429, 430, 441 Potter, J., 504, 510 Potter, P. C., 183, 186, 203 Potter, S., 436, 439 Potts, P., 597, 601 Poulin, J. E., 381, 384, 401 Powe, N. R., 79, 83 Powell, M. C., 486, 493 Powell, P. L., 485, 492 Powell, W. W., 321, 324, 340 Power, G., 246n Powers, A., 561, 564, 568, 575, 576, 580 Pratt, C. A., 558, 561, 580 Pratt, C. B., 558, 561, 580 Pratt, G., 148, 156 Preiss, R. W., 479, 489 Prendergast, C. G., 144, 145, 156 Present, R. M., 354, 364 President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 123, 138 President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, 331, 343 Preston-Whyte, E., 298, 305 Price, 416 Price, A., 298, 311 Price, R., 23, 33 Prichard, J., 111, 117 Primomo, J., 267, 283 Prince, A., 297, 311 Prince, L. M., 154, 156 Pritcher, R. E., 429, 430, 441 Pritikin, T., 234, 237 Probart, C., 435, 439 Prochaska, J. O., 452, 453, 471, 501, 502, 511, 512, 549, 555

AUTHOR INDEX Procter, R., 36, 60 Prohaska, T., 192, 201 Prusoff, W., 330, 343 Psathas, G., 144, 145, 156 Psaty, B., 208, 213, 217 Ptacek, J. T., 167, 179 Public Health Reports, 233, 237 Purcell, B., 36, 60 Purnell, L. D., 434, 442 Puska, P., 452, 471, 610, 621 Putnam, 413 Putnam, L. L., 319, 336, 343, 344, 355, 367, 376, 394, 401 Putnam, R. D., 209, 212, 219, 435, 442 Putnam, S. M., 68, 86, 126, 127, 138, 139, 143, 159, 164, 180, 195, 203 Puyol, J., 407, 508 Pyczynski, S., 113, 116

Q

Quam, L., 196, 202 Quandt, S., 231, 234, 235 Quattrone, G., 298, 309 Query, J. L., 611, 622 Quesada, G. M., 78, 86 Quesenberry, C. P., Jr., 69, 87 Quick, J. C., 423, 424, 425, 426, 441, 442 Quick, J. D., 423, 425, 426, 442 Quill, T. E., 167, 168, 172, 179 Quinn, R. P., 351, 365 Quinn, S. C., 656, 678 Quinones, M., 298, 309 Quintero, G. A., 297, 299, 300, 308 Quirk, M. E., 102, 116 Quiroga, S. S., 244, 245, 257, 260

R

Rabinowitz, P., 658, 674 Rabow, M. W., 167, 168, 175, 179 Radin, K., 452, 470 Radley, A., 358, 367, 557, 580 Rafaeli, A., 355, 367 Rafaeli, S., 506, 511 Raffaelli, M., 298, 299, 311 Ragan, S. L., 131, 135, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 203 Raiburn, J., 673 Railsback, C. C., 10, 33 Raine, L., 497, 509

715 Rainey, L. C., 148, 159 Raj, A., 243, 244, 257 Rakowski, W., 610, 622 Ramachandran, B., 587, 589, 596, 602, 603 Ramirez, A. G., 482, 483, 493, 669, 676 Ramirez-Valles, J., 655, 679 Ramirez-Williams, M. F., 322, 324, 340 Ramsay, T. B., 270, 278 Rand, C., 127, 137 Randall, L. M., 210, 218 Rankin, 413 Rao, N., 207, 218, 610, 620 Rapkin, B., 614, 623 Rappaport, W., 167, 179 Rash, S., 189, 202 Rathgeb Smith, S., 213, 218 Ratick, S., 223, 236 Ratzan, S., 39, 60, 233, 238, 610, 621 Ratzan, S. C., 493, 597, 602, 652, 669, 674, 676 Ray, E. B., 22n, 30, 32, 34, 50, 52, 57, 60, 78, 84, 164, 176, 243, 260, 343, 348, 350, 357, 359, 360, 361, 366, 367, 434, 438 Ray, G. B., 480, 493 Raymond, L., 665, 677 Raymond, R. M., 401 Reagan, M., 403, 412, 416, 417, 418 Real, K., 287, 307, 321, 344, 505, 511 Reardon, K. K., 359, 366 Reddick, B., 253, 259 Redding, C. A., 502, 511 Redelmeier, D. A., 148, 159, 172, 174, 179 Redford, 410, 411n Redlich, F. C., 203 Redman, S., 144, 145, 159 Reed, D., 302, 312, 382, 401 Reed, G., 145, 155 Reed, R. L., 605 Reesor, K., 274, 281 Reeve, C., 22, 33 Regalbuto, G., 184, 203 Reginster, J. Y., 543, 555 Reichardt, C. S., 122, 138 Reichel, W., 47, 57 Reid, J. L., 301, 302, 310 Reif, C., 78, 83 Reifsteck, S., 73, 85 Reimers, T. M., 287, 308 Reinerman, C., 467, 471 Reinhardt, U., 324, 343 Reinhart, 421 Reintgen, D. S., 610, 623 Reischl, T. M., 68, 85 Reitman, D., 299, 312

716 Relman, A. S., 327, 343 Ren, J., 587, 592, 602 Renaud, D., 101, 111, 118 Renn, O., 223, 226, 228, 236, 238 Resch, N., 501, 512 Ressler, W. H., 486, 493, 661, 673 Reuben, D. B., 377, 381, 384, 386, 401 Revenson, T. A., 275, 282 Reynolds, K. L., 503, 510 Reynolds, N. R., 302, 305 Reynolds, P. D., 36n, 60 Rhodes, L. A., 168, 176, 653, 671 Ricardo, I., 231,. 236, 298, 299, 312, 656, 658, 672 Rice, R. E., 75, 76, 86, 286, 312, 669, 676 Rich, E. C., 80, 84 Rich, R., 230, 235, 237, 238 Richards, D., 573, 574, 578 Richardson, D., 296, 308 Richardson, J. L., 302, 310, 312 Ricter, K. P., 250, 258 Ridings, D. S., 212, 219 Ridsdale, L., 151, 159 Rightmyer, J., 658, 669, 672 Riker, 404, 410, 411 Riley, G., 74, 88 Rimal, R. N., 130, 133, 138, 501, 504, 505, 507, 511 Rimer, B. K., 501, 512, 610, 617, 622, 623, 656, 673 Rimon II, J. G., 286, 311, 476, 492 Rinaldo, D., 377, 379, 398 Rinehart, W., 286, 311 Rinzler, S. H., 378, 397 Rioux, S., 274, 283 Rissel, C., 251, 253, 257 Ritter, C., 557, 580 Ritvo, P. G., 272, 282 Ritzer, G., 321, 343 Rivadeneyra, R., 152, 159 Rizzo, C., 146, 157 Robbins, D. A., 372, 401 Robbins, J. A., 67, 68, 79, 82, 84, 195, 199 Robbins, L., 428, 442 Roberto, A. J., 480, 483, 493 Roberts, C. S., 610, 623 Roberts, L., 170, 171, 179 Roberts, M. C., 183, 186, 203 Robertson, A., 246, 260 Robertson, R. S., 167, 177 Robins, L. S., 572, 576 Robinson, C. D., 358, 368 Robinson, E. J., 105, 110, 111, 118

AUTHOR INDEX Robinson, H. C., 148, 156 Robinson, J. C., 326, 327, 334, 343 Robinson, J. D., 188, 190, 191, 192, 202 Robinson, J. G., 252, 253, 257 Robinson, J. W., Jr., 209, 218 Robinson, S., 388, 392, 401 Roca, R. P., 99, 104, 118, 147, 148, 159 Rocchini, A. P., 504, 512 Roccoforte, J. A., 276, 281 Rochefort, 413 Rockwell, A., 143, 160 Rodin, J., 184, 201 Rodriguez, G. M., 296, 308 Rodriguez, M. A., 244, 245, 257, 260 Rodriguez, T., 74, 87 Roemer, 417, 418 Roessner, J., 321, 336, 339 Rogan, R. G., 360, 365 Rogers, 476 Rogers, C., 223, 236 Rogers, C. L., 44, 51, 58 Rogers, D., 370, 401 Rogers, E. M., 27, 34, 39, 60, 207, 218, 286, 307, 450, 451, 452, 461, 463, 466, 469, 471, 472, 476, 494, 497, 499, 512, 549, 555, 573, 580, 610, 620, 651, 655, 659, 665, 672, 676, 677 Rogers, G., 227, 238 Rogers, L., 524, 534 Rogers, L. E., 129, 138 Rogers, M., 501, 511 Rogers, R., 452, 471 Rogers, R. W., 503, 512 Rogers, S. M., 597, 604 Rogers, W., 68, 69, 71, 79, 85 Rogers, W. H., 74, 87 Rohert, M., 68, 85 Roi, L. D., 69, 85 Roijackers, J., 502, 509 Rojas, G., 167, 177 Roland, M. O., 150, 159 Rolfe, I. E., 172, 178 Roloff, M. E., 288, 311 Roman, P., 431, 437 Romanao, P. S., 79, 84 Romer, D., 298, 299, 312 Rond, 407n Rook, K., 274, 275, 283 Rook, K. S., 275, 281 Rooney, B., 504, 510 Root, J., 583, 594, 595, 604 Rootman, I., 80, 85 Roppel, C., 658, 677 Ros, W. J., 96, 117, 273, 279

AUTHOR INDEX Rosch, P. J. F., 286, 310 Roschelle, A. R., 267, 272, 283 Rose, G., 657, 676 Rose, J. H., 266, 283 Rose, R. L., 476, 492 Rosen, B., 573, 574, 578 Rosen, C. S., 501, 502, 512 Rosen, R., 432, 442 Rosen, S., 272, 283 Rosenbaum, J., 101, 111, 118 Rosenblum, B., 17, 31 Rosenblum, L., 14, 33 Roseneau, 417 Rosenfeld, L. B., 166, 179 Rosenstock, I., 452, 471, 481, 494 Rosenstock, I. M., 335, 343, 473, 474, 484, 493, 494, 503, 512, 549, 555 Rosenthal, 417 Rosenthal, D., 294, 298, 312 Rosenthal, M., 74, 86 Roser, C., 499, 512 Roska, J., 192, 201 Rosner, F., 300, 306 Ross, A. W., 69, 86 Ross, J. M., 113, 119 Ross, J. W., 292, 293, 312 Ross, L. M., 41, 60 Ross, M., 413, 414, 422 Ross, M. W., 294, 296, 298, 306, 308, 312 Ross, R. R., 426, 427, 428, 429, 442 Rossi, J. S., 501, 502, 511, 512 Rosson, C., 131, 140 Rost, K. M., 105, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118 Rota, J., 659, 671 Roter, D. L., 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 89, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 158, 159, 164, 180, 194, 195, 201, 203, 588, 596, 604, 610, 621, 623 Roth, N. L., 291, 312 Rothbaum, F. M., 44, 60 Rothblum, E. D., 558, 562, 570, 580 Rothman, A., 223, 238 Rothman, A. J., 480, 490, 585, 604 Rothman, J., 208, 210, 211, 219 Rothschild, M. L., 651n, 657, 676 Rothschild, S. K., 78, 86 Rouse, F., 173, 177 Rovati, L. C., 543, 555 Rowan, B., 321, 334, 342

717 Rowan, F., 224, 238 Rowe, B. M., 593, 604 Rowe, M. M., 360, 367 Rozin, P., 172, 174, 179 Rubenstein, L. Z., 374, 377, 380, 381, 382, 384, 385, 386, 399, 401, 402 Rubin, A. M., 376, 379, 386, 397 Rubin, G., 426, 439 Rubin, H. R., 74, 87 Rubinson, L., 504, 510, 511 Ruch, S., 353, 354, 355, 367 Ruckdeschel, J. C., 192, 202, 264, 273, 277 Ruczek, B., 328, 331, 344 Rudd, P., 113, 119 Rudd, R. E., 595, 603, 659, 676 Ruderman, A. J., 504, 509 Rudisill, J. P., 106, 110, 118 Ruef, M., 319, 320, 337, 344 Ruiz, M. S., 302, 310, 312 Rundall, T. G., 369, 373, 386, 387, 401 Runyan, T. W., 382, 401 Ruppert, R. A., 362, 363, 367 Rushefsky, 417, 418 Rushforth, H., 185, 203 Rushton, N., 350, 366 Russell, D. W., 271, 272, 279, 360, 368 Russell, J. A., 23, 31, 44, 56, 301, 306 Russell, M. L., 152, 159 Russell, N. K., 152, 159 Russo, J., 377, 380, 384, 399 Rutherford, P., 665, 676 Ryan, 403 Ryan, C. J., 173, 180 Ryan, D. J., 354, 366 Ryan, E. B., 190, 203 Ryan, F. M., 610, 623 Ryan, W., 661, 676 Ryan-Crepin, K., 377, 380, 399 Ryder, R. W., 301, 309

S

Saavedra, R., 231, 234, 235 Sabogal, F., 660, 677 Sabshin, M., 391, 402 Sacco, W. P., 105, 107, 110, 112, 116 Sachs, L., 661, 677 Sachweh, S., 69, 87 Sackett, D. L., 664, 674 Sacks, H., 70, 87, 131, 138 Safran, C., 597, 603 Sailors, J. R., 431, 440

718 St. Clair, P., 301, 313 St. Lawrence, J. S., 299, 312 St. Louis, M. E., 301, 309 St. Petersburg Times, 540, 555 Salazar, J. C., 561, 580 Saljo, R., 144, 145, 158 Salmon, C. T., 450, 452, 463, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 474, 488, 494, 610, 622, 664, 677, 679 Salmon, P., 153, 159 Salonen, J., 452, 471 Salovey, P., 480, 490, 561, 580, 614, 623 Saltz, C. C., 377, 378, 384, 386, 397 Saltzer, E., 434, 442 Salyer, J., 354, 368 Salyer, S., 382, 402 Salzman, C., 144, 145, 159 Samarel, N., 610, 623 Samet, J. H., 302, 313 San Diego Union Tribune, 539, 555 Sandberg, E., 516, 534 Sanders, J., 518, 520, 521, 523, 533, 534 Sanders, P. S., 154, 159 Sandler, G., 111, 119 Sandler, I. N., 270, 278, 283 Sandor, M. K., 388, 392, 401 Sands, R. G., 392, 401 Sandvik, H., 561, 580 Sanger, P. A. C., 53, 59, 424, 435, 440 Sankar, N., 298, 305 Sanson-Fisher, R. W., 96, 119, 144, 145, 159, 166, 180, 610, 620 Santa, J., 73, 85 Santa-Barbara, J., 425, 442 Santi, L., 610, 620 Saracino, M., 478, 491 Sarason, B. R., 264, 283 Sarason, I. G., 264, 278, 283, 287, 306 Sargese, S. M., 353, 364 Sarvela, P. D., 559, 580 Sass, J. S., 355, 368 Satcher, D., 212, 217 Satterlund-Larsson, U., 132, 135 Saunderson, T., 227, 237 Sauvigne, A. E., 143, 160 Savage, R., 147, 159 Savetsky, J., 302, 313 Saxton, J. W., 72, 73, 87, 350, 353, 368 Sayeed, S., 457, 470 Sayre, J. A., 382, 401 Sbarbaro, J. A., 144, 145, 159 Scamagas, P., 655n, 678 Scanlan, T. J., 329, 344 Schaap, C., 67, 71, 86, 126, 137

AUTHOR INDEX Schaefer, C., 264, 283 Schaffer, M. A., 268, 283 Schaffner, W., 286, 309 Schall, M. B., 363, 365 Schapp, C., 194, 195, 202 Scharff, D. P., 501, 509, 597, 601 Scharlach, A. E., 362, 368 Schattschneider, 404, 406, 407n, 415 Schatz, H., 610, 621 Schatzman, L., 372, 390, 391, 393, 401, 402 Schaufeli, W. B., 426, 442 Schauffler, H. H., 74, 87 Scheerhorn, D., 506, 512 Scheffler, R., 334, 343 Schegloff, E. A., 70, 87, 131, 138 Scherer, C. W., 223, 230, 238, 287, 307, 478, 491 Scherer, K. R., 477, 494 Scherlis, W., 276, 282 Scherwitz, L. W., 126, 137, 147, 148, 158, 275, 278, 283 Schiedermayer, D. L., 77, 87, 150, 159 Schiffman, R. F., 268, 282 Schilling, R. F., 297, 308 Schleifer, L. M., 426, 442 Schlenker, B. R., 663, 677 Schlenker, R., 516, 534 Schlesinger, 421 Schlesinger, M., 73, 86, 154, 158, 332, 343 Schmitt, M. H., 376, 377, 378, 380, 384, 386, 387, 392, 396, 398 Schmitt, N., 68, 85 Schmittdiel, J., 69, 87 Schnall, P. L., 428, 440 Schneck, R., 386, 400 Schneider, 410 Schneider, C. E., 123, 138 Schofield, M. J., 166, 180 Schofield, R. G., 372, 374, 377, 383, 401 Schonmann, S., 103, 117 Schooler, C., 223, 235, 286, 312, 499, 512, 637, 644, 649, 657, 672 Schoonhoven, C. B., 385, 387, 401 Schorr, L. B., 212, 219 Schott, R. L., 424, 434, 442 Schreibman, M., 573, 574, 578 Schryer, F., 215, 220 Schulman, J. L., 111, 117 Schulman, K. A., 78, 79, 87 Schultz, J. A., 250, 258 Schulz, A. J., 213, 219, 637, 648 Schulz, R., 363, 364 Schurman, S. J., 428, 440 Schwab, M., 226, 230, 238, 658, 677

AUTHOR INDEX Schwab, R. C., 344 Schwankovsky, L., 70, 88, 107, 110, 111, 119, 148, 160 Schwartz, 411n Schwartz, D. J., 287, 312 Schwartz, L. M., 584, 585, 604 Schwartz, M. D., 353, 354, 358, 366 Schwartz, R. K., 70, 87 Schwartz, R. W., 167, 180 Schwartzman, A., 189, 201 Schwarz, K. S., 268, 280 Schwarzer, A., 270, 282 Schwarzer, R., 270, 284 Schwenk, T. L., 69, 85 Scott, 417 Scott, C., 337, 342, 356, 366 Scott, C. D., 425, 442 Scott, D. E., 298, 299, 309 Scott, H. L., 449, 472 Scott, R. L., 10, 33, 566, 576 Scott, S. A., 660, 677 Scott, T. L., 587, 592, 602 Scott, W. R., 319, 320, 326, 327, 330, 337, 342, 344 Seals, B. F., 301, 303, 311, 312 Seedhouse, D., 652, 662, 677 Sefcovic, E., 641, 648 Segerling, M., 610, 621 Sego, D., 97, 119 Seibold, D. R., 287, 288, 311, 312, 313, 328, 336, 337, 339, 340, 342, 376, 377, 378, 397, 432, 440 Seijo, R., 434, 442 Seitel, F. P., 538, 555 Selby, J. V., 69, 87 Selby, M. J., 300, 302, 309 Selfe, S. A., 146, 147, 159 Seligman, M. E. P., 44, 54, 55 Sell, L., 167, 180 Selwyn, B. J., 268, 278 Selye, H., 425, 442 Selznick, P., 210, 219, 320, 344 Semin, G. R., 294, 313 Sennott-Miller, L., 480, 494, 610, 620 Sensenbrenner, J., 214, 219 Sentell, T., 588, 603 Serkey, J. M., 325, 345 Sex in the age of AIDS, 291, 312 Sexton, B., 349, 368 Seymour, C., 111, 117 Seymour, M., 270, 281 Shain, M., 431, 442 Shanahan, J., 563, 579

719 Shaner, J. L., 190, 201 Shank, J. C., 151, 152, 160 Shanklin, H. D., 431, 440 Shannon, G., 518, 523, 533 Shannon, W. J., 482, 491 Shapiro, B. P., 474, 490 Shapiro, J., 434, 442 Shapiro, J. L., 299, 310 Shapiro, M. F., 301, 313 Shapiro, P. A., 170, 172, 174, 180 Shapiro, R. S., 77, 87, 150, 159, 180 Sharf, B. F., 14, 15, 16, 22n, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 39, 48, 60, 70, 78, 84, 87, 196, 203, 319, 344, 434, 438, 560, 574, 580, 611, 623 Sharkey, W. F., 78, 79, 85 Sharp, L., 97, 107, 110, 112, 114, 117 Sharpe, P. A., 105, 112, 115 Shaughnessy, P., 516, 534 Shaw, D., 677 Shea, D., 337, 340 Shebroe, V., 98, 99, 101, 104, 119 Sheeler, R., 34 Sheer, V. C., 44, 60, 477, 494 Sheeran, P., 299, 312 Sheffet, A., 298, 309 Shefner-Rogers, C. L., 659, 676 Shefsky, M., 658, 674 Shelby, M. C., 299, 312 Sheldon, G. F., 168, 169, 174, 178 Shellow, R. A., 166, 177 Shelton, 409, 418 Shen, J. K. M., 380, 399 Shepel, L. F., 267, 284 Shepherd, M. D., 594, 603 Sheridan, J. F., 266, 278 Sherman, D. W., 293, 294, 312 Sherwin, S., 652, 654, 677 Shilts, R., 291, 292, 312 Shiu, A. T., 357, 368 Shoemaker, F. F., 549, 555 Shonick, W., 329, 344 Shorter, E., 121, 138 Shortliffe, E. H., 331, 341 Shostak, A. B., 428, 442 Shuchman, M., 170, 180 Shumaker, S. A., 265, 276, 278 Shuy, R. W., 131, 138 Siefert, K., 354, 368 Siegel, K., 267, 278 Sigmond, R. M., 214, 220 Signitzer, B., 662, 678 Signorielli, N., 286, 312, 549, 553, 563, 564, 565, 572, 578, 580, 665, 673

720 Silayan-Go, A., 476, 492 Silbergeld, E. K., 428, 442 Silberman, S., 520, 535 Silliman, R. A., 382, 401 Silver, G., 401 Silver, R. C., 152, 159, 272, 284 Silverman, J., 96, 119 Simeonsson, R. J., 378, 386, 393, 396 Simon, 408, 411n, 413 Simon, C. M., 377, 387, 390, 392, 401 Simon, G., 377, 380, 384, 399 Simon, H., 408 Simoni, J. M., 301, 302, 303, 310, 312 Simons-Morton, B., 504, 508 Simons-Morton, B. G., 654, 657, 663, 675 Simpson, D. E., 77, 87, 150, 159 Simpson, L. A., 353, 354, 368 Simpson, M. R., 474, 492 Singer, G., 428, 443 Singer, J., 658, 675 Singer, R. P., 481, 492 Singh, D. A., 344 Singhal, A., 27, 34, 452, 461, 463, 472, 476, 494, 573, 580, 659, 662, 671, 676, 677 Singleton, R. A., 36n, 60, 559, 580 Sipperstein, G. N., 382, 401 Sistrunk, S., 78, 79, 87 Siu, A. L., 196, 201, 610, 621 Sjoden, P. O., 610, 622 Sjostrand, 409 Skillbeck, C., 481, 494 Skillen, D. L., 428, 432, 442 Skinner, C. S., 501, 512, 597, 604, 610, 623, 656, 660, 677 Skinner, G., 73, 88 Skinner, V. S., 501, 512 Skochelak, S., 34 Skocpol, 403, 414, 417, 418 Skogan, W. G., 215, 220 Skurnick, J., 298, 309 Slack, W. V., 597, 603, 610, 623 Slaten, D., 641, 649 Slater, J., 196, 202 Slater, M., 452, 470, 472, 499, 512 Slay, L., 588, 603 Slevin Perocchia, R., 614, 623 Sloan, D. A., 167, 180 Sloan, F. A., 149, 157 Sloan, J. A., 67, 83 Sloan, R. P., 505, 509 Slosson, R. J. L., 591, 592, 604 Slovenko, R., 155, 159 Slovic, 421

AUTHOR INDEX Slovic, P., 222, 223, 226, 227, 228, 236, 238 Smaglik, P., 610, 623 Smiley, L., 568, 576 Smilkstein, G., 164, 177 Smith Du Pre, A., 194, 203 Smith, A. C., 356, 368 Smith, D. G., 81, 85 Smith, D. H., 3, 5, 15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 26, 34, 39, 43, 60, 78, 79, 85 Smith, K. J., 589, 590, 605 Smith, K. K., 376, 396 Smith, N. L., 111, 118 Smith, P., 356, 368 Smith, R. C., 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 119 Smith, S., 478, 483, 494 Smith, S. G., 141, 142, 149, 158 Smith, S. M., 563, 579 Smith, S. W., 492 Smith, T., 378, 386, 393, 396 Smith, W. A., 657, 659, 660, 677 Smith-Dupre, A., 131, 138 Smucker, W., 502, 509 Smutny, G., 232, 234, 238 Snoek, J. D., 351, 365 Snow, M. H., 301, 302, 303, 309 Snyder, L., 452, 466, 472 Snyder, S. S., 44, 60 Sobo, E. J., 293, 294, 298, 299, 300, 302, 312 Sobocinski, K. A., 77, 87, 150, 159 Socha McGee, D., 105, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 119 Sochalski, J., 337, 339 Solari-Twadell, P. A., 329, 342 Solomon, D., 452, 470, 484, 491 Solomon, J., 203 Solomon, M., 48, 60 Soloway, 405 Somera, D. M., 659, 674 Somerfield, M. R., 610, 621 Sommerfeld, M., 212, 220 Sommers, P. A., 77, 87 Sonenstein, F., 597, 604 Song, V., 484, 491 Sonnenberg, F. A., 497, 512 Sonnenschein, S., 503, 512 Sonnenstuhl, W. J., 431, 442 Sontag, S., 12, 34, 41, 60, 290, 292, 293, 312, 566, 580, 663, 677 Sood, S., 659, 676 Sopory, P., 452, 466, 469 Sorensen, G., 429, 434, 435, 436, 439, 442, 443, 595, 603 Sorensen, M. E., 185, 186, 200

AUTHOR INDEX Sorenson, J. R., 473, 492 Soros, G., 416n Soskolne, C. L., 652, 654, 668, 671 Sotheran, J. L., 295, 308 Soumerai, S. B., 70, 87 Sowell, R. L., 301, 303, 311, 312 Sox, C. H., 143, 160 Sparler, S., 275, 278 Spears, H., 504, 510 Speck, P., 167, 180 Speer, P., 563, 581 Speers, M. A., 213, 218 Spera, S., 426, 440 Spiegel, D., 148, 159, 267, 284 Spiro, D., 67, 87 Spiro, M. S., 436, 438 Springston, J. K., 548, 548, 554, 555 Sprott, R., 189, 202 Sproule, M. J., 654, 677 Sprung, C. L., 173, 180 Spunt, B. S., 501, 512 Squier, R. W., 144, 145, 159 Srebnik, D. S., 173, 180 Stableford, S., 583, 594, 595, 604 Stafford, J., 392, 401 Stafford, M. R., 550, 555 Stage, C., 337, 342, 356, 366 Stahl, S. M., 188, 203 Stainbrook, G. L., 424, 443 Staker, L. U., 111, 118 Stallings, R. Y., 172, 180 Stanford, A. F., 14, 33 Stange, K. C., 73, 83, 151, 152, 157, 160, 161 Stange, P. V., 212, 217 Stanley, I., 153, 159 Stanley, J. M., 101, 119 Stanley, R. O., 147, 156 Stanton, B., 656, 658, 672 Starfield, B., 125, 138, 148, 160 Starr, 410n, 416 Starr, N. J., 655n, 678 Starr, P., 322, 326, 332, 344 Statham, H., 167, 168, 180 Steckler, A., 245, 259, 655, 657, 675 Steel, B., 229, 237 Steger, M., 229, 237 Steiger, J. H., 501, 502, 512 Stein, J. A., 196, 201, 474, 491, 596, 602, 610, 621 Stein, M. D., 301, 302, 313 Stein, P. L., 593, 604 Stein, S. R., 143, 144, 146, 158 Stein, T., 34, 73, 85

721 Stein, T. S., 102, 104, 114, 119 Steiner, 483 Steiner, C., 640, 641, 642, 644, 645, 646, 648, 649 Steinhauser, J., 358, 368 Stelling, J., 390, 401 Stengle, W. A., 614, 621 Stephens, R. C., 276, 277 Stephens, R. J., 48, 58 Stephenson, M. T., 478, 480, 494, 610, 623 Stepherson, B., 295, 296, 311 Sterk, H. M., 568, 580 Sterling, T. D., 213, 218 Stern, L. S., 295, 308 Stern, P. C., 230, 238 Stevens, J., 561, 569, 577 Stevenson, F. A., 153, 156 Stevenson, H. M., 53, 60 Steward, M., 184, 203 Stewart, A. L., 142, 160 Stewart, D. E., 358, 368 Stewart, D. W., 662, 677 Stewart, G., 252, 253, 257 Stewart, J., 60 Stewart, L. P., 485, 492 Stewart, M. A., 64, 67, 70, 71, 85, 86, 87, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 143, 146, 149, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 160, 164, 180, 195, 203 Stewart, T. J., 69, 86 Stiff, J. B., 355, 366, 560, 581 Stiles, W. B., 68, 80, 85, 86, 92, 93, 125, 126, 127, 137, 138, 139, 143, 147, 148, 158, 159, 164, 180, 195, 203 Stine, E. L., 189, 204 Stoddard, A., 429, 434, 436, 439, 443 Stoddard, A. M., 102, 116, 435, 439 Stoddard, J. L., 476, 494 Stoeckle, J., 194, 204 Stoeckle, J. D., 71, 88 Stoeckle, M. L., 173, 180 Stoffelmayr, B. E., 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 119 Stohl, C. S., 44, 51, 57, 265, 280, 336, 343, 344, 358, 359, 365, 366, 376, 394, 401, 426, 443 Stokols, D., 488, 494 Stone, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 412, 413, 416 Stone, H., 520, 521, 533 Stone, K., 573, 574, 578 Stones, R. W., 146, 147, 159 Storey, D., 450, 451, 471, 493 Storey, J. D., 497, 499, 512, 655, 676 Storms, D. M., 142, 156

722 Stott, N., 146, 147, 158 Stoudemire, A. S., 173, 178 Strahan, 413 Straits, B. C., 36n, 60, 559, 580 Straits, M. M., 559, 580 Strasberger, C. C., 286, 313 Strasser, T., 665, 677 Strathdee, G., 377, 400 Strauman, 22 1997 Strauss, A. L., 21, 31, 328, 331, 344, 391, 402 Strauss, L. H., 103, 104, 119 Strecher, V., 481, 494 Strecher, V. J., 494, 499, 501, 503, 510, 512, 597, 601, 604, 610, 623 Street, R., 526, 534 Street, R. L., 129, 130, 133, 139, 164, 180, 196, 203, 319, 321, 344, 525, 534 Street, R. L., Jr., 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 79, 80, 81, 84, 87, 88, 105, 119, 596, 604, 610, 623 Stress Management Services, 425, 443 Strickland, D., 610, 622 Strobino, D., 223, 238 Strodel, W. E., 167, 180 Stroebe, M. S., 42, 60 Stroebe, W., 42, 60 Strongbow, R., 264, 273, 277 Strug, D., 295, 307 Strzepek, D. M., 381, 400 Stuart, T., 44, 59 Sturdevant Reed, C., 210, 219 Stutman, R., 392, 398 Suarez, E., 655, 679 Suarez, L., 660, 677 Suarez-Al-Adam, M., 298, 299, 311 Subervi-Velez, F. A., 562, 581 Suchman, A. L., 77, 82, 131, 139, 141, 149, 156, 164, 176, 195, 202 Sufian, M., 295, 296, 311 Suhr, J. A., 271, 279 Sullivan, C. F., 20, 22, 23, 34 Sullivan, L. M., 302, 313 Sullivan, M. J. L., 272, 282 Sullivan, R., 275, 278 Sullivan, W. M., 212, 217, 665, 670 Sulmasy, D. P., 172, 180 Sultz, H., 352, 353, 368 Sussman, S., 476, 494 Sussur, M., 667, 677 Sutcliffe, E., 664, 678 Sutton, R. I., 355, 367 Sutton, S. R., 478, 494, 503, 512 Sutton-Smith, K., 67, 83

AUTHOR INDEX Suzman, R., 188, 202 Svarstad, B. L., 144, 160 Svec, K. H., 381, 399 Swanson, G. P., 67, 68, 70, 88 Swartz, J., 428, 443 Sweeney, G., 349, 368 Sweeney, J., 24, 34 Sweet, B., 147, 156 Swidler, A., 212, 217, 666, 670 Sykes, R. K., 656, 660, 677 Syme, L., 226, 230, 238, 658, 677 Syme, S. L., 263, 264, 265, 278 Sypher, B. D., 527, 535 Sypher, H., 452, 470 Szalai, G., 430, 443 Szasz, P. S., 121, 139

T

Tabak, E. R., 106, 119 Tai, T. W., 358, 368 Takahashi, L., 232, 234, 238 Takayama, J. I., 67, 82, 194, 195, 199 Taleghani, C. J., 78, 79, 87 Talley, W., 170, 178 Talsky, A. M., 77, 87, 150, 159 Tam, K., 526, 534 Tangwa, G. B., 652, 677 Tanriverdi, H., 522, 527, 534 Tantam, D., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Tantleff-Dunn, S., 287, 312 Taranta, A., 154, 156 Tardy, C. H., 164, 166, 180 Tardy, R. W., 287, 313 Taren, D., 610, 620 Tataryn, D. J., 610, 621 Tattersall, A. J., 427, 443 Tattersall, M. H., 108, 111, 115 Tavis, T. W., 294, 313 Taylor, B., 664, 678 Taylor, B. M., 298, 299, 313 Taylor, C., 452, 470, 484, 491 Taylor, C. A., 186, 186, 187, 204 Taylor, D. W., 664, 674 Taylor, H., 377, 380, 384, 386, 399 Taylor, M., 587, 588, 590, 601 Taylor, S. E., 44, 60, 266, 267, 279, 280, 282, 491 Taylor, T. J., 273, 284 Taylor, V. M., 501, 512 Teasdale, J. D., 44, 55 Telepchak, J., 501, 512

AUTHOR INDEX Telzak, E. E., 377, 379, 398 Tempelaar, R., 267, 284 Teno, J. M., 153, 157 Terre, L., 563, 581 Terry, P. B., 172, 180 Tesh, S. N., 651n, 677 Tessier, S., 128, 135 Thakkar, H., 276, 277 Thakker, K. D., 152, 156 Thayer, L., 38, 60 Themba, M., 561, 581 Thoits, P. A., 264, 284 Thom, D. H., 73, 88 Thomas, B. H., 658, 675 Thomas, D., 274, 278 Thomas, E. J., 349, 368 Thomas, J. C., 230, 238 Thomas, K., 224, 237 Thomas, K. B., 147, 160 Thomas, L. H., 391, 394, 402 Thomas, L. T., 360, 368 Thomas, R., 518, 535 Thomas, R. W., 287, 312, 313 Thomas, S. A., 382, 386, 387, 402 Thomas, S. B., 79, 83, 656, 665, 677, 678 Thomas, V. D., 656, 671 Thomasma, D. C., 163, 166, 167, 180 Thompson, A., 370, 372, 399 Thompson, B., 430, 431, 437 Thompson, B. L., 64, 79, 88 Thompson, C., 594, 601 Thompson, H. M., 381, 399 Thompson, J. D., 426, 443 Thompson, J. K., 287, 312 Thompson, S. C., 70, 88, 107, 110, 111, 119, 148, 160 Thompson, T. L., 1, 2, 3, 5, 69, 82, 88, 91, 93, 95, 105, 119, 129, 130, 132, 136, 139, 168, 177, 180, 188, 190, 191, 192, 196, 199, 202, 203, 286, 313, 473, 494, 640, 649 Thomson, S., 435, 439 Thorn, D., 151, 157 Thorne, B., 221, 236 Thorne, S. E., 63, 88 Thornton, B. C., 39, 58, 335, 341, 424, 440 Thorp, J., 597, 601 Thorson, J. A., 328, 344 Tibshirani, R. J., 148, 159 Tiemann, T., 610, 621 Tiernan, K., 504, 508 Tiffany, S. T., 486, 490 Tigert, D. J., 476, 495 Tillman, H. J., 354, 368

723 Tilman, P., 274, 283 Tindale-Biscoe, S., 126, 135 Ting-Toomey, S., 77, 84 Tinker, T. L., 223, 238 Tinsley, B. J., 68, 83, 85 Tips Help Diagnose, Treat Celiac Disease, 541, 555 Tipton, S. M., 212, 217, 666, 670 Todd, A. D., 71, 88, 131, 136, 193, 194, 203 Toledo, E., 486, 493 Tolle, C., 614, 624 Tolle, S. W., 172, 173, 178 Tolsdorf, C. C., 264, 284 Tones, K., 560, 581 Tong, D. A., 76, 89, 497, 513 Tong, S., 234, 238 Tonges, M. C., 354, 368 Toobert, D. J., 78, 80, 84 Toole, J., 269, 282 Toomey, T. L., 211, 213, 220 Toress, M., 660, 670 Torrens, P. R., 322, 345 Torres, I., 660, 670 Toth, E. L., 566, 581 Townsend, P., 167, 168, 179 Tracy, K., 70, 88 Travers, K. D., 251, 260 Travis, S. S., 362, 364 Treichler, 417 Treichler, P., 292, 313 Trewyn, P., 334, 344 Trice, H. M., 431, 442 Tripp, C., 550, 553 Tripp, J. H., 184, 200 Trost, M. R., 287, 313 Tsao, J. C., 558, 561, 581 Tselikis, P., 543, 555 Tsevat, J., 476, 494 Tucker, M., 243, 260 Tuckett, D., 127, 139 Tuckson, R. V., 584, 604 Tudor, C. G., 74, 88 Tulips, J., 481, 494 Tulloch, J., 560, 572, 579 Tulsky, J., 173, 177 Tuminaro, D. J., 425, 440 Tuomilehto, J., 452, 471 Turett, G. S., 377, 379, 398 Turk, D., 645, 649 Turk-Charles, S., 610, 623 Turner, B., 301, 313 Turner, C. F., 597, 604 Turner, J., 517, 519, 533

724 Turner, J. C., 288, 313 Turner, J. W., 518, 519, 522, 525, 526, 527, 528, 529, 530, 531, 534, 535 Turner, L., 148, 156 Turner, T. J., 477, 493 Turow, J., 563, 564, 575, 581 Tushman, M. L., 329, 344 TV Free America, 557, 581 Tversky, 421 Tweedie, I., 493 Tye, L., 325, 344 Tyteca, L. O., 175, 179

U

Uchino, B. N., 264, 266, 284 Ullman, E., 376, 377, 378, 381, 384, 386, 387, 389, 396, 400 Understanding AIDS, 477 Unger, D. G., 269, 284 U.S. Census Bureau, 188, 204, 322, 329, 344 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 330, 344 U.S. Congress, 584, 604 U.S. Department of Education, 586, 604 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 329, 334, 344, 345, 494, 609, 623 U.S. Security and Exchange Commission, 332, 345 U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, 187, 204 U.S. Surgeon General, 296, 313 Unsworth, C. A., 382, 386, 402 Unutzer, J., 377, 380, 384, 399 Urban, N., 610, 620 Ureada, J. R., 476, 492 Ureta Carrillo, L. A., 485, 493 USA Today, 540, 541, 555 Uutela, A., 610, 621 Uzark, K. C., 504, 512

V

Vaidya, V. U., 103, 104, 119 Valadez, A. M., 376, 379, 397 Valde, K., 395, 399 Valdisseri, R., 232, 239 Valenstein, E., 41, 61 Valente, T. W., 484, 494 Valios, R., 213, 220 Vallbona, C., 126, 137, 147, 148, 158, 664, 670

AUTHOR INDEX van Assema, P., 501, 505, 507, 508, 509 van Bemmel, J. H., 610, 623 van Breukelen, G., 502, 505, 509 Van Buren, M. E., 436, 438 Vance, R. J., 426, 440 Vanderford, M. L., 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25, 26, 34 Van de Ven, A. H., 386, 402 van de Wiel, H. B., 96, 117 van den Heuvel, W. J. A., 267, 284 van der Kam, W. J., 610, 623 van der Staak, C., 67, 71, 86, 126, 137, 194, 195, 202 Van Dulmen, A. M., 128, 133, 139 Van Egeren, L. F., 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 119 Van Eijk, J. T. M., 270, 271, 283 Van Hook, M., 256, 260 Van Kirk, J., 353, 354, 358, 366 van Nieuwenhuijzen, M. G., 267, 284 Van Ryn, M., 79, 88, 638, 649 Van Tilburg, T., 270, 271, 283 Van Valzen, D., 360, 368 Varallo, S. M., 30, 34 Vargas, L. C., 562, 568, 581 Vaughan, R. D., 504, 510 Veatch, R. M., 652, 661, 678 Vedhara, K., 301, 302, 303, 309 Vega, W. A., 498, 513 Velicer, W. F., 501, 502, 511, 512, 610, 622 Verby, J. E., 151, 160 Verdi, M. B., 105, 107, 110, 112, 116 Verhaak, P. F. M., 128, 133, 139 Verhoef, M. J., 610, 624 Verweij, M., 663, 678 Vettese, M. A., 172, 180 Viadro, C. I., 656, 662, 672 VIA (Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment) Website, 15, 34 Vicary, J. R., 297, 309 Vignos, P. J., 381, 399 Villarreal, R., 482, 483, 493 Villaume, W. H., 189, 204 Vincent, C., 149, 160 Vincus, A. A., 656, 662, 672 Vinokur, A. D., 267, 284 Vinokur-Kaplan, D., 267, 284, 370, 376, 377, 382, 384, 386, 387, 388, 393, 402 Viswanath, K., 40, 57, 452, 470, 504, 510, 610, 617, 622, 664, 678 Vogel, 404, 407n Voigt, B., 67, 68, 70, 88 Volk, G., 167, 179 Volk, R. J., 195, 199

AUTHOR INDEX Volz, D., 543, 556 von Essen, L., 610, 622 von Frederichs-Fitzwater, M., 129, 130, 139 Von Korff, M., 377, 380, 384, 399 Voss, C., 170, 171, 179 Voss, M., 658, 669, 672 Vranizan, K., 72, 73, 84 Vu, H. T., 79, 83 Vygotsky, L., 185, 204

W

Wackman, D. B., 610, 622 Wade, A., 295, 311 Wade, B., 584, 605 Wade, E., 189, 199 Wagenaar, A. C., 211, 213, 220 Wagner, D., 614, 624 Wagner, E., 208, 210, 213, 216, 217, 218 Wagner, E. R., 72, 88 Wagner, F., 272, 281 Waite, M. S., 374, 374, 377, 384, 402 Waitzken, J. H., 194, 204 Waitzkin, H., 53, 61, 67, 71, 81, 88, 132, 135, 139, 152, 159, 165, 167, 180 Waldmiller, M., 501, 509, 597, 601 Walker, 412, 413 Walker, D., 113, 119 Walker, E., 377, 380, 384, 399 Walker, J. L., 381, 384, 401 Walker, J. M., 166, 177 Walker, K. L., 132, 139 Walker, M. H., 252, 260 Walker, N. M., 476, 494 Walkom, S., 166, 180 Wall, E., 215, 220 Wallace, D. J., 595, 605 Wallace, M., 428, 443 Wallace, S. P., 244, 259 Wallack, L. M., 452, 465, 469, 472, 561, 570, 573, 574, 577, 581, 610, 624, 669, 661, 678 Wallbott, H. G., 477, 494 Wallen, J., 71, 88, 194, 204 Wallerstein, N., 127, 139, 213, 218, 246, 250, 254, 257, 260, 436, 441, 659, 670 Walsh, D. C., 655, 671 Walsh, J., 209, 220 Walsh, M. E., 184, 185, 199 Walsh-Childers, K., 572, 581 Walter, C. A., 381, 384, 401 Walter, C. L., 208, 220

725 Walter, H. J., 504, 510 Walther, J. B., 76, 88, 273, 284 Walton, R. E., 383, 399 Wan, C. K., 482, 484, 495 Wan, J. Y., 298, 309 Wandersman, A., 208, 210, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 220, 253, 257, 269, 284 Wang, C., 646, 649, 663, 678 Wang, M. C., 133, 140 Wang, W., 298, 309 Ward, S., 267, 284 Ward, T., 295, 296, 311 Warda, U. S., 298, 310 Wardle, J., 664, 676 Ware, J. E., 68, 69, 71, 79, 85, 127, 137, 142, 160, 164, 178 Ware, J. E., Jr., 70, 74, 84, 87, 95, 106, 107, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 141, 147, 148, 151, 157, 158, 610, 621 Warheit, G. J., 498, 513 Warisse, J., 105, 115, 506, 512, 522, 526, 527, 529, 530, 535 Warnecke, R. B., 617, 623 Warner, A., 370, 398 Warr, D., 298, 309 Warren, B., 589, 590, 605 Wartella, E., 35, 57, 557, 558, 559, 560, 578 Washiendo, K., 658, 674 Wasserman, R. C., 69, 88, 164, 181 Wasson, J. H., 143, 160 Watkins, K. E., 497, 508 Watters, D., 658, 675 Watzlawick, P., 50, 51, 61, 304, 313 Wayland, S. C., 189, 204 Wayne, S. M., 563, 579 Wayne-Doppke, J., 83 Weakland, J., 51, 61, 305, 313 Weathers, B., 501, 509, 597, 601 Weeks, J. L., 428, 443 Wei, Q., 170, 179 Weick, 408 Weick, K., 16, 34 Weider, D. L., 246, 260 Weijts, W., 166, 181 Weil, D., 428, 443 Weiland, D., 373, 374, 377, 384, 402 Weiler, R., 474, 495 Weinberg, P., 296, 307 Weiner, E., 150, 151, 158 Weiner, J., 300, 308 Weinhouse, B., 558, 579 Weinman, J., 108, 110, 118, 143, 160 Weinstein, N. D., 474, 495

726 Weinstock, M. A., 640, 649 Weisman, C. S., 172, 180 Weiss, 416, 417, 418 Weiss, B. D., 589, 590, 592, 601, 605 Weiss, C., 467, 472 Weiss, K., 70, 89, 127, 128, 140 Weiss, L. H., 294, 297, 299, 313 Weiss, L. J., 143, 160 Weiss, R. D., 296, 308 Weiss, S. J., 166, 181 Weissert, W., 520, 535 Weissman, M. M., 188, 201 Weisz, J. R., 44, 60 Welch Cline, R. J., 166, 181 Welch, C. E., 148, 156 Welch, H. G., 584, 585, 604 Wellner, A. S., 543, 556 Wells, N., 382, 402 Wells, P., 69, 86 Wells, W. D., 476, 495 Welsh, I., 225, 239 Wenger, N. S., 153, 157 Wennberg, J. E., 172, 178 Wentzel, T. M., 610, 620 Werner, H., 184, 204 Werner, L., 544, 556 West, C., 71, 88, 89, 131, 132, 139, 140, 193, 194, 204 West, M., 349, 365 West, R. L., 189, 199 West, V., 524, 534 Westcott, R., 151, 152, 160 Wester, R., 664, 678 Westerlund, 409 Weston, W., 128, 139 Weston, W. W., 128, 133, 135, 139, 143, 149, 160, 164, 180 Wethington, E., 270, 271, 284 Whaley, B. B., 51, 61, 184, 185, 186, 187, 193, 204 Wharton, A. S., 355, 368 Wheeler, J., 525, 534 Whetten-Goldstein, K., 149, 157 Whitchurch, G. G., 50, 61 White, J., 75, 76, 77, 89 White, J. C., 131, 140 White, K., 121, 140 White, M. A., 610, 624 White, M. D., 195, 203 White, M. J., 102, 116 White, M. L., 126, 139 White, M. S., 664, 678 White, T. L., 489, 490

AUTHOR INDEX Whitehurst, G. J., 503, 512 Whitfield, M. J., 105, 110, 111, 118 Whiting, R., 614, 624 Whitney, D., 435, 443 Whitney, D. C., 557, 558, 559, 560, 578 Whitney-Saltiel, D., 184, 201 Whitt, J. K., 185, 186, 187, 204 Whitten, P., 522, 526, 527, 535 Whorley, L. W., 372, 402 Why only the best is good enough, 540, 556 Wiatzkin, H., 67, 83 Widman, L. E., 76, 89, 497, 513 Widmark Peterson, V., 610, 622 Wieland, D., 380, 382, 399, 401 Wiemann, C. M., 268, 284 Wiener, C., 328, 331, 344 Wiener, L., 302, 308 Wikler, D., 661, 678 Wilbright, W. A., 614, 624 Wilcox, C., 403, 422 Wilcox, D. L., 538, 556 Wildavsky, 412 Wildavsky, A., 227, 236, 239 Wilder, C. S., 188, 204 Wilis, B. S., 524, 533 Wilkerson, J., 353, 361, 368 Wilkinson, C., 151, 158 Wilkinson, G. S., 591, 592, 602 Wilkinson, K. P., 209n, 220 Wilklund, K., 640, 648 Willan, A., 658, 675 Williams, 130 Williams, A., 127, 139, 189, 192, 202, 204 Williams, A. B., 296, 300, 301, 313 Williams, B., 228, 229, 236, 239 Williams, C. B., 392, 402 Williams, D., 233, 237 Williams, D. L., 614, 624 Williams, E., 353, 354, 358, 366 Williams, E. A., 299, 309 Williams, J. E., 498, 513 Williams, M., 151, 160, 297, 306, 647, 648 Williams, M. V., 79, 83, 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 594, 596, 598, 600, 601, 602, 603, 604, 605 Williams, P., 452, 470, 484, 491 Williams, S., 78, 79, 87, 143, 160, 322, 345 Williams, S. J., 143, 160 Williams, S. S., 294, 297, 299, 313 Willig, C., 299, 313 Wills, T. A., 264, 270, 272, 279, 284 Wilmot, W. W., 297, 305 Wilson, A., 150, 152, 160

AUTHOR INDEX Wilson, B. M., 144, 145, 161 Wilson, F. L., 655, 678 Wilson, J. Q., 407 Wilson, K., 646, 648 Wilson, L. J., 211, 219 Wilson, M. E. H., 70, 89 Wilson, N. L., 563, 581 Wilson, R. N., 369, 388, 390, 392, 402 Wilson, S. E., 402 Wilson, S. R., 655n, 678 Windahl, S., 599, 603, 662, 678 Winefield, H. R., 266, 282 Winett, R. A., 655, 678 Wingard, J. R., 610, 621 Wingerd, J. L., 656, 678 Wingfield, A., 189, 204 Winkelby, M. A., 655, 664, 678 Winkelstein, W., 657, 672 Winker, M. A., 75, 76, 77, 89 Winkleby, M. A., 590, 602, 664, 671 Winkler, K., 286, 309 Winn, L., 334, 342 Winnett, L. B., 610, 624 Winnubst, J. A., 96, 117, 273, 279 Winograd, C. H., 377, 402 Winslade, W. J., 662, 672 Winston, J., 452, 466, 470 Winter, R. J., 100, 118 Wiprud, R., 69, 73, 75, 80, 88 Wirtzer, A. W., 152, 161 Wise, M., 276, 281 Wise, P. H., 498, 511 Wissow, L. S., 70, 89, 127, 128, 133, 140 Withers, M., 524, 533 Witte, K., 37, 51, 61, 473, 474, 477, 478, 480, 481, 483, 488, 493, 494, 495, 503, 504, 505, 513, 543, 549, 554, 556, 610, 623, 658, 678 Wittson, C. L., 523, 535 Witzke, D., 167, 179 Wodak, A., 296, 308 Woefel, M. W., 270, 282 Wofsy, C. B., 302, 307 Wohlfeiler, D., 244, 260 Wolde-Tsadik, G., 377, 381, 384, 386, 401 Wolf, M. D., 139 Wolf, R. E., 594, 602 Wolfe, A., 435, 443 Wolfe, D. M., 351, 365 Wolfe, H. W., 585, 605 Wolfson, H. G., 81, 85 Wolinsky, F., 327, 345 Wollner, J. M., 126, 135 Woloshin, S., 584, 585, 604

727 Wolraich, M. L., 382, 401 Wood, J. M., 297, 309 Wood, J. V., 267, 282 Wood, M. C., 610, 622 Wood, P., 270, 279 Wood, R. E., 385, 402 Wooding, J., 425, 440 Woods, I., 210, 216, 217 Woods, N. F., 267, 283 Woods, P. J., 268, 281 Woodward, B., 169, 170, 181 Woodwell, D. A., 557, 581 Woolverton III, H., 610, 622 Wooten, K., 664, 677 Wooton, R., 519, 535 Worth, D., 298, 299, 313 Worthley, J. S., 189, 199 Wortman, C. B., 264, 272, 274, 284 Wossmer, B., 100, 117 Wray, C., 125, 138, 148, 160 Wright, 405 Wright, A. L., 664, 678 Wright, E., 194, 195, 201 Wrong, 405 Wulfert, E., 482, 484, 495 Wyatt, J. C., 76, 82

Y

Yaldon, S., 570, 581 Yancovitz, S. R., 296, 307 Yang, H., 497, 508 Yano, E. M., 106, 111, 113, 114, 117, 148, 151, 157 Yanovitzky, I., 572, 573, 581 Yarborough III, C. M., 434, 440 Yarnall, K. S. H., 610, 622 Yasumoto, J. Y., 215, 218 Yates, B. C., 267, 283 Yep, G. A., 244, 245, 248, 258, 260 Yin, R. K., 529, 535 Yoos, G. E., 679 Yost, A. J., 325, 345 Young, E. W., 169, 181 Young, K., 352, 353, 368 Young, L. A., 215, 219 Young, L. N., 170, 179 Young, M., 149, 160 Youngner, S. J., 173, 179 Youngstrom, R., 434, 443 Yows, S. R., 664, 679

728

AUTHOR INDEX

Z

Zimmerman, D., 661, 673 Zimmerman, M. A., 249, 254, 256, 257, 260, 654, 655, 657, 659, 663, 670, 675, 679 Zimmerman, R. S., 498, 513 Zimmerman, S., 377, 382, 384, 402 Zimmermann, S., 359, 368, 377, 382, 402 Zismer, D. K., 74, 85 Zoeller, H. M., 248, 249, 254, 255, 261 Zola, I. K., 568, 581, 663, 679 Zook, E. G., 40, 49, 61, 354, 359, 360, 366, 425, 434, 441, 443 Zuckerman, 421 Zuckerman, H. S., 320, 340 Zumiani, G., 610, 620 Zupkis, R. V., 67, 83 Zyzanski, S. J., 73, 83, 144, 145, 151, 152, 157, 158, 160, 161, 223, 236

Zaid, A., 268, 284 Zald, M. N., 210, 219 Zambrana, R. E., 244, 261 Zborowski, M., 41, 61 Zeisel, S. H., 542, 556 Zeiss, A. M., 373, 374, 381, 386, 389, 390, 395, 400 Zeithaml, V. A., 550, 555 Zemore, R., 267, 284 Zettl, H., 585, 605 Zhao, P. Z., 192, 202 Ziant, G., 610, 624 Zibart, R., 197, 204 Zierler, S., 301, 313 Ziff, M. A., 664, 679

Subject Index

A 5-a-Day program, 431, 632– 633 AARP, 412n Absenteeism, 384, 428, 429 Academic and public health collaborations, 637– 647 agreeing on facts, 640– 641 building trust, 637, 638– 639 identifying aims, 641– 642 knowing history of prior endeavors, 642 maintaining collaborations, 642– 647 Academic participation in funded research projects, 632– 633 Access to computers, 113 to health care, 276–277, 412–414, 417, 421, 532, 597–598, 613– 614 to health information, 599 to provider, 143 to social support, 268 Accessibility, media differences and, 462 Accidental System, The, 403 Accidents, 544, 545, 546 Accountability, risk perception and, 228 Accreditation organizations, 324–326 ACIDS (acquired community immune deficiency syndrome), 292 Acquiescent utterances, 126 Action, health message design and, 473 Action cues, 474, 476–477 Action stage, 502 Active communication, 547 Active euthanasia, 173 Active public, 547 Adaptive systems, 386 Adherence, 144–146 Ad Hoc Committee on Health Literacy for the Council on Scientific Affairs, 598 Ad hoc groups, 373 Advance directives, 20, 26, 169–170, 172 Advertising, 538–539, 557n, 669 Advice, 271–272 Advisory councils, 230 Advocacy, illness narratives and, 27, 28 Affective dimensions, of communication, 127

African Americans communication skills research on, 106, 108, 109 health communication strategies for, 256 health message design and, 476–477 HIV/AIDS disclosure and, 303 as mass media audience, 572 mistrust of medical system by, 228 stereotypes of, 79 Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis and, 635 Age bias for/against providers due to, 69 consultation length and patient, 152 patient communication style and, 67– 68 patient satisfaction and, 142 provider communication style and patient, 69 provider interactions and patient, 183–187 Ageism, 190, 192 Agency, 661n Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ), 617 Age of Paradox, The, 432 Age-related cognitive changes, 189 Aging population, increasing size of, 330. See also Elderly patients AIDS. See HIV/AIDS AIO characteristics, 476–477 Alcohol binge drinking, 485 media representation of use of, 563, 564 Alcoholism, 431 Alzheimer’s disease, 188 Ambiguity, policymaking and, 408 American Association of Health Plans (AAHP), 543 American Cancer Society, 196 American College of Physicians, 324 American College of Surgeons, 324 American College of Women’s Health Physicians, 197 American Dental Association, 324 American Healthstyles, 452 American Home Products, 330 American Hospital Association (AHA), 324, 325, 326, 419 American Hospital Supply, 420 American Indians, diabetes health campaign for, 626, 630

729

730 American Medical Association (AMA), 197, 324, 325, 411, 415n, 419, 420, 541, 548, 584, 598 American Nursing Association (ANA), 325–326 American Pharmaceutical Association, 542 American Psychological Association, 548 American Responds to AIDS campaign, 452 American Society of Internal Medicine, 324 American Vietnamese community, antismoking campaign and, 665 AmericasDoctor Web Services, 528 Analogies, use in provider–pediatric patient interaction, 186 Analysis, health campaigns and level of, 450 Annie E. Casey Foundation, 212–213 Anthrax attacks, 334 Antidrug messages, 413n, 454, 467, 474. See also Health messages Antidrunk-driving campaigns, 573, 662, 663 Antihealth messages, 669. See also Health messages Antismoking campaign, 486, 499, 665 Appeals multiple, 457 negative, 456–457 positive, 457 Appropriation, 659– 660 Archival studies, 12n, 377, 379 Argumentation, principles of, 628– 629 Arizona Social Support Interview Schedule, 270 Arthritis, 330 Asian women, relation to health care, 244, 245 Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), 324–325 Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, 420 Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH), 324 Assurance, 550 A Su Salud En Accion, 482, 483 Attentiveness, 125 Attitudes behavior and prior, 485–487 defined, 485 effect of health campaigns on, 208, 466–467 Attractiveness, of health messenger, 460, 461 Attribution theory, image restoration strategies and, 545–546 Audience analysis of, 304 field experience with, 626– 627 for health campaign, 451–452, 453–454, 466 health literacy level of, 593–594 health message design and, 474 popular mass media, 572–573 values of, 456 Audience effects, 575–576 Audience segmentation. See Segmentation Aurora Health Plans, 334 Authority, medical, 568 Autoethnography, 12n Autonomy

SUBJECT INDEX ethics and, 653, 666, 669 within health care teams, 389 health communication theory and patient, 47, 131 informed consent and, 170 medical disclosure and, 167 suffering and loss of, 19–20 Availability of provider, 143 Average people, as health messengers, 460, 461 Awareness messages, 455, 458–459. See also Health messages Aware public, 547 Axiology, theory and, 46

B Bad news delivery, 98, 101, 103, 104, 167–168 Balanced Budget Act of 1997, 191 Bales’ process analysis system, 125, 129 Battle and journey illness narratives, 17 Baxter-Travenol, 420 Before-and-after format, in illness narratives, 22 Behavior effect of health campaigns on, 208, 466–468 intention and, 487 interpersonal messages and meanings and, 303 meanings of HIV/AIDS and, 293–303 risk perception and changes in, 504 prior beliefs and, 485–487 social norms and, 305 unteamworthy, 396 See also Risk-taking behaviors Behavioral approach system (BAS), 489 Behavioral inhibition system (BIS), 489 Behavioral measures, vs. perceptual, 81 Behavioral model of health services use, 335 Behavioral Research Program, 613 Belief, behavior and prior, 485–487 Belief-oriented messages, 460–461. See also Health messages Bell Atlantic Technology Education Center, 614 Belmont Report of 1974, 169 Beneficence, 304 Benefit, health messages and perceived, 484–485 Benefit reductions, Medicare, 421 Biases, health risk management and, 233 Biomedical model, 11, 42, 49, 95, 121, 123 balance with psychosocial, 143 Biopsychological model, 42, 49, 95 Biosocial resonation, 264 Biotechnology organizations, 329–330 Blame ethics and, 660– 662 narrative sense-making and, 19 risk perception and, 228 Bleeding Edge, 403 Blocking strategies, policymaking and, 414, 415n Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Florida, 541

SUBJECT INDEX Body, health communication and, 40–42, 48, 49, 50 Bolstering, 545 Bona fide health care groups, 376, 390, 394 Bonaventure House, 27 Boomerang, 403 Boomerang effects, 467 Boundedness, health care teams and, 389–390, 395 Bracketing, 111 Brand equity, 539–540, 544–545 Breast cancer media articles on, 561 moralization of, 571 prevention campaigns, 570 screening, 662 Breast cancer gene, 221 Breast cancer patients CHESS program, 614 effects of provider styles of communication on, 153–154 expressive group therapy for, 148 illness narratives, 17n, 20–21, 23, 25–26, 28 social support and, 267 Breastfeeding campaigns, 660– 661, 664 Breast implants, narrative sense-making and, 18 Breast self-examination experience of, 53 information campaigns, 29n, 479–480 pamphlets, 489 popular media and, 568, 575 Bristol Myers Squibb, 330 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 428 Bureau of Primary Health Care (BPHC), 618 Burnout, 347, 355–356, 359, 384, 424, 427 Business, policymaking and, 405n, 406, 407n

C CAIDS (community acquired immune deficiency syndrome), 292 California Department of Health Services, 574 Campfires, 435 Camp Health Aide Program (CHAP), 252–253 Cancer language of, 12, 292 moralization of, 571 prevention of, 610 risk charts, 617 risk communication and, 223 self-disclosure and, 166 Cancer care, health care teams and, 374 Cancer Care Collaborative, 618 Cancer communications, 613 Cancer Health Disparity Collaborative, 618 Cancer information dissemination, 615– 616 Cancer Information Service (CIS), 574, 613– 614 Cancer Information Service Research Consortium (CISRC), 616– 617

731 CancerNet, 615 Cancer patients, 108, 266–267, 273 Cancion de la Raza, 574 Cardiology studies of teams, 378 use of telemedicine consultation in, 523 Cardiovascular disease prevention campaign, 484 Career development, Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communication Research, 616 Caregivers burnout among, 358 effect of illness on, 17–18 lay, 362–363 Casa en Casa project, 250–251 Case studies of health care teams, 377–382 of telemedicine, 529 Casuistry, 654 CDCynergy, 634 CD-ROMs, health messages and, 462, 464 Celebrities, as health messengers, 460, 461 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 213, 241, 286, 291, 452–453, 557n, 625, 629, 630, 632, 633, 635, 664 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMM), 322, 324, 372 Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communication Research (CECCRs), 615– 616 Change, policymaking and, 410 Change processes, in health organizations, 335, 337–338 Channel selection, 450, 461–464, 499, 593 CHESS Program (Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System), 614 Chicago Hope, 574 Children bicycle helmet campaign, 486 conceptualization of illness, 184–185 interactions with providers, 183–187 medical interview training and, 97 sun protection campaign, 640, 644 training in question asking for, 107 Children’s Hospital of Boston, 551 Children’s Partnership, 598 Chronic illness, 330–331 older patients and, 188, 330 self-image and, 21–24 suffering and, 15–16, 19–20 teams and, 382 telemedicine and management of, 528–529 vs. terminal, 23 Church of Scientology, 548 CIGNA, 332 Citizen contacts, 230 Citizen juries, 230 Citizens Commission on Human Rights, 548 Citizen surveys, 230 Citizen volunteers, 250–252 Civil investing, 209

732 Clarifying questions, 111 Clinical care/medicine patient-provider interactions in, 154–155 social construction theory and, 11–12 use of narrative in, 14 Clinical problem, classifying telemedicine according to, 518 Clinical trial enrollment, 134 Close textual analysis, 566 Close ties/weak ties, 269 Coalition for Affordable Quality Healthcare, 540 Coalition for Healthcare Choices, 414 CODEC, 527 Codependency, supportive communication and, 361 Coding approach, to interaction analysis, 124, 125 Coding categories, 559 Coercive isomorphism, 321 Cognitive ability age-related changes in, 189 health literacy and, 584 Cognitive-affective influences, provider-patient interactions and, 68– 69, 80 Cognitive response to health messages, 489 Collective efficacy, 213–214 Collectivist cultures, communication styles and, 78 Commonality, idiosyncrasy and, 43–44, 48, 50, 53 Communicating Social Support, 358 Communication active, 547 constitutive model of, 47, 424, 436 coping and supportive, 269–272 functions of in health care, 2 in health intervention programs, 246–247 objectives of, 288 passive, 547 under pressure, 585 role and purpose of, 10–13 transmission model of, 424, 436 work and, 424 Communication dynamics, measurement of, 124–132 Communication Predicament of Aging Model, 190 Communication research funding, 612– 613 role in telemedicine, 523–527 social support and, 264–265 See also Community-based research; Health communication research Communication skills training effects/transference of, 114 interventions, 112–113 patient, 105–113 provider, 95–105 Communication styles of doctors, 66– 67 of patients, 67– 68 Community defined, 209

SUBJECT INDEX in health intervention programs, 246 professional obligations to, 666– 667 Community activists, 250–252 Community advisory boards, 656– 657 Community analysis, 211 Community-based health interventions foundations of, 245–249 with marginalized groups, 249–254 Community-based research, 637– 647 building trust, 637, 638– 639 agreeing on facts, 640– 641 identifying aims, 641– 642 knowing history of prior endeavors, 642 maintaining academic and public health collaboration in, 642– 647 Community building, 208, 209, 212 illness narratives and, 10, 16, 26–28 Community capacity, 213–214 Community coalitions, 213, 253–254 Community field, 209n Community health risk management, 221–235 balancing science, institutional trust, and public choice, 232–235 community involvement in HIV/AIDS prevention, 231–232 Focus on Kids, 231 integrating health risk assessments, 225–235 negotiating health risk assessment, 228–230 PACE Project, 231 transscientific nature of risk, 226–228 Community health teams, 378 Community health workers, 252–254 Community intervention, 655 Community networks, health campaign design and, 452 Community organizing, 207–217 communities and organized systems, 209 grassroots organizing, 250–252 state-of-the-art, 212–215, 216–217 state-of-the-science, 210–212, 215–216 Community-oriented approaches, 654 Community outreach movement, 371 Community partnerships, 214 Community power debate, 404 Community stakeholders, 215 Comparative risks, 222 Comparison studies, of interaction analysis, 129–130 Compassionate care, 148–149 Competence perspective, on bad news delivery, 168 Completeness, 654 Complex Adaptive Systems, 337 Complexity component, 385 coordinative, 385 dynamic, 385 of group’s work, 385–387 Compliance, 144–146 awareness messages and, 458

SUBJECT INDEX health literacy and, 589, 598 telemedicine and, 531 Component complexity, 385 Comprehensibility, 655 Comprehension tests, 591, 592 Comprehensive care, 371 Comprehensive community initiatives, 209 Computer literacy, 585 Computers health messages and, 497, 502, 506–507 multimedia health communication via, 596–598 use in examining room, 155 See also Internet; Web sites Concord Coalition, 191 Concrete-logical stage, 184 Condom use campaigns to encourage, 481, 484, 485 identity threats and, 295 negotiating, 297, 298–299 Confidentiality, 653 Conflict, in health care teams, 392–393, 394 Confrontation, 659– 660 Consent, 656– 657. See also Informed consent Consent by proxy, 170 Constitutive model of communication, 11, 424, 436 Constitutive view of health intervention programs, 246–247 Constraint recognition, 547 Consultation length, 74, 141, 142, 150–152, 557n Consumerism, 123, 667 Contemplation stage, 502 Content analysis, 575 information value of health messages and, 559–564 Context consultation length and medical encounter, 152 field experience, 627– 628 Contextual approach, to medical consultation, 81–82 Contingency theories, health care teams and, 394–395 Continuing medical education, 155 Continuity devices, 465 Continuity of care, 133–134, 143, 144 Contracts, in managed care, 333–334 Control illness narratives and assertion of, 10, 16, 19–21 managed care and provider, 73 Controlled trials, 377–382 Conversational repair attempts, 131–132 Conversation analysis, 131–132 Conversation pits, 435 Cooperation, communication and, 2 Co-optation, 659– 660 Coordination and Competence System (CACS), 129, 130 Coordinative complexity, 385 Coping, supportive communication and, 269–272 Corporate fitness programs, 429 Corporate image, 539–540, 544–545 Corporate structure, changes in, 539–540

733 Corporatization of medicine, 327 Correctness, 654 Correlational studies, 572 Cosmeceutical, 542 Cosmopolitan, 291 Cost of communication skills training, 112 low health literacy and health care, 590–591 media differences and, 462 of telemedicine, 517, 522 Cost containment, 413, 421 Cost savings health risk reduction programs and, 430 public relations and, 541–542, 549–550 Counsel, communication and, 2 Coworkers, as sources of social support, 359–360 Creative epidemiology, 463 Creative publicity, 463 Credibility media differences and, 462 of persuasive messages, 455 Crises, 546 policy windows and, 412 management plan for, 544 types of, 544–545 Critical analysis, 559, 564–572, 575 Critical consciousness, 249, 255–256 Critical mass, policy windows and, 412 Critical scholarship, 559n Critical theory, 46, 566 Critical tradition of communication, 52–53 Culpability, 660– 662 Cultivation theory, 549 Cultural barriers, 248 Cultural context audience and, 593–594 cancer information and, 615 health intervention programs and, 248–249 of marginalized groups, 243–244 of provider-patient interactions, 77–80 social support and, 273–274 Cultural empowerment model (PEN-3), 255n Cultural norms, challenging, 660 Cultural paradigm of risk, 227–228 Cultural sensitivity, 29, 248, 669 Cultural themes, ethics and, 659– 660 Cultural values, bad news and, 168 Culture conception of health/illness and, 12–13, 41, 51–52 defined, 77 health goals and, 656 health literacy and, 599 wellness concept and, 434 Cyber Dialogue Health Practice, 528 Cyberhealth, 516. See also Telemedicine Cybernetic tradition of communication, 50–51

734 D Danger control response, 487 Data gathering, 127, 131 Data sources, 634 Days of Our Lives, 574 Death and dying, attitudes toward, 42–43 Decision making, 153, 171–174, 175 health outcomes and patient involvement in, 147 illness narratives and, 10, 16, 24–26 patient role in, 145 rights, 321 risk and, 228 surrogates, 172 Declaration of Geneva, 169 Declaration of Helsinki, 169, 170 Decodability, media differences and, 462 Decoding Abortion Rhetoric, 559 de Madres a Madres project, 253 Dementia, 188 Democracy, risk communication and, 224 Demographic characteristics audience segmentation and, 498 health message design and, 476 of health organizations, 330 limited value of, 546–547 Denial, 474, 487, 545, 587–588 Density of supportive network, 268–269 Deontological, 653 Departments of public health, 329 Depression awareness campaign, 662 in elderly patients, 188–189 Deprivation, 662– 666 Depth, media differences and, 462 Depth interviewing, 12n Dermatology, use of telemedicine consultation in, 523 Desires, uncertainty and, 44–45 Diabetes, 186, 330, 482, 483, 626, 630 Diabetic patients, 106, 108, 528–529, 588 Diachronic analysis, 530 Diagnosis, communication and, 2 Diagnosis related groups (DRGs), 321, 322, 352, 413, 418, 421 Diagnostic uncertainty, 165 Dialogue centralizing in health intervention programs, 248–249 ethics of, 659 in healthy workplaces, 436 phenomenological tradition and, 49 Diaries, 131 Diet advertising, 48–49 Dietary improvement campaigns, 501 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, 542 Dietetics teams, 380 Difficult patients, managing, 101, 102 Diffusion of innovation theory, 549, 550

SUBJECT INDEX Digital divide, 113, 276–277, 597–598, 613– 614 Directiveness, 126 Direct truth, 163 Disability marginalization and, 244 terminology, 559–560 Disciplines, defined, 370 Disclosure, of HIV/AIDS status, 301–303 Discourse, 47–48 Discourse analysis, 12n, 131, 566 Discursive reflection, 52 Disease, 289 classifying telemedicine according to, 517–518 vs. illness, 14 language of, 40–41 models of, 43 moralization of, 570–572 as shaper of communication, 40 See also Illness Disease chronicity, 330–331. See also Chronic illness Dissemination, of health messages, 461–464 Distance, image restoration and, 545 Distress, 425 Diversity, in health care teams, 387–388 Doctors. See Physicians Doctor-patient relationships. See Provider-patient interaction Domain consensus, 392 Do no harm, 304, 631, 653, 660, 662 Drugs antidrug campaigns, 413n, 454, 467, 474 effect on understanding of disease and health, 41 negative appeals, 456–457 over-the-counter, 542–543, 561 therapeutic classes of, 329 Dual hierarchy, of hospitals, 327–328 Due Process Clause, 173 Dupont, 542 Dying, stories of, 17 Dynamic complexity, 385

E Ebony, 561 Ecological model for study of medical encounters, 8, 63–82 cognitive-affective influences, 68– 69, 80 communicative ontology of, 64– 66 cultural context, 77–80 impact of Internet, 75–77 interpersonal context, 64–72 interplay of processes, 71–72 managed care and, 72–75 partner’s communication influences, 70 political-legal context, 77 predispositional influences, 66– 68 research agenda, 80–82

SUBJECT INDEX Economic context of marginalized groups, 243–244 Economic incentives, 457 Eder Inc., 430 Education of health communication practitioners, 633, 636 partnership building and level of, 70 of public relations practitioners, 552 See also Health education Efficacy beliefs, 504 Efficiency, media differences and, 462 Egalitarianism, risk and, 227 e-health, 516. See also Telemedicine Elaboration likelihood model, 503 Elan Corporation, 539 Elderly patients adherence among, 144–146 cancer information for, 614 decision-making assistance for, 172 interactions with providers, 128–129, 187–193 special health needs of, 188–190 See also Medicare Eli Lilly Corporation, 548 Elites, role in policymaking, 404–410 e-mail, provider-patient interaction via, 76 Emergency room teams, 378, 387 Emergency room telemedicine consultation, 523 Emergency room visits, 134 Emotion, decision making and,172 Emotional appeals, ethics of, 658– 660 Emotional contagion, 355 Emotional labor, 355–356 Emotional response, to health messages, 489 Emotional support, 266 Emotion-focused enacted support, 271 Emotion management, 99, 356 Empathy, 355, 550 Empiricism, 46 Employee assistance programs (EAPs), 429, 431–432, 433 Employee Benefit Research Institute, 430 Employers, professional obligations to, 667 Empowerment, 255, 661 community coalitions and, 253–254 risk communication and, 224–225 Empowerment education, 245–246, 249–250 Enacted support, 269–271 End-of-life care, 146 End-of-life decisions, 134, 172–173 End-of-life discussion campaign, 476 Enforceable trust, 215 Entertainment Education, 573 Entertainment-education, 463 ethics and, 659 health and, 573–575 health images in, 560 illness narratives and, 27–28 Entitlement, 656 Environment

735 affecting via health messages, 465 in community-based research, 641– 642 as focus of health campaign, 451, 453 health messages and appraisal of, 473–475, 481–487, 502 Epidemiology teams, 379 Epistemological uncertainty, 37 Epistemology, theory and, 46 Equity, 665 ER, 574 Essence, 561 Ethic of Care, 654 Ethics, 3, 651– 670 blame, shame, culpability, and responsibility and, 660– 662 communication research agenda and, 134 future challenges for, 668– 670 goals and mandates of, 656– 657 health as ultimate value, 665– 666 health communication research and, 304 illness narratives and reflection on, 25 intervention levels, 655 moral obligations and ethical dilemmas, 652– 655 narrative thought and, 16 persuasive tools, 658– 660 professional obligations, 666– 668 public relations and, 552 social support and, 275–277 stigmas, gaps, deprivation, and valuing and, 662– 665 targeting and segmentation and, 657– 658 Ethnicity attitudes and stereotypes related to, 79–80 effect on therapeutic relationship, 134 marginalization and, 244 as predispositional influence on communication, 78–79 Ethnocultural interpretations of disease, 12–13, 41, 51–52 Euro-communication rating scale, 129–130 Eustress, 425 Evaluation of field projects, 645 of health campaign effectiveness, 466–468 of health communication, 635 Everyday interpersonal communication research agenda, 303–305 social influence and, 288–290 health and, 285–287 HIV/AIDS epidemic and, 290–303 Evidence, 43 health campaign, 457–458 interpretation of, 640 Evidence messages, 479. See also Health messages Exaggeration, ethics of, 658– 660 Expectations for treatment, 143–144, 145 uncertainty and, 44–45

736 Expertise, 43 of health messenger, 459, 460, 461 policy, 410 Explaining Illness, 193 Explanation, 36n Explanatory models of illness, 12–13 Exposure, to health campaign, 451 Extended parallel process model, 473, 475, 503, 505, 549, 550 External change agencies, 210, 216 External cues, 476

F “Faces of Breast Cancer,” 28 Face-to-face instruction, 112, 113 Face-to-face-requirements, 521, 525 Factual truth, 163 Fairness, 654 Families USA, 411 Family accompanying elderly patients, 192 as advocates, 172 effect of member’s illness on, 17–18, 26 health campaigns directed at, 662 job stress and, 428 support from, 267 as surrogate decision makers, 173 Family and Community Health, 617 Family communication, 287 Family intervention, 655 Family systems theories, 50 Fantasy themes, in illness narratives, 27 Farmers, sun protection campaign, 640, 641, 644– 645, 646 Farm Kids Safety camp, 645 Farm workers Camp Health Aide Program, 252–253 hantavirus prevention program, 242–243 health campaigns, 626 PACE Project, 231 Fatalism, risk and, 227 Faux pas, 544, 545 Fear appeals, 487 design of, 477–478 ethics of, 658– 660 Fear control response, 487– 488 Feedback communication skills training and, 97, 99, 101, 103, 104 health behavior changes and, 505–506, 507 health campaign, 453 ipsative, 505, 506 normative, 505–506 personal, 505 Fee-for-service, quality of care and provider-patient communication in, 74

SUBJECT INDEX Female healthcare workers, home/work conflict among, 357 Female physicians communication styles of, 195–196 home/work conflict among, 357–358 Field theory, 209n Figurative language, use in provider–pediatric patient interactions, 186 Financing health services and products, 322–324 Flexible scheduling, 360 Flu season education efforts, 549–550 Focal behaviors, 451 Focal segments, 451, 453 Focus groups, 131, 452, 631 Focus on Kids, 231 Folk remedies, 568 Formal-logical stage, 184, 185 Formulations, 111 For-profit health care organizations consumer education and, 541–542 public relations and, 537, 539 situational theory and, 547 For-profit HMOs, 332 FPA Medical Management, 334 Frame of reference, 126 Framing, 561–562, 617 Free market romanticism, health care and, 416–417 Friends, support from, 267 Functions, defined, 371 Funding health communication grant applications, 618– 619 public health communication research, 612– 613 Futility thesis, 416–417

G Gain framing, 480 Gale Directory of Associations, 325 Gaps, 662– 666 Garbage can model of policymaking, 408–410 Gay cancer, 292 Gay men, HIV/AIDS and, 291–292, 302–303 Gay plague, 292 Gay pneumonia, 292 Gender bias for/against providers and, 69 communication style and, 70 effect on therapeutic relationship, 134 marginalization and, 244 meanings of drug use and sexual behavior and, 296 negotiating condom use and, 298 patient communication style and, 67 patient satisfaction and, 142 provider communication style and, 67 segmentation and, 498 wellness concept and, 434 See also under Women

SUBJECT INDEX General Health Questionnaire, 130 General Hospital, 574 Genetic testing, 134 Geriatrics teams, studies, 378–382 Glaxo Wellcome, 330 Globalization, 254 Goals ethical, 656– 657 health care policy, 417–418 Goode Behavior, 574 Gore and Associates, 435 Gorgias, 10, 121 Government, risk communication and, 225 Government officials, as health messengers, 460 Government sponsorship of telemedicine, 520, 522 Grassroots organizing, 208, 210, 250–252 GRID (gay-related infectious disease), 292 Grounded theory, 22n, 132 Group ad hoc, 373 defined, 370 interdisciplinary, 373–374, 375 multidisciplinary, 373, 374, 375, 376 nominal care, 373 transdisciplinary, 374, 375 unidisciplinary, 373, 374, 376 Group communication theory, 548 Group context, in health organizations, 335, 336 Group discussion, communication skills training and, 97, 98, 100 Group HMOs, 72 Group maintenance, 384 Group process, 630– 632 medical work and, 385–389 Group productivity, 385 Group structures, 385 Group therapy, expressive, 148 Group work, 385 Guiding Light, 574 Gun safety campaign, 480, 483

H Handbook of Community Psychology, 208 Hantavirus prevention program, 241–243, 252 Harvard Alcohol Project for Designated Drivers, 574 Headache Study Group, 148 Head Start, 614 Health definitions of, 13 everyday interpersonal communication and, 285–287, 290 impact of social support on, 265–268 social construction of, 9–10, 289 socioeconomic inequities and, 668 as ultimate value, 665– 666, 667 Health advocacy groups, 320

737 Health and disease management, 74 Health belief model, 335, 455, 473– 475, 499, 503, 549 Health beliefs, theories of, 51 Health beyond medicine, 17 Health care access to, 412–414, 417, 421, 532 as commodity vs. right, 13, 416–417 job stress and, 347–350 Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), 191, 322, 521. See also Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Health Care Leadership Council, 543 Health care providers. See Providers Health care quality improvement movement, 321 Health care teams/groups, 369–396 approaches to study of, 376–383 as bona fide groups, 376 definitions, 370–371 development, 395 effectiveness of, 383–393 group processes and team effectiveness, 385–390 history in United States, 371–372 negotiating roles, power, and conflict in, 390–393 outcomes and, 383–385 roles in groups, 375–376 studies of, 377–383 types of, 373–375 unteamworthy behavior, 396 Health care trilemma, 417–418 Health Communication, 2, 3, 130, 133 Health communication the body and, 40–42, 48–50 increasing visibility of, 632– 635 interpersonal, 595–596. See also Provider-patient interaction moral justification, 651– 652. See also Ethics multimedia, 596–598 qualitative inquiry into, 130–132 wellness programs and definition of, 434 See also Communication Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch (HCIRB), 286, 613, 619 Health communication campaigns, 286 Health Communication Intervention Research Program, 617 Health communication research, 1–4 agenda for, 3–4 centralizing marginalized groups in, 254–255 grant applications, 618– 619 limitations of methods, 132–134 narrative approaches to, 14–16 role of group processes in, 630– 631 social construction of, 29–30 status of, 285–286 Health communication theory characterizing, 39–46 communication scholarship and, 35–36 critical tradition, 52–53

738 Health communication theory (Cont.) cybernetic tradition, 50–51 defining theory, 36–37 organizing, 46–53 phenomenological tradition, 49–50 points of contention, 39 rhetorical tradition, 47–48 semiotic tradition, 48–49 sociocultural tradition, 51–52 sociopsychological tradition, 51 theory and practice, 37–39 unifying themes and tensions, 39–45 Health Disparity Collaborative, 618 Health education, 2, 429, 431 Health images in popular media, 558–559 Health informatics, 610 Health information, 287, 599, 611 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), 614– 615 Health intervention, ethical questions, 276 Health literacy, 583– 600, 669– 670 assessing levels of, 591–593 defined, 583–586 health communication and, 593–598 health messages for low health literacy, 646 impact of low health literacy, 587–591 increasing levels of, 598, 599– 600 prevalence of low health literacy, 586–587 research agenda, 599– 600 Health message design strategies, 473–489 commonalities across theories, 473–474 future directions, 488–489 motivational variables, 477–481 outcome variables, 487–488 resource and environment appraisal, 481–487 stimuli, 474–477 Health messages channel characteristics and goals of, 499–500 critical analysis and ideological hegemony and, 564–572 delivery of, 488–489 effectiveness of tailoring of, 501–502 individual vs. societal orientation of, 570 information value of, 559–564 narrowcasting, 497 segmentation and, 499–501 tailoring of, 499–501 targeting and, 499–501 See also Media campaigns for health promotion; Prevention and health campaigns Health messenger, 459–461 Health models, culture and, 78–79 Health narrative, 10. See also Illness narratives Health organizations, 319–338 accreditation organizations, 324–325 centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMM), 322, 324 demographic trends, 330 departments of public health, 329

SUBJECT INDEX disease chronicity trends, 330–331 hospice, 319, 320, 323, 328–329 hospitals, 319, 323, 327–328 insurance organizations, 324 managed care and, 332–335 medical groups, 326–327 nursing homes, 190, 323, 328 organizational change, 337–338 overview of, 322 parish nurse programs, 329 pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations, 329–330 physicians’ offices, 326 technology trends, 331 theorizing organizations in health services, 335–338 trade and professional organizations, 325–326 Health outcomes, 146–149 provider communication skills training and, 104–105 self-disclosure and, 166 See also Outcomes; Patient outcomes Health policy communication and, 609– 610 models, 569 See also Policymaking; Public health Health Professional Shortage Areas, 521 Health promotion messages, rhetoric of, 29 Health-related ideological themes, 567–572 Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), 618 Health risks appraisal of, 505 management of, 232–235 public understanding of, 226 reduction of, 430 Health screening, 329, 431, 610, 662 Health screening messages, 38. See also Health messages Health status, social support and, 264 Healthy, 13 Healthy Cities/Health Communities project, 245, 250n, 254 Healthy Communities, 234 Healthy Living Program, 482 Healthy Markets, 417n Healthy People 2010, 286, 584, 598, 600, 609 Hearing loss, 189, 330 Heart disease, 330 Heart disease prevention program, 230 Hegemony, 361 Helicobacter pylori education campaign, 629, 630, 664 Henbest and Stewart measure, 129 Hermeneutics, 46 Hierarchy, risk and, 227 High Incident, 574 Hippocratic oath, 165, 169, 171, 653 Hispanics, ethical concerns and cultural values of, 660 Historical studies, 377 History taking, 146–147

SUBJECT INDEX HIV/AIDS AIDS quilt, 28 brochures, 480 as chronic disease, 28n community involvement in prevention of, 231–232, 234 disclosure and, 69, 301–303 everyday interpersonal communication and, 285, 290–291 gay men and, 291–292, 302–303 health care workers, 350 illness narratives, 23, 25, 27 language of, 12 Latino men and, 248 meanings of and influence on behavior and everyday interaction, 293–303 meanings of having AIDS, 300–303 meanings of HIV prevention, 296–300 meanings of HIV test, 299–300, 329 meanings of IV drug use and sharing works, 295–296 meanings of prostitution and, 294–295 meanings of unsafe sex and, 293–294 media coverage of, 565 moralization of, 571 negotiating condom use, 298–299 prevention of, 296–300 prevention campaign, 467, 477, 478 risk reduction program, 231 safe sex campaigns, 467 safe-sex talk, 296–298 self-disclosure and, 166 social construction of, 291–293 HMO Act of 1973, 332 HMOs (health maintenance organizations), 72, 324 Medicare enrollees and, 338 number in United States, 323 as organizational form, 319, 320 policymaking and, 413 Hmong culture, American medical establishment and, 51, 52 Hoechst Marion Roussel, 330 Holistic conception of health/disease, 43, 49–50 Home health care, 329, 528 Homeland security issues, 228 Homeless, compassionate care for, 148–149 Home/work conflict, 357–358 Homogeneity/heterogeneity, 269 Hospice, 319, 320, 328–329 studies of teams, 378, 382, 384 in United States, 323 Hospice Association of America (HAA), 328 Hospital consent forms, 170 Hospitalization rates, low health literacy and, 590–591 Hospitals, 319, 327–328 influence of managed care, 352–353 nonprofit, 327 public relations in, 539 in United States, 323

739 Hospital staff nurses, job stress and, 349 Hospital teams, 379, 381 Human subjects protection of, 169, 170 protocol, 644 Humana, 541 Humanism, science and, 42–43, 52, 53 Hum Log, 573 Hypertension, 330 Hypertensive patients, 106, 107

I Iatrogenic outcomes, 662, 665 Identification, rhetoric and, 48 Identity chronic illness and, 21–24 illness narratives as transforming, 10, 16, 21–24 sense-making and, 17 spoiled, 663 stigma and labeling and, 663– 664 Identity dilemmas, 21 Identity meanings of unsafe sex, 293–294 Identity objectives, 288 Identity threats condom use and, 293, 295 HIV/AIDS disclosure and, 301–302 meanings associated with condoms and, 298 Ideology health care teams and, 393 health-related, 567–572 media coverage of health and, 564–565 policymaking and, 410, 411 Idiosyncrasy, commonality and, 43–44, 48, 50, 53 Illness, 289 children’s conceptualization of, 184–185 vs. disease, 14 impact of social support on, 265–268 labeling, 286 language of, 11 metaphorical conceptions of, 41 models of, 43 personal meaning of, 43–44 social construction of, 8, 9–10 stress-related, 426 See also Chronic illness; Disease Illness, Immunity, and Social Interaction, 263 Illness models, culture and, 78–79 Illness narratives, 10, 14–16 as assertion of control, 10, 16, 19–21 building community and, 26–28 clinical implications of, 30 functions of, 10, 16 as sense-making, 10, 16–19 as transforming identity, 10, 16, 21–24 types of, 17 as warranting decisions, 10, 16, 24–26

740 Image restoration strategies, 545–546 Immigrants, health literacy among, 587 Immunization, 329, 415 Immunization messages, 483, 574. See also Health messages Impression management, 166 Incentive appeals, 455–456 Inclusion, 655 Incrementalism, 410 Independent practice associations, 72 Individual community-based research and goals of, 641– 642 as focus of wellness programs, 435–436 professional obligations to, 666 Individual intervention, 655 Individualism, 78, 227, 653, 666, 667 Individual orientation of health messages, 570 Individual wellness, 427 Industry, risk communication and, 225 Industry image, 540 Influence, resistance to, 640 Influencers, as focus of health campaign, 453, 454, 464–465 Information, inferior, 561–562 Informational support, 266, 268, 271–272 Information exchange, 144 health outcomes and, 147 patients and, 105, 110–112 Information gaps, 665 Information incongruities, 265 Information processing, 50–51 Information provision, 11, 110–111, 164 Information seeking, 105–107, 110 awareness messages and, 458–459 Information source, corporate brand as, 540 Information technologies, 331, 669 Information use, Internet and monitoring of, 506–507 Information verifying, 111 Informativeness, 125, 127 Informed consent, 47, 165, 167, 168–171, 653 forms, 171, 594 Infotainment programs, 542 Ingratiation, image restoration and, 545, 546 Insights into illness, illness narratives and, 23–24 Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), 618 Institute of Medicine, 331 Division of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, 233 Institutional analysis, 320–321 Institutional context, 335, 337 Institutionalization of older patients, 190 Institutionalized meanings, 320 Institutional perspective, 320 Institutional trust, health risk management and, 232–235 Institutions, community-based research and goals of, 641– 642 Instructional videotape, communication skills training and, 97, 101, 102, 104

SUBJECT INDEX Instruction messages, 455, 459. See also Health messages Instrumentality view of health intervention programs, 246–247 Instrumental objectives, 288 Instrumento Para Diagnosticar Lecturas (Instrument for Diagnosis of Reading), 592 Insurance organizations, 324 Insured persons, 322 Intended responses, to health campaign, 451, 454 Intensive care teams, studies, 378, 381 Intention, behavior and, 487 Interaction analysis, 124–129, 377 limitations of, 133 Interactive media, health campaigns and, 461 Interactive technologies, 134, 500–501 Interactive video–mediated telepsychiatry, 519 Interactivity, 506 Interdisciplinary teams/groups, 373–374, 375, 389, 393 developing, 395 older patients and, 192–193 studies of, 378–382 Interest groups, role in policy formation/implementation, 404–405, 414–415, 418 Internal cues, 474, 476 International Code of Medical Ethics, 169 International Communication Association, 646 Health Communication Division, 1, 3 International development studies, 211 International Food Information Council, 542 Internet clinicians’ attitudes toward information on, 75—76 focus groups on, 631 health campaigns and, 462, 467 health communication via, 596–598, 617, 634 health literacy and, 585 health messages on, 497, 502, 506–507 impact on provider-patient interactions, 75–77 public health information and, 610 public relations and, 551 support groups on, 25, 273, 276–277 telemedicine and, 520 virtual consultations, 76–77 See also Web sites Interorganizational role stress, 352–353 Interpersonal channels, 499–500 Interpersonal context of medical encounters cognitive-affective influences, 68– 69 communicative ontology of, 64– 66 interplay of processes, 71–72 partner’s communication influences, 70 predispositional influences, 66– 68 Interpersonal health communication, 595–596 Interpersonal influencers, 464 Interpersonal intervention, 655 Interpersonal objectives, 288 Interpersonal role stress, 353–355

SUBJECT INDEX Interpretive paradigm, 565–566 Interpretive truth, 163 Intervention levels, 655 Intervention programs, effectiveness of social support, 274–275 Interview closings, 131 Interview training, 97–102 Intrusiveness, 461 Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviors, 270 Investor-owned hospitals, 327 Involvement with health issue, 503 IPAs, 332 Ipsative feedback, 505, 506 Iron triangles, 410n Isomorphic processes, 320, 321 Issues management, 544 IV drug use, HIV/AIDS and, 295–296

J Jargon, 596, 599 Jeopardy thesis, 416–417, 418 Job stress, 424 changing relation between self and work, 427–428 demands on professional and personal time and, 426–427 economic impact of, 428–429 emotional labor and, 355–356 in healthcare professions, 347–350 home/work conflict and, 357–358 increasing reliance on technology and, 425–426 interventions, 429 managed care stressors and, 350–351, 362 role stress and, 351–355 social support and, 359 sources of, 350–358 worker injury and, 428 John Laroquette Show, The, 574 Johnson & Johnson, 545 Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), 324, 325, 327, 372 Journal of Applied Communication Research, 361 Journal of Health Communication, 2 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 411, 560, 566 Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association, 193 Jupiter, 467 Justice, 654

K Kaiser Permanente, 332, 549–550 Karmanos Cancer Center, 614 Key contacts, 230

741 Knowledge effect of health campaigns on, 466–467 low health literacy and limited, 588–589 Knowledge gap phenomenon, 664 Know your partner, 296–297 Knox NutraJoint, 541

L Labeling, 663– 664 La Clinica de la Raza, 250 Laissez-faire capitalism, health care and, 416–417 Language of AIDS, 291–292 construction of reality and, 629– 630 of disease, 40–41 effect on communication, 78 jargon, 596, 599 pluralist, 228, 229 scientific-managerial, 228–229 social reality and, 289 Laotian immigrants, conflict with American medical system, 78–79 Latent meanings, 567 Latent public, 547 Latinos/Latinas health care information and, 562 HIV infection and, 248 as mass media audience, 572 relation to health care, 244, 245 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2 Lay caregivers, 362–363 Lay health advisors, 252–253 Lectures, communication skills training and, 97–102 Legal concerns, telemedicine and, 521 Legislative approval of health care issues, 540–541, 546–549 Licensing, as barrier to telemedicine, 520–521, 528 Lifestyle-based models of health promotion, 245 Lifestyle changes, 610 Lifestyle Heart Trial, 275 Lifestyle model, 569, 570 Lifestyle subgroups, 499 Life/work balance, 427–428 Lifeworld, 11–12 Likeability, of health messenger, 460 Listening, to community, 645– 646 Listservs, 27 Literacy, 583–584 Living wills, 172, 476 Local governments, public health departments, 329 Locality development, 210 Longitudinal studies, telemedicine, 529 Long-term care, 415 Loss framing, 479–480 Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, 614

742 Low health literacy health messages for, 646 impact of, 587–591 prevalence of, 586–587 Low-income patients health literacy among, 587 pregnant women, 267–268 social support and, 267–268

M Magazines, health images in, 558 Maintenance stage, 502 Making Connections, 212–213 Making Quality Count for Consumers and Patients Research Program, 617– 618 Male physicians, communication styles of, 195–196 Malpractice claims communication and, 77, 141 impact on patient outcomes, 154 medical disclosure and, 167 provider communication style and, 149–150 telemedicine and, 521 Mammography education campaigns, 474 media articles on, 561 Managed care, 336 communication structure of, 333 contracting, 543 crises, 546 defined, 332 effect on provider-patient communication, 72–75, 155, 361–362 end-of-life decisions and, 172 health care teams and, 372 health organizations and, 332–335 health reform legislation and, 540–541 as job stressor, 362 media coverage of, 564 Medicare and, 191 overview, 72 patient outcomes and, 142 public relations and, 540, 543 quality of care and, 74 research agenda for, 154 stressors in, 350–351 telemedicine and, 523, 529 women patients and, 196 Managed indemnity, 72 Management plan, health outcomes and, 147, 148 Mandates, ethical, 656– 657 Manmade risks, 227 Marginalization, defined, 243 Marginalized groups, 241–256, 627 centralizing in health communication research, 254–255

SUBJECT INDEX community-based health communication interventions and, 245–249 community-based strategies for communicating with, 249–254 social, economic, and political context of, 243–245 Market fundamentalist, 416n Marketing, 537–538, 539 public relations and, 542–543 Markey Cancer Center, 614 MART, 592 Mass communication, 286 Mass media, 499–500, 557n. See also Popular media Mass Media Images and Impact on Health, 563 Matrix structure, for health care teams, 389 Maude, 573–574 McDonaldization of society, 321 Meaning communication and, 11 of HIV/AIDS, 293–303 of illness, 43–44 institutionalized, 320 latent, 567 relational, 294, 295, 299 Meaning modalities, 462 Measurement of communication dynamics, 124–132 Media advocacy, 465 Media campaigns for health promotion, 449–469 campaign design, 451–455 channels and formats, 450, 461–464, 499, 593 definition of a campaign, 449–450 determining effectiveness, 466–468 dissemination, 465 health messengers, 459–461 influencing influencers, 464–465 instruction and awareness and, 458–459 persuasive message strategies, 455–458 See also Health messages; Prevention and health campaigns Media context, impact of Internet on provider-patient interactions, 75–77 Media effects research, 572–573 Media literacy, 459, 585 Media Metrix, 467 Media portrayals, public consciousness and, 27–28 Media richness theory, 530 health campaigns and, 450 telemedicine and, 525–526 Mediated space, 529, 531 Medicaid, 322, 324, 338 Medical center teams, 371 Medical dialogues, 121–122 Medical disclosure, 164–168 Medical encounters cognitive-affective influences, 68– 69, 80 communicative ontology of, 64– 66 cultural context, 77–80 ecological model of communication in, 63–82 impact of Internet, 75–77

SUBJECT INDEX interpersonal context, 64–72 interplay of processes, 71–72 managed care and, 72–75 partner’s communication influences, 70 political-legal context, 77 predispositional influences, 66– 68 research agenda, 80–82 See also Provider-patient interaction Medical error, 336 Medical gaze, 131 Medical Group Management Association, 327 Medical groups, 326–327 in United States, 323 Medical hegemony, 568 Medicalization, 568–569, 663, 667 of work, 433 Medical model, 569 Medical records, telemedicine and, 521 Medical reserve corps units, 334 Medical residents, job stress and, 349–350 Medical schools, accreditation of, 324–325 Medical students, obtaining informed consent, 170, 171 Medical Terminology Achievement Reading Test, 591, 592 Medical work, group processes and, 385–389 Medicare, 191, 321, 322, 324, 415n, 418–421 Medicare+Choice plans, 191 Medications, low health literacy and, 588, 589 Member need satisfaction, 384 Memorable message concept, 359 Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 614 Menopause, medicalization of, 569 Mental health of older patients, 188–189 use of telemedicine consultation in, 523 Mental health nurses, job stress and, 349 Mental health teams, 378, 380–382 Mental illness, media depictions of, 566–567 Merck, 330 Message action plans (MAPs), 544 Message-centered approach to social support, 359 Message-testing labs, 452 Messenger, 459–461 Metamodel of communication, 47 Metaphors of AIDS, 292–293 analysis of, 131, 566 of cancer, 292 in everyday life, 289 interplay of body and communication in, 41 use in provider–pediatric patient interaction, 186 Methodological pluralism, 3 Michigan Department of Community Health, 484 Military metaphors/language for disease, 571 in health campaigns, 449–450 Military settings, telemedicine and, 522–523 Mimetic isomorphism, 321

743 Minnesota Heart Health Program, 452, 610 Minorities, 109, 587 Misrepresentation of health information, 562 Mobilization, policymaking and, 407–408, 410 Mobilization of bias, 406–408 Modeling, 104, 112 Models for health campaigns, 451 Moffitt Cancer Center, 540 Monsanto, 542 Moralization of disease, 570–572 Moral obligations, in health communication, 652– 655 Moral relativism, 653, 669 Morbidity, impact of social support on, 266 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 291 MORT syndrome, 666– 667 Mortality, impact of social support on, 266 Mortification, image restoration and, 545, 546 Motivation, health message design and, 473–474, 475, 476, 477–481, 502 Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, 574 Multi-Dimensional Interactional Analysis System (MDIA), 128–129 Multidisciplinary teams/groups, 373–376, 389, 393 studies of, 378–381 Multimedia health communication, 596–598 Multimedia Technology/Health Communication Grants Program, 616 Multiple appeals, 457 Multiplexity/uniplexity, 269 Mutuality, 123 Myasthenia gravis, illness narrative, 9, 12, 15, 19, 24–25, 26

N Nabisco, 541 Narrative account, 132, 479. See also Illness narratives Narrative analysis, 131, 132 Narrative evidence messages, 479. See also Health messages Narrative theory, 46, 549 National Academy of Sciences, 230 National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), 429 National Academy on an Aging Society, 590 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), 586 National AIDS Hotline, 476 National Breast Cancer Coalition, 28 National Cancer Institute, 115, 210, 286, 574, 611 communication research funding, 613 digital divide pilot projects, 613– 614 National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), 324, 328 National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 169 National Committee for Quality Assurance, 372 National Communication Association, 1 National Conference of State Legislations, 540

744 National health expenditures, 323 National health insurance, 414–415, 416, 418, 419 National Health Interview Study, 572 National Health Service of England, 369 National Hospital Association, 415n National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 428–429, 644 National Institute of Mental Health, 662 National Institutes of Health, 543, 630 communication initiatives, 613– 620 National Literacy Act of 1991, 584 National Research Council, 224, 230 Natural risks, 227 NCI, 633 Nebraska Psychiatric Institute, 523 Necrotizing fascitis, 571 Negative appeals, 456–457 Negative role models, 563–564 Negotiation and mediation, 230 Negotiation of work in health care teams, 390–393, 394–395 Negotiation skills, 102, 106 Nested model, 499 New England Journal of Medicine, 411, 560 News media AIDS coverage by, 291 health messages in, 463, 465 Newspapers health campaigns and, 461, 462–463 health images in, 558 Newsweek, 291 New York Times, 292, 573 Nick Freno, 574 Nominal care groups, 373 Noncompliance, 52 Nondirect care providers, 350, 354 Nonmaleficence, 304 Nonprofit hospitals, 327 Nonrationalities, decision making and, 408–410 Nonverbal receiver cues, 595 No response, 487 Norfolk State Hospital, 523 Normative feedback, 505–506 Normative isomorphism, 321 North Carolina Farmworkers’ Project, 231 North Karelia project, 230, 452 Novartis, 330 Numeracy health literacy and, 584–585 tests of, 592 Nuremberg Code, 169, 170 Nurse practitioners, 336, 392 Nurses changes in role of, 336 communication skills training for, 96 coworkers as sources of social support, 360 end-of-life decisions and, 173 health care teams and, 372

SUBJECT INDEX home/work conflict among, 357 hospital staff, 349 job stress and, 353–354 managed care stressors on, 351 mental health, 349 parish nurse programs, 329 role in health care teams, 391, 392 role stress and, 353–354 status in health care teams, 375 telemedicine and, 526–527 Nursing assistants, 357 Nursing home caregivers, 355 Nursing homes, 190, 328 in United States, 323 Nursing teams, 379, 380, 382 Nutriceuticals, 542–543 Nutrition program, 251–252 Nutritional labeling, 542–543

O OB/GYN patients, 107 Obesity health campaigns, 626 media representation of, 562, 563 Objective language, 11 Occupational identification, 335–336 Occupational Safety and Hazards Administration (OSHA), 428 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 644 Occupational stress. See Job stress Occupational therapists, 349 Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 628 Omission, ethics of, 658– 660 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, 169 One-sided message strategy, 458 Online chat groups, 27 Online focus groups, 631 Online support groups, 25, 273, 276–277 Ontological model of disease, 43 Ontological uncertainty, 37 Ontology, theory and, 46 Open-ended questions, 67, 591 Operation Hometown, 419 Opportunity gaps, 665 Oral contraceptives, media articles, 561 Organizational context, 335, 336–337 Organizational environment, promoting social support and, 360 Organizational intervention, 655 Organizational programs and policies, health-minded, 429–432 Organizational relationships, telemedicine and, 527, 532 Organizational stress, 425 Organizational wellness, 427 Organizations

SUBJECT INDEX economic impact of job stress on, 428–429 experience of health and disease and, 423 job stress in, 425–429 professional obligations to, 667 wellness programs and focus on, 435–436 Organized systems, 209 Orthopedics teams, 379 Otherness, phenomenological tradition and, 49 Otherness metaphor, AIDS and, 292–293 Outcome expectations, 483–484 Outcomes of health campaigns, 450 health care teams and, 383–385, 390, 394 of health communication, 3 health message design and, 473– 475, 487–488, 502 iatrogenic, 662 incentive appeals and, 456 low health literacy and adverse, 589–590 See also Health outcomes; Patient outcomes; Provider outcomes Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, 542–543, 561

P P01 (program project grants), 618 PACE Project, 231 Pain, neuromatrix theory of, 40 Pain management, 173 Pamphlets, 462, 463 Parallel analysis, 530 Parental consultation, 186 Parish nurse programs, 329 Participant observation, 12n, 131 Participation, media differences and, 462 Partners/spouses, support from, 267 Partnership building (provider/patient), 69, 70, 79, 127, 196 Partnerships, development of, 630– 631 Passive communication, 547 Paternalism, 123, 163, 167 Pathography, 17 Patient cognitive-affective influences, 69 communication influence on provider, 69 communication skills training, 105–113 impact of provider job stress, 349 information provision, 110–111 managed care and, 333–334 medical disclosure and, 166 perception of provider ethnicity by, 79 predispositional influences, 67– 68 Patient adherence, 141, 144–146, 192 Patient bill of rights, 77 Patient-centered communication, 69 Patient-centered interviewing, 98, 100, 101 Patient-centered perspective on bad news delivery, 168 Patient-centered style, 66

745 Patient-centeredness, 128, 130, 149 Patient education, 2, 144 Patient expectations, communication and, 143–144 Patient interview, 121 Patient outcomes adherence and, 144–146 health outcomes, 146–149 patient-provider interactions and, 141–142 research agenda, 152–154 Roter interaction analysis system and, 127 satisfaction and, 141, 142–144 See also Health outcomes; Outcomes Patient participation, 75, 130, 166 Patient-physician communication assessment instruments, 154 Patient rights, 541, 653 bad news delivery and, 167 informed consent and, 169, 170 medical disclosure and, 165 Patient role, passivity of, 20 Patient satisfaction adherence and, 146 consultation length and, 151 among elderly patients, 191–192 health literacy and, 598 health outcomes and, 141, 142–144 provider behavior and, 74 telemedicine and, 524, 525 Patient’s best interest, 123 Patient Self-Determination Act, 47, 169–170 Patient system, 376 Patient values, provider-patient relationship and, 123 Pedagogy for health communication practitioners, 633, 636 for teaching communication skills, 3 Pediatricians, communication with mothers, 142 Pediatric patients, interactions with providers, 183–187 Pediatrics teams, 380 Peer influence, 287 Peer models, 460 Peer resistance, 459 Peer social support, 360 PEN-3, 255n Peptic ulcer education campaign, 629, 630, 664 Perceived risk, 502, 503–504 Perceived severity, health message design and, 478–479, 481 Perceived susceptibility, 480–481, 503 Perceived threat, 503 Perceived volitional control, 504 Perceptual measures, vs. behavioral, 81 Personal feedback, 505 Personality, patient communication style and, 68 Personalization, media differences and, 462 Personalized references, in health messages, 480 Personal responsibility, 660– 661 Personal truth, 163

746 Person-centered support messages, 271. See also Health messages Persuasion, 288 ethics of, 658– 660 rhetorical tradition and, 47–48 Persuasion messages, 455–458. See also Health messages Perversity thesis, 416–417, 418 Pfizer, Inc., 540, 598 Pharmaceutical organizations, 329–330, 334 Pharmacists, increasing health literacy and, 598 Phenomenological tradition of communication, 49–50 Photovoice, 645 Physical therapists, role stress among, 354 Physician-assisted suicide, 173 Physician-centered style, 66– 67 Physicians collaboration in teams, 388 communication skills training for, 96 female, 195–196, 357–358 home/work conflict among, 357–358 managed care and job stress and, 353, 354 practicing in United States, 323 public relations and, 543 role on health care teams, 391, 392 satisfaction of, 338 status distinctions, 336 status in health care teams, 375 See also Providers Physicians’ assistants, 336, 392 Physicians’ offices, 326 Physiological iatrogenesis, 662 Physiological model of disease, 43 Physiological outcomes, 141. See also Outcomes; Patient outcomes Plain talk, 286 Plan administrations, managed care and, 332–334 Pluralist language, 228, 229 Pluralist model, policymaking and, 405, 407–408 Policy defined, 411 telemedicine and, 532 Policy agenda, 404–405 garbage can model and, 408–409 health as ultimate value and, 665– 666 mass media and, 462, 573 mobilization of bias and, 406–407 Policy conflicts, 407 Policy equilibria, change in, 411–416 Policymakers, as audience, 572, 627 Policymaking, 403–422 garbage can model, 408–410 illness narratives and, 28 interests, institutions, and stability, 410–411 mass media and, 572–573 Medicare, 418–421 mobilizing bias, 406–408

SUBJECT INDEX political upheavals and punctuated partial equilibria, 411–416 punctuated equilibria models of, 406–416 rhetoric and health care, 416–418 traditional view of, 404–406 Policy monopolies, 410–411 Policy streams, policy equilibria and, 411–412 Policy whirlpools, 410n Policy windows how and why the close, 413–416 how and why they open, 412–413 policy equilibria and, 411–416 Politeness strategies, 132 Politeness theory, 166 Political context, of marginalized groups, 244–245 Political leanings, communication style and, 67 Political-legal context of provider-patient interactions, 77 Political model, 569 Political parties, policymaking and, 407n Political upheavals, policymaking and, 411–416 Politics media coverage of health and, 564–565 policymaking and, 411 Popular culture, 557n Popular media, 557–576 audiences, 572–573 content analysis and informational value of health messages, 559–564 critical analysis and ideological hegemony of health message, 564–572 entertainment and health, 573–575 health images in, 558–559 inferior information in, 561–562 research agenda, 575–576 Population approach, 657– 658 Population ecology perspective, 338 Positive affect, patient adherence and, 145 Positive appeals, 457 Postmodern illness, 12 Power relationships analysis of, 53 discourse analysis and, 131 in health care teams, 392–393, 394 in medical visits, 122–123 provider vs. patient, 596 Powers of attorney for health care, 172 Practice, theory and, 37–39, 48, 50 Practice training component, 112 Praising others, 545 Praxeology, theory and, 46 Precontemplation stage, 502 Predispositions, provider-patient interactions and, 66– 68 Preferred provider organizations (PPOs), 72, 323, 332 Pregnant women antismoking campaign, 478–479 HIV testing and, 300

SUBJECT INDEX low-income, 267–268 social support and, 267–268 Prelogical stage, 184 Premenstrual syndrome (PMS), 569 Preparation stage, 502 Presbycusis, 189–190 Prescription drugs, 542 Presumptuous utterances,126 Prevention and health campaigns, 454, 625– 636 group process, 630– 632 new audiences, 626– 627 new contexts, 627– 628 principles of argumentation, 628– 629 symbolic construction of reality, 629– 630 See also Media campaigns for health promotion; Health messages Prevention benefit charts, 617 Primary care physicians, 150, 543 Printed materials communication skills training, 112, 113 health literacy and, 594–595 Prison settings, telemedicine and, 522–523, 525 Privacy, 666 ethics and, 653 self-disclosure and, 166 telemedicine and, 521 Probability of occurrence, 503 Problem, defining for policymaking, 409, 411, 414, 415 Problematic integration theory, 4, 44–45, 53, 164, 174–175, 358 Problem-defining skills, 99 Problem-focused enacted support, 271 Problem recognition, 547 Problem solving, 125 Problem That Won’t Go Away, The, 403 Process analysis systems, 124–125 Processing, 451 Procter & Gamble, 542 Product introduction, 540 Productivity group, 385 health care teams and, 383–384 Professional associations, 325–326 Professionalization, 567–568 Professional obligations to health care communication, 668 Professional performers, as health messengers, 460 Programmed group systems, 386 Project Verdad, 252, 253 Prominent placement, 465 Promotional media, 557n Prostate cancer illness narratives, 22, 25 images in popular media, 567 Prostitution, HIV/AIDS and, 294–295 Protection motivation theory, 455, 503 Protection of human subjects, 169, 170 Provider expectations, communication and, 143–144

747 Provider outcomes, 149–152 consultation length, 150–152 malpractice claims, 149–150 research agenda, 152–154 Provider-patient information exchange, 163–175 informed consent, 168–171 low health literacy and poor, 588 medical decision-making, 171–174 medical disclosure, 164–168 problematic integration theory, 174–175 Provider-patient interaction, 3, 8 elderly patients, 128–129 historical perspective, 121–122 impact of Internet on, 75–77 managed care and, 72–74, 333–334, 351, 361–362 patient outcomes and, 141–142 research on, 286 telemedicine and, 524–526, 530–531 virtual consultation, 76–77 See also Medical encounters; Therapeutic relationship Provider-patient relationship socioemotional dimension of, 164–165 types of, 123 Providers attitudes toward information on Internet, 75–76 cognitive-affective influences, 68– 69 communication influence on patient, 69 communication skills training, 95–105 differences in male and female physician communication styles, 195–196 female, 70 gender bias, 194 health outcomes and communication style of, 146–148 managed care and, 333–334 medical disclosure and, 165 patient adherence and, 145 pediatric patient interactions, 183–187 personal style and patient satisfaction, 143 predispositional influences, 66– 67 self-disclosure, 166 telemedicine and, 524, 526–527 See also Physicians Provider-to-provider relationships, telemedicine and, 531–532 Prozac, 548 Pseudo-event, 463 Psychiatric interviewing skills, 97 Psychiatry patients, 107 teams, 379, 380, 381 telemedicine and, 518 Psychographic characteristics, health message design and, 476–477 Psychological incentives, 456, 457 Psychologists, role in health care teams, 391 Psychometric paradigm, of risk, 227 Psychosocial adaptation, 610

748 Psychosocial data gathering, 97 Psychosocial model, 143 Psychosocial skills, 97, 98 Public choice, health risk management and, 232–235 Public consciousness, illness narratives and, 27–28 Public funding of health campaigns, 628 Public health communication and, 609– 610 funding for communication research in, 612– 613 goals of, 610 health communication scholarship and, 611 See also Academic and public health collaborations Public health departments, 329 Public health schools, 324 Public interest, policymaking and, 404 Public meetings, 230 Public officials, as health messengers, 460 Public opinion, 540–541, 546–549 Public relations, 537–552 corporate image and brand equity, 539–540, 544–545 costs and time savings, 541–542, 549–550 defining and distinguishing, 537–539 field dynamics, 548–549 future of, 551–552 in health domain, 463 promotion of sales and services, 542–543, 550–551 public opinion climate and regulatory/legislative approvals, 540–541, 546–549 theory and models, 543–551 uses in health communication, 539–543 Public relations field dynamics (PRFD), 548–549 Publics, types of, 547 Public service announcement (PSA), 462, 463 Public sphere, health risk assessment and, 228–230 Public system of health care, 322, 324 Punctuated equilibria models of public policymaking, 406–416 garbage can model, 408–410 interests, institutions, and stability, 410–411 mobilizing bias, 406–408 political upheavals and punctuated partial equilibria, 411–416

Q Qualitative approach to communication in medical encounters, 80–81 to health communication, 130–132 to medical dialogue, 122 vs. quantitative, 133 Quality improvement, health care teams and, 372 Quantitative approach to communication in medical encounters, 80–81 to interaction analysis, 124–129 to medical dialogue, 122 vs. qualitative, 133 Que Pasa, U.S.A., 574

SUBJECT INDEX Question asking, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 Question-and-answer sequences, 131

R R01 (research project grants), 618 R03 (small research grants), 618 R21 (exploratory/innovative research grants), 618 Race attitudes and stereotypes related to, 79–80 marginalization and, 244 as predispositional influence on communication, 78–79 Race for the Cure, 28 Radio, health campaigns and, 462 Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine, 591, 592 Rationality, 224 technical, 225–226 Rationalization, 320 Rational myths, 320, 321 Reach media, 461 specificity and, 499 Reactance, 474, 487, 488 Readiness, health campaigns and, 453 Reality social construction of, 10–13, 289 symbolic construction of, 629– 630 REALM, 592 Reasoned action, theory of, 455, 473, 475, 499, 549 Rebirth stories, 17 Reciprocity, 267 transactions, 215 Rectification, 545, 546 Recursive model of community change, 215 Re-engineering Movements, 337 Regulating heath services and products, 322–324 Regulatory approval of health care issues, 540–541, 546–549 Rehabilitation teams, 378, 379, 382 Reimbursement, telemedicine and, 521 Reinforcement, 486 Relational control condoms and, 299 IV drug use and, 296 unsafe sex and, 294 Relational Control Coding Scheme (RCCS), 129 Relational meanings of condoms, 299 drug use and, 295 of unsafe sex, 294 Relationship building, 127 Relationship default, 123–124 Relationships effect of illness on, 22 effect of HIV/AIDS disclosure on, 302–303 semiotic tradition and, 48

SUBJECT INDEX Relevance, 502–503 Reliability, 550 Remediation, 545, 546 Repentence, 545, 546 Repetition, 111, 476 Representational discourse, 247 Research agenda, 599– 600 effect of patient-provider interaction on outcomes, 152–154 everyday personal communication and health, 303–305 health communication, 134–135, 633– 635 health message design, 488–489 popular media and health, 575–576 provider-patient interactions, 80–82 social support and job stress, 361–363 telemedicine, 527–532 Research design, study of health care teams, 383 Researcher greed, 643– 645 Research methods, telemedicine, 529–530 Resistance to influence, 640 Resource appraisal, health message design and, 473, 474, 475, 481–487 Resource Sisters/Companeras, 253 Response efficacy, 481 Responsibility, 660– 662 narrative sense-making and, 19 Responsiveness, 506, 550 Resuscitation, desire for, 153 Retrospect, sense-making and, 16, 17 Rhetoric, 10 health care policymaking and, 416–418 Rhetorical analysis, 29, 566 Rhetorical tradition of communication, 47–48 Rheumatology teams, 381 RIAS system, 133 Right to refuse treatment,173 Risk assessment of, 224, 297 comparative, 222 ideology and, 661 individual perception of, 223–224, 226–227 meaning of, 43, 289, 640 perceived, 502, 503–504 transscientific nature of, 226–228 See also Community health risk management Risk characteristics, wellness concept and, 434 Risk communication, 222–225 origins of, 225–235 Risk information, explosion of, 222 Risk-taking behavior everyday interpersonal communication and, 304 HIV/AIDS and, 293–296 interpersonal communication and, 286, 287 Road to Nowhere, The, 403 Role ambiguity, 351, 359, 391, 394 Role conflict, 351, 354 Role models

749 negative, 563–564 in popular media, 560 Role-plays, communication skills training and, 97, 99–104 Roles classifying telemedicine according to, 518–519 defined, 351 in health care teams/groups, 375–376, 390–392, 394 Role stress, 351–355 interorganizational, 352–353 interpersonal, 353–355 Ross Loos Clinic, 332 RotaShield, 544 Roter interaction analysis system (RIAS), 126–130 Routine group systems, 386 Running partner, 295–296

S Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, 574 Safeness, 461–462 Safe sex campaigns, 467 Safe-sex talk, 296–298 Sales promotion, 542–543, 550–551 San Bernardino County (California), 430 Savannah, 574 Scheduling, of campaign messages, 465 Science health risk management and, 232–235 humanism, and, 42–43, 52, 53 Scientific literacy, risk communication and, 226 Scientific-managerial language, 228–229 Screening questionnaires, 464 Script/schemata, for provider–pediatric patient interactions, 186 S.D. Dura Pharmaceuticals, 539 Second-hand smoke, 484 Sectoral view of society, 320 Segmentation, 452, 453, 498, 499–501, 593 ethics of, 657– 658 Selective exposure, 550 Self, job stress and changing relation between work and, 427–428 Self-determination, 165, 167, 172, 173, 211 Self-disclosure, 166 Self-efficacy, 481–483, 502, 504–505, 598 defined, 504 Self-help, 211 Self-image, chronic illness and, 21–24 Self-interest, health as ultimate value and, 666 Self-organizing systems theory, 337 Semantic networks, 359 Semiotic tradition of communication, 48–49 Sense-making, illness narratives as, 10, 16–19 Sense of understanding, 36n Sensitization, awareness messages and, 459 September 11, 2001 attacks, 334

750 Service promotion, 542–543, 550–551 Service quality, 336, 550 SERVQUAL, 550–551, 552 Sesame Street, 574 Seventh Heaven, 574 Severity, health message design and perceived, 478–479, 481 Sexual behavior, media representation of, 563–564 Sexuality, marginalization and, 244 Shame ethics and, 660– 662 low health literacy and, 587–588 Shared Decision-Making Program, 172 Sharing works, 295–296 Sick building syndrome (SBS), 426 Sickness, 14 Side effects, attribution of, 153 Similarity health message design and, 480 persuasion and, 460 Simplemente Maria, 573 Sincerity, 654– 655 Situational identification of publics theory, 546–547 Situational theory, 551 Size, of supportive network, 268 Skills acquisition, instruction messages and, 459 Skin cancer prevention campaign, 480 Slosson Oral Reading Test-Revised, 591, 592 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR), 616 Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR), 616 SmithKline Beecham, 542 Smoking cessation programs/campaigns, 486, 499, 665 media representation of, 562, 563 pregnant women and, 478–497 Social action, 208, 210 Social capital, 213, 214–215, 217, 435 defined, 214 Social class. See Socioeconomic status Social cognitive theory, 473, 475, 499, 504, 549 Social construction of health scholarship, 29–30 of HIV/AIDS, 291–293 of reality, 10–13, 289, 565 Social context, 243–244 Social ecology–based initiatives in community organizing, 208, 212–213 Social ecology perspective, 216 Social exchange theories, 126 Social experiments, 658, 667 Social feedback model, 269 Social field, 209n Social gaps, 663, 664– 665 Social incentives, 456, 457 Social influence, 285 social reality and social norms, 289 theory of, 288–289

SUBJECT INDEX Social learning theory, 473, 475, 560 Social leverage, 217 Social networks, dissemination of health information and, 287 Social norms, 288, 289, 305, 485 Social Organization of Doctor-Patient Communication, The, 131 Social planning, 208, 210 Social policymakers, 464–465 as focus of health campaign, 453, 454 Social reality, 8, 289 Social skills, health literacy and, 584, 585–586 Social support, 217, 263–277, 287 effect on cancer patients, 266–267 ethical considerations, 275–277 history and origins, 264–265 impact on health and illness, 265–268 impact on mortality and morbidity, 266 message-centered approach to, 359 practical implications, 274–275 public health and, 610 research implications, 272–274 sources of, 359–360 stress and, 347–348 supportive communication and coping, 269–272 supportive networks and relationships, 268–269 See also Supportive communication Social Theories of Risk, 226 Social workers coworkers as sources of social support, 360 role stress among, 354 on teams, 378, 384, 388, 391, 392 Societal intervention, 655 Societal orientation, of health messages, 570 Society, professional obligations to, 667 Society for Psychosomatic Medicine, 264 Sociocultural tradition of communication, 51–52 Sociodemographic groups, popular media and health information needs of, 561–562 Socioeconomic status consultation length and, 152 effect on therapeutic relationship, 134 health and, 668 marginalization and, 244 medical disclosure and, 165 wellness concept and, 434 Sociopsychological tradition of communication, 51 Solutions to “problems,” framing, 414 SORT-R, 592 Source credibility, 550 Source of experience, 125, 126 Specialist care, 134 Specialist physicians, 372 Specialization in health care groups, 387–388 of media, 461

SUBJECT INDEX Specialty classifying telemedicine according to, 518 defined, 370–371 Specificity, reach and, 499 Spoiled identities, 663 Spokespersons, 216–217 Sponsors, professional obligations to, 667 Spousal abuse, 244, 245 Stability elites and, 408 policymaking and, 410–411 theories, 550 Staff HMOs, 72 Stage theory, 184 Stakeholders, identity and motives of, 654– 655 Standard disease summary templates, 617 Standards of care health care teams and, 372 telemedicine and, 521 Standards of excellence, in cancer care, 618 Stanford Disease Prevention Project, 452 Stanford Five City Heart Health Program, 610 Stanford Five City Multi-factor Risk Reduction Project, 484 Stanford Three Community Study, 450 State public health departments, 329 Statistical evidence messages, 479. See also Health messages Status quo, supportive communication and, 361 Step by Step, 574 Stereotyping, 190, 663– 664 Stigmas ethics and, 663– 664 low health literacy and, 587–588 of using wellness programs, 432, 434 Stigmatization, 667 Stimuli, 473, 474–477, 502 S-TOFHLA, 592 Strategic ambiguity, 408 Stress defined, 425 enacted support and, 270 medical relationships under, 134 social support and, 270–271 See also Job stress Stressful interactions, skills for, 100 Stress Questionnaire, 270 Strong ties, 269 Structuration, 337 Subjective expected utility theory, 503 Subjective language, 11 Subjective probability of the threat, 503 Subsystem politics, 410n Suffering, 15–16 image restoration and, 545 lost autonomy and, 19–20 Sun protection campaigns, 485, 640, 641, 644– 645, 646 Supervisors, as sources of social support, 360

751 Supplements, 542–543 Support groups, 27, 273 Internet, 276–277 illness narratives and, 27 Supportive communication, 358–361 coping and, 269–272 dysfunctions of, 361 functions of, 358–359 job stress and, 347–348 Supportive networks, 268–269 Surgeon General’s Report on AIDS, The, 565 Surgeons, malpractice claims, 150 Surgery, use of telemedicine consultation in, 523 Surgical teams, 336, 374, 387 Surveys of health care teams, 377–382 Symbolic construction of reality, 629– 630 Symbolic convergence, 27 Symbolic inversion, 48 Synchronic analysis, 530 System for the Multiple Level Observation of Groups, 548 Systems theory, 50

T Tailoring, 499–501, 610, 617 communication skills training, 113 computers and, 597 effectiveness of, 501–502 ethics of, 658 health literacy and, 599 Internet and, 506–507 use of computers for, 502 Talk-as-prevention, 296–297 Talk of the Clinic, 132 Tangibles, 550 Targeting, 498, 499–501 ethics of, 657– 658 Teams. See Health care teams/groups Technical rationality, 225–226 Technology(ies) classifying telemedicine according to, 518 health communication and, 634 health organizations and, 331 interactive, 134, 500–501 job stress and increasing reliance on, 425–246 telemedicine, 516–519 Teleconsultation, 516 Teledermatology, 518 Teleeducation, 516 Telehealth, 516 Telemedicine, 506–507, 515–532 applications, 522–523 barriers, 520–522 changes in health care practitioner roles and, 526–527, 531–532 changes in organizational relationships and, 527, 532

752 Telemedicine, 506–507, 515–532 (Cont.) costs, 522 defining, 516 doctor and patient relationship, 524–526, 530–531 history of, 519–520 licensing and legal concerns, 520–521 organizational and interpersonal concerns, 522 privacy and, 521 reimbursement, 521 research agenda, 527–531 role of communication research, 523–527 technologies, 516–519 See also Internet Teleological, 653 Teleoncology, 518 Telepathology, 516, 518, 519 Telephone focus groups, 631 Telepsychiatry, 518, 519, 523, 524 Teleradiology, 516, 519, 527 Television health campaigns and, 499, 461, 462 health images on, 574–575 Terminal illness, vs. chronic, 23 Terrorism, 334, 545 Testicular self-exam campaign, 479 Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (TOFHLA), 586–587, 592 Tests of health literacy, 591–593 Thematic categories, 559 Theoretical pluralism, 3 Theory defining, 36–37 practice and, 37–39, 48, 50 Theory building, 47 Theory of planned behavior, 473, 475 Theory of reasoned action, 455, 473, 475, 499, 549 Therapeutic relationship, 122–124 historical background, 121–122 thirtysomething, 574 Threats health message design and, 477, 478 identity, 293, 295, 298, 301–302 positioning efficacy and, 481 Time demands on professional and personal, 426–427 public relations and savings in, 541–542, 549–550 temporal aspects of telemedicine, 519 Timeline, for health campaigns, 628, 643 Tobacco, 411, 454, 474, 476. See also Smoking Total Quality Management, 337 Trade associations, 325–326 Training biases, 69 Transcendence, 545 Transdisciplinary groups, 374, 375 Transgenders, 245 Transgressions, 544 –546 Transmission model of communication, 11, 424, 436 Transscientific nature of risk, 226–228

SUBJECT INDEX Transtheoretical model, 502, 549 Trust community-based research and, 635, 637, 638– 639 enforceable, 215 in health messenger, 459, 460 managed care and provider-patient, 73–74 risk perception and, 228 telemedicine and, 531 Truth, 654 communication and creation of, 10 types of, 163 withholding, 163–164 Truth-telling, provider perspective on, 165 Turf battles, policymaking and, 414 Turn-taking rules, 131, 132 Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis, 228, 635 Two-sided message strategy, 458 Tylenol, 545

U Ulcer patients, 106, 629, 630, 664 Unassuming utterances, 126 Uncertainty, 3–4 experience of illness and, 44–45, 51 health care teams and, 385 management of, 44–45 problematic integration theory and, 174–175 social support and, 265 supportive communication and, 358–359 theory and, 37, 38 Understanding, low health literacy and limited, 588–589 Understanding AIDS, 477 Unhealthy behavior low health literacy and, 589 role models and, 563 Unidisciplinary teams/groups, 373, 374, 376, 379, 381 United HealthCare, 541 United States, health organization statistics, 323 U.S. Administration on Aging, 330 U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 336 U.S. Census Bureau, 324, 329 U.S. Constitution, 173 U.S. Department of Defense system of health care, 322 U.S. Department of Education, 586 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 334, 609 U.S. Supreme Court, 173 U.S. Surgeon General, 296 Universalism, 653 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 574 University of Wisconsin, Madison, 614 Unsafe sex, 293–294 Urban League, 614 Urgent risk communication, 334 USA Today, 541

SUBJECT INDEX Utilitarian perspective, 653 Utterance categories, 111

V Vaccination, alleged risks, 227 Validity, tests of, 133 VALS, 452 Values health communication theory and, 38 illness narratives and, 15, 25 incentive appeals and audience, 456 meaning of uncertainty and, 45, 51 policymaking and, 412 scientific vs. humanistic, 42–43, 52, 53 Valuing, 662– 666 VD Blues, 450 Verbal dominance, 127 Verbal response mode (VRM), 125–126, 129, 130 Verbosity, 189–190 Veterans’ Administration Health Care System, 322 Victim-blaming, 570, 574, 661, 664 Videoconferencing, 518 Violence disclosure of HIV/AIDS status and, 301 negotiating condom use and, 299 Virtual consultations, 76–77 Vocabulary, for provider–pediatric patient interactions, 187. See also Language Voice, 30

W Wal-Mart, 435–436 Washington Post, 573 Watering holes, 435 Weak ties, 269, 273 Web-based telemedicine, 518 Web sites Children’s Hospital of Boston, 551 communication skills training, 113 health/medical, 49, 528 health communication via, 634 health messages and, 464 physician, 543 See also Internet Weight loss treatments, 570 Well-being concept of, 424 job stress and, 428 social construction of, 8

753 Wellness accountability, 436 Wellness initiatives, 423–436 design of, 429–430 education, 431 employee assistance programs (EAPs), 431–432 focus on individual, 435–436 health risk reduction, 430 limitation of effects of, 432 not working well in organizations, 425–429 organizational programs and policies, 429–432 reconsidering communication of, 433–436 wellness at work, 436 Wellness promotion, 74 W. Gore and Associates, 436 Wheelchair, identity and use of, 24–25 Whistleblowing, 396 Wide-Range Achievement Test, 591, 592 WOGS (wrath of God syndrome), 292 Women historical treatment by medical profession, 193 as patients, 70 in poverty, 244 social support and low-income pregnant, 267–268 use of telemedicine by, 526 Women and Health, 193 Women’s health care delivery, 131 Women’s health communication, 193–198 Women’s Health Issues, 193 Women’s health medical specialty, 197 Word recognition tests, 591, 592 Work job stress and changing relation between self and, 427–428 medicalization of, 433 wellness at, 436 Workaholism, 424, 427 Worker injury, 428 Workers’ compensation claims, 428, 429 Work group, defined, 370. See also Health care teams/groups Workplace, wellness campaigns in, 423–424 World Health Organization, 169, 245, 250n, 540, 584, 592 WRAT-3, 592

Y Yale Cancer Center, 614 Yale University, 540 YMCA Cyberlab, 614