以人為本的健康傳播

People at the Heart of Effective Health Communication

李賴俊卿(Annisa Lai LEE)

《傳播與社會學刊》 31期 (2015/01) Pp. 39-44

https://doi.org/10.30180/CS.201501_(31).0003

並列摘要

In the past thirty years, Western scholars have developed health communication into a major communication field. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines health communication as, ＂the study and use of communication strategies to inform and influence individual and community decisions that affect health＂ (CDC, 2014). Professor Shen and Dr. Yan's article demonstrated a media framing approach to explore the causal attributions of obesity for adults and children by analyzing 572 The New York Times reports from 1985 to 2011. In Asia, health communication gained global recognition when Asia became an unfortunate breeding ground for new pandemic diseases, such as Avian Flu and SARS. Health threats abound in conditions of low health knowledge, limited resources, poor governance, and environmental risks, fostering the need to provide proper health-related information to the public and accelerating the development of health communication. Local scholars develop theoretical and methodological paradigms that challenge direct translation and import of Western concepts and frameworks, noting the absence of the histories, cultures, and voices of local people (Dutta, 2008; Paek, Lee, Jeong, Wang & Dutta, 2010). Liu's article remonstrated Taiwan's top-down ＂Save the country with modern western hygienic system＂ campaign and attributed its failure to elitist planning without the support of the masses, through analyzing Ta Kung Pao's 406 volumes of Medical Weekly. Health habits are hard to change. Four authors strive to develop effective health communication by exploring the needs, beliefs, taboos, and social norms of individual communities. Professor Chiu analyzed 277 news coverage of female cancers in 2010–2011 and discovered that woman patients were improperly portrayed within the contemporary context of Taiwan, revealing the need to represent the authenticity of sufferings. Professor Lu interviewed 40 minorities in four Taiwanese regions to understand their limited views on health policies and develop a community-based intervention. Professor Que spent 10 months to delineate ethnographically media patterns for health information access in two communities in China. My article on STD online intervention for MSMs investigated fear of isolation from data of 70 participants. Extreme fear drives MSMs to seek for prevention and diagnosis directly. I learned that only when we unearth the deepest psychological needs of our target audience do changes occur and health messages become meaningful and effective. People become the center of health communication in this journal. I would like to thank the authors, for their passionate hard work in improving others' lives. I want to express my gratitute towards the external reviewers and Professor Lo's team in making this specail edition possible.