761-780 of 797 Results

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Transnational and Queer Diasporic Sexualities  

Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui

Research on transnational and queer diasporic sexualities is still in its infancy but continues to evolve rapidly as understandings of sexuality and queer identity become further complicated. The nuanced and contextual intersections of queer identity as paired with cultural specificity amplify and redefine queerness across space. Pushing back against long-standing notions of what queer looks like in the West, transnational and diasporic queer sexual identities transcend normative definitions of what sexualities can look like outside of rigid binary thinking. Considering three core themes—Western hegemony, transnational and queer diasporic families, and blurring the First/Third World binary—offers the ability to highlight lived experiences to better understand the complexities of the past, present, and future of transnational and queer diasporic sexualities.

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Transnational Cooperation in Journalism  

Maria Konow-Lund, Amanda Gearing, and Peter Berglez

The journalism industry has used technology and cooperation to convey information around the world since the mid-1800s when six American newspapers aligned to form the Associated Press. The nonprofit news agency was a business collaboration that allowed members to share content with one another. Cooperation in journalism was not always compatible with the industry’s traditional business model, however, which valued exclusivity. As technology progressed, cooperation grew ever easier and more productive. The ultimate emergence of the internet has consummated this trend, facilitating collaborations among groups of reporters across the globe. These collaborations allow individual groups to retain and capitalize upon their geographical exclusivity while enhancing their collective ability to provide domestic stories with a transnational context or to cover cross-border or even global issues.

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Transnational News Flows  

Daya Kishan Thussu

The international flow of news has traditionally been dominated by that from North to South, with the West being at the core. Within the West itself, news flow is dominated by Anglo-American media, a situation which has its roots in the way that journalism developed historically. The historical context of global news begins with the introduction of the telegraph and undersea cables in the nineteenth century, which created a global market for news. Major players emerged—including news agencies—and shaped the transnational news flows. What emerges is that, in all ages, key innovations in transnational news flows have been closely linked to commerce, geopolitics, and war, from the telegraph to online news outlets. The increasing availability and use of news media, from major non-Western countries, are now affecting transnational news flows. Global journalism has been transformed in the digital age by internet-based communication and the rise of digital media opportunities—allowing for multi-directional news flows for growing global news audiences.

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Transparency in Journalism  

Michael Koliska

Transparency is the most recently established ethical principle for professional journalists, even though its roots stretch back almost a century. The emergence of transparency as a core journalistic ethic and value has been fueled mainly by three distinct yet interdependent developments. First, sociocultural advances in society have gradually increased the availability and demand for more information, including in areas such as politics and business. This development instilled an expectation of the “right to know,” also impacting the journalistic institution. Second, the introduction of digital media technologies has provided more means to disclose information, interact with journalists, and witness news production. Third, ethical and normative discussions by journalists and scholars have promoted more openness about journalism. Transparency has frequently been advocated as an effective way to combat the ongoing decline of trust and credibility in the news media. A central rationale supporting information disclosure and providing direct access to journalists and news organizations is that the audience will be able to ascertain which journalism it can trust to be true or which journalism may be superior. Specifically, in times when the news media is being labeled as fake or lying to the public, transparency may indeed be an important mechanism for the audience to hold journalism accountable. Yet, while the promise of transparency is an enticing prospect for the journalistic institution, empirical research has not quite been able to support all the claims that transparency will indeed improve credibility and trust in the news media. However, transparency is a nascent ethic and practice in journalism, and has only recently been officially recognized. Journalists and news organizations are still in the process of finding new ways to openly engage with the public, showing them the journalistic production process and building relationships with their communities. After all, building trust takes time and may only be achieved in a continuous effort to engage in an open, honest, and personal dialogue with the people.

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Transportation Theory Applied to Health and Risk Messaging  

Melanie C. Green and Kaitlin Fitzgerald

Transportation Theory: Narrative transportation theory focuses on the causes and consequences of an individual being immersed in a story, or transported into a narrative world. Transportation refers to the feeling of being so absorbed in a story that connection to the real world is lost for some time; it includes cognitive engagement, emotional experience, and the presence of mental imagery. This experience is a key mechanism underlying narrative influence on recipients’ attitudes and beliefs, particularly in combination with enjoyment and character identification. Narrative persuasion through transportation has been demonstrated with a wide variety of topics, including health, social issues, and consumer products. Transportation can occur across media (through written, audio, or video narratives) and for both factual and fictional stories. It is typically measured with a self-report scale, which has been well-validated (Green & Brock, 2000). Transportation is conceptually similar to flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) and presence (Klimmt & Vorderer, 2003), although both flow and presence pertain more to being immersed in an experience, rather than specifically in a narrative. While individuals are transported, their mental systems and capacities become concentrated on events occurring in the story, causing them to lose track of time, lack awareness of the surrounding environment, and experience powerful emotions as a result of their immersion in the narrative. Transported recipients may also lose some access to real-world knowledge, making them more likely to adapt their real-world beliefs and behaviors to be more consistent with the story to which they are exposed. Transportation theory suggests several mechanisms to explain this phenomenon, including reduced counterarguing, connections with characters, heightened perceptions of realism, the formation of vivid mental imagery, and emotional engagement. Personality factors can also affect the extent of transportation: narrative recipients vary in transportability, or their dispositional tendency to become transported; and they may be influenced differently by narratives due to a difference in their need for affect (individuals high in need for affect are more likely to be transported into narratives). Additional factors such as story quality and points of similarity between the reader and the story can also influence transportation.

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Transtheoretical Model and Stages of Change in Health and Risk Messaging  

Seth M. Noar

The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) is an integrative health behavior change theory that describes the process of how people change their behavior. The central organizing construct in the theory is stages of change, which are five distinct stages of readiness to change behavior, ranging from not ready to change (precontemplation), thinking about change (contemplation), preparing to change (preparation), changing (action), and maintaining the change (maintenance). Movement through the stages may be nonlinear, and cycling and recycling through the stages is viewed as a natural part of the change process. Other model constructs explain what drives individuals forward through the stages of change. Decisional balance involves a weighing of pros and cons of changing behavior, while self-efficacy involves situation-specific confidence that one can change. Increases in pros, deceases in cons, and increases in self-efficacy propel people forward through the stages of change. The processes of change are experiential and behavioral strategies that people use to change their behavior. In early stages of change, people use experiential strategies while they use behaviorally oriented strategies in later stages of change. The TTM holds significant implications for message design. Most notably, messages should be targeted and tailored to stages of change, and where possible, to other model variables as well. Studies indicate that the TTM has been successfully applied to health communication campaigns, and to a larger extent, to computer-tailored interventions to change health behavior. Meta-analyses indicate that scores of computer-tailored interventions have been efficacious, including many based upon the TTM and stages of change. New applications of the model include a focus on novel health behaviors, multiple behavior change, and advancing an understanding of message design in the context of the TTM in combination with other theoretical approaches.

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Trends: Women in International Journalism  

Marilyn S. Greenwald

For women in international journalism, it is the best and worst of times. Their numbers have grown dramatically in the last 100 years, and more women are being recognized for their journalistic accomplishments and bravery. In the last few decades, women journalists have banded together to form regional and international organizations to monitor coverage by and about women and to study the employment of women in newsrooms. In addition, some women journalists find that their gender allows them to speak to some people that men cannot – women subjects and sources in restrictive nations often feel more comfortable talking to women journalists. Yet their numbers as journalists in most countries are low when compared to those of men, and few women have been named to management positions within media organizations. Global changes, including political upheaval, technological changes, and economic cutbacks, have led to their diminished status in global media. Technological advancements within media organizations may make the dissemination of news easier, but it means reduced access to some poor and rural areas that often cannot afford expensive technology. Also, media concentration worldwide has reduced the number of small and independent media organizations that often employ women. And the elimination of international bureaus by many news outlets translates into many journalists—men and women—losing their jobs.

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Types of Explanations in Health and Risk Messaging  

Katherine E. Rowan

Explanations designed to teach, rather than to support scientific claims in scholarly works, are essential in health and risk communication. Patients explain why they think their symptoms warrant medical attention. Clinicians elicit information from patients and explain diagnoses and treatments. Families and friends explain health and risk concerns to one another. In addition, there are websites, brochures, fact sheets, museum exhibits, health fairs, and news stories explaining health and risk to lay audiences. Unfortunately, research on this important discursive goal is less extensive than is research on persuasion, that is, efforts to gain agreement. One problem is that explanation-as-teaching has not been carefully conceptualized. Some confuse this communication goal and discursive type with its frequent verbal and visual features, such as simple wording or diagrams. Others believe explanation-as-teaching does not exist as a distinctive communication goal, maintaining that all communication is solely persuasive: that is, designed to gain agreement. Explanation-as-teaching is a distinct and important health communication goal. Patient involvement in decision making requires that both clinicians and patients understand options underlying health-care choices. To explore types of explanation-as-teaching, research provides (a) several ways of categorizing health and risk explanations for lay audiences; (b) evidence that certain textual and graphic features overcome predictable confusions, and (c) illustrations of each explanation type. Additionally, explanation types succeed or fail in part because of the social or emotional conditions in which they are presented so it is important to note research on conditions that support patients, families, and clinicians in benefiting from explanations of health and risk complexities and curricula designed to enhance clinicians’ explanatory skill.

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Uncertainty and Extremism  

Sucharita Belavadi

Uncertainty regarding the self—about who we are, our place in the world, and our future is typically an unsettling and aversive state. It is a state that we are motivated to reduce in order to gain predictability over events in the world around us. One of the most effective ways of managing uncertainty regarding the self is by seeking group memberships and belonging to groups. Thus, uncertainty reduction can be construed as a drive, such that we join and identify with groups in order to manage uncertainty about and related to the self; this is the core tenet of uncertainty-identity theory, which discusses uncertainty reduction as one of the motives for seeking group memberships. Previous work in uncertainty-identity theory has shown that when uncertain about the self, individuals seek highly entitative groups to identify with. Such groups are characterized by clear, distinct boundaries—a clear sense of what the group stands for while spelling out who we are versus who we are not. Highly entitative groups have interdependent members and a clear sense of identity that is distinct from those of other groups. According to uncertainty-identity theory, identifying with such groups can reduce self-uncertainty, as individuals can define the self in terms of a clear, distinct prototype and manage uncertainty regarding who they are. Research in uncertainty-identity theory shows that when uncertain, group members perceptually polarize their group away from the outgroup in order to enhance the perceived entitativity and distinctiveness of their group prototype relative to other groups. Thus, the group moves to an extreme and polarized position that is far removed from that of an outgroup with the need to fashion a distinctive identity. The preference for a clearly defined and highly entitative social identity that helps delineate who we are versus who we are not when group members are self-uncertain should increase group members’ vulnerability to ingroup rhetoric that emphasizes the distinctiveness of group boundaries and an us versus them thinking. This is a dangerous trend, especially in the context of intergroup conflict, as influential group members, such as leaders, might seek to mobilize group members by demonizing outgroup members while attributing suffering and unpredictability experienced by ingroup members to the actions of outgroup members. Thus, gaining an understanding of the processes through which the uncertainty of group members is exploited to mobilize support for extreme ideologies might be one way to explain extremism and radical behavior by groups.

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Uncertainty Management Theories  

Michael A. Hogg and Sucharita Belavadi

The subjective state of uncertainty can be understood as deriving from reduced predictability of and control over events and the world around us. There are different ways to conceptualize the nature of uncertainty, its antecedents and predictors, and the strategies that individuals use to manage & reduce uncertainty within communication science and social psychology. Prominent theories of uncertainty within communication—uncertainty reduction theory, anxiety/uncertainty management theory, and approaches to uncertainty management—focus on states of uncertainty and lowered predictability within the context of interactive communication with others. In these theories, communication with others plays a central role in the production, maintenance, and management of uncertainty. These three communication-based approaches also differ in the ways in which they conceptualize uncertainty and its management in communicative contexts. Uncertainty reduction theory treats uncertainty as an aversive state that individuals always aim to reduce. In contrast, although anxiety/uncertainty management theory and approaches to uncertainty management discuss uncertainty as an aversive state, they also provide for conditions under which uncertainty might be a desired state. Within social psychology, the construct of uncertainty has received different treatments. Some approaches have conceptualized the extent of uncertainty experienced and tolerated by individuals as an enduring individual difference or a personality attribute. Social psychologists have also conceptualized uncertainty as an aspect of a person’s identity and self-concept. For instance, uncertainty-identity theory explains uncertainty as a context-invoked aversive state associated with lowered perceived predictability of self and others—uncertainty about who one is, how one should behave, and how one will be treated by others. The theory argues that individuals are motivated to reduce such uncertainty by seeking group memberships, as groups provide a framework for self-definition that helps manage self-conceptual uncertainty.

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Understanding Communication Through a Historical Lens  

Clark Callahan

Historical emergences of new communications technologies have had a dramatic impact on the structures of international contact. While these advances come in many forms, they all affect the ecology of international communications. Some forms of advances, such as the physical, are often overlooked and perhaps even trivialized. Advances like the stirrup and hay allowed increased movements, often in the form of conquests that brought disparate people and cultures into physical contact. Intellectual advancements such as the scientific method, mathematics like calculus and trigonometry, Copernicus’s heliocentrism, and Darwin’s theory of evolution bridged international boundaries through the formation and maintenance of international academic communities.

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Understanding Hate Speech  

Michael S. Waltman and Ashely A. Mattheis

Most of the research dealing with hate and hate speech has examined the practices and discourses of hate groups and hate crimes. This work has tended to focus on hate and hate speech directed at African Americans, Jews, and other nonwhites by white supremacist groups. An emerging and growing literature examines hate and hate speech that is used by men to target and harass women. Research in this area has focused on the ways that hate speech produced by organized hate groups and men’s rights activist groups is used to recruit new members, to socialize new members, to radicalize people, and to encourage ethnoviolence. The Internet has had a revolutionizing influence on these groups’ use of hate speech. Additionally, hate novels and “hate music” have played important roles in the recruitment of people into the hate movement and promoted violence against those perceived as enemies of Aryans.

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The United States Military: Sites of Intergroup Discourses  

Erin Sahlstein Parcell

The United States military is a frequent point of public conversation since the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. Approximately two and a half million service members have deployed in the Global War on Terror, and many have completed multiple deployments with almost 7,000 fatalities across operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Communication research on the military has a long history but since 9/11 has picked up pace with scholars seeking to understand the military’s relationship with the media, its discussion in the public sphere, and the interpersonal/familial experiences of service members and their families. The theoretical and methodological approaches are wide ranging within the discipline, but an intergroup perspective is noticeably absent. Many opportunities exist for answering intergroup communication questions, most notably at the military and civilian divide and, in turn, offering insight about and practical suggestions for communication within and about the military. Given the numerous possibilities for intergroup communication research related to the military, researchers should seize the opportunity to bring new theoretical and methodological approaches to the area. One theory, which has not been used in the intergroup communication scholarship but has great potential for this part of the discipline, is relational dialectics theory. Relational dialectics theory (RDT) is a critical/interpretive theory/method package that explores the substance and form of relational talk with a keen eye for dominant and marginalized discourses. For example, intergroup communication scholars who study the military from an RDT perspective could help illuminate how different groups (e.g., military families and civilian families; same-sex military married couples; and opposite-sex military married couples) understand and construct, for example, their similarities and differences with the goal of improving their interactions. Intergroup communication scholars could use also RDT to study how multiple group-related discourses are present within military groups who have diverse membership (e.g., Family Readiness Groups, FRGs) where members constitute the intersections of several identities (e.g., military wives are simultaneously members of military culture but technically are not military personnel; members are also often simultaneously women, spouses, who, in some cases, are mothers who come from different socioeconomic and ethnic groups, as well as identify as officer or enlisted wives).

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Unruly Multiculture: Struggles for Arts and Media Diversity in the Anglophone West  

Ien Ang

During the past half century, advanced Western democracies have all become so-called multicultural societies, hosting in their midst people of various ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds as a consequence of mass immigration from other areas of the world. However, the arts and media sectors have been lagging behind in representing this increased cultural diversity and are therefore failing to contribute fully to the making of a dynamic and vibrant multiculture: the flourishing of a plurality of cultural forms and practices to represent different perspectives on society and the world, expressed by different sections of society and from different corners of the world. Instead, the issue of diversity is increasingly recognized as one of the most problematic quandaries afflicting arts and media organizations. As a consequence, diversity is now widely made a policy priority across the sector, as reflected in the diversity and inclusion policies and strategies that virtually every self-reflecting arts or media organization now has to incorporate in their strategic and operational plans, especially in Anglophone Western societies. Nevertheless, the lack of progress made by such diversity measures in the past few decades suggests that diversity may be pursued as a stated cause but remains elusive in practice. The problem of diversity, in short, is a symptom of deep institutional ambivalence in relation to the making of multiculture. This ambivalence can be understood by considering the word with which diversity is constantly associated: inclusion. “Inclusion” is a paradoxical goal because it is surreptitiously based on continued marginalization: To be included does not mean becoming an integral part of the mainstream; it means to be content with hovering on the periphery of the mainstream. In other words, the vision of inclusion is limited because it does not undermine the hegemony of the dominant culture; instead, it shores it up by containing diversity within its allocated specialist box—be it as “multicultural arts,” “Black cinema,” “minority culture,” etc. Many cultural institutions in the West bear the traces of White hegemony in their DNA but are so deeply embedded within the cultural infrastructure of modern society that getting rid of them is nigh unimaginable. This is a structural double bind that informs the fractiousness and divisiveness across the field of multiculture today. Outside the established cultural sector, there is a proliferation and fragmentation of multiculture on a global scale, where digital platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are the new cultural infrastructures carrying vast flows of heterogeneous and capricious multiculture in ways that are distinctly transgressive, disrupting and transcending the biases and confinements of the dominant, nationally defined cultural sphere in unruly ways.

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Urban Communication  

Susan J. Drucker and Gary Gumpert

Cities themselves function as media of communication. They are places where messages are created, carried, and exchanged by structures, infrastructures, and people. Urbanity is an age-old phenomenon undergoing radical transformation as developing means of communication redefine traditional notions of place and space. Urban communication meshes population density, technology and social interaction. Urban communication, like urban studies, is an interdisciplinary field that provides a fresh perspective from which to view the city and its transformation. The communication lens offers valuable perspectives and methodologies for the examination of urban and suburban life. It conceptualizes the city as a complex environment of interpersonal interaction, a landscape of spaces and places that shape human behavior, and an intricate technological environment. The development of urban communication research and activities is traceable from the early works a diverse group of urbanists to more current research programs conducted by communication scholars. Urban communication foregrounds communication in the study of the urban landscape. The unique patterns and needs of urban dwellers and communities are examined in an age where cities are layered with media technologies. An increasing number of technologies enable information from the digital world to be layered onto the physical world through augmented realities, thereby altering the person–environment relationship by creating spaces in which users interact with their physical surroundings through digital media. The future of cities is increasingly influenced by media technology. Cities are global, connected, inclusive, livable, green, sustainable, mega, and smart. Cities have been identified as communicative cities. There are many ways of looking at communication and cities and the history and broad parameters of the growing area of urban communication.

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U.S. Freedom of Information Act and Democratic Accountability  

Michael Schudson

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Congress, with allies in the news media, created legislation that came to be known as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It was designed to help hold the federal executive accountable to the public. It became law in 1966. Its significance can be understood in several contexts: (1) in connection with a special relationship of journalists to the operation of the FOIA; (2) in terms of arguments that transparency in government is necessary for citizens’ informed participation in democracy and that, on the other side, there are strong democratic arguments that transparency should be limited in the pursuit of other legitimate values, some of them recognized in the language of the FOIA itself that government agencies may deny a citizen's request for information on the grounds that honoring the request could endanger national security, personal privacy, the integrity of internal government deliberations, or other significant objectives; and (3) that freedom of information law are one institution within a wider web of institutions and practices dedicated to holding government accountable. In this regard, the U.S. Freedom of Information Act can also be seen in a broad context of a cultural shift toward “openness” and a political shift toward what has been called a “monitory” model of democracy.

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Using Guilt to Motivate Individuals to Adopt Healthy Habits  

Monique Mitchell Turner

In social marketing, the use of guilt appeals can be effective for influencing healthy behaviors. Guilt, being a moral, other-based emotion, can spur people to think of others, act honestly, and be empathetic. Likewise, collective guilt, the feeling that arises when people believe their in-group caused illegitimate harm to others, can lead people to feel positively toward the victimized others and desire policies that will help them. We can see then, that guilt, though often considered “negative” can lead to an array of prosocial, constructive, behaviors. In that vein, a number of researchers have assessed the possibility that guilt based persuasive appeals can induce such positive behaviors. Clearly, guilt-appeals can be an effective tool for reducing risk (STI testing), increasing prevention practices (encouraging mammograms), and effecting altruistic health-related behaviors (donating blood). In the correct conditions, guilt appeals can induce guilty feelings, lead people to want to “right the wrong,” generate positive attitudes about the message’s advocacy, and intend to engage in a behavior.

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Using Maps to Display Geographic Risk, Personal Health Data, and Ownership  

Suellen Hopfer and Genesis Gutierrez

Fundamental structural features of risk maps influence how health risk and burden information is understood. The mapping of health data by medical geographers in the 1800s has evolved into the field of geovisualization and the use of online, geographic information system (GIS) interactive maps. Thematic (statistical) map types provide basic principles for mapping geographic health data. It is important to match the nature of statistical data with map type to minimize the potential for communicating misleading messages. Strategic use of structural map features can facilitate or hinder accurate comprehension of health risk messages in maps. A key challenge remains in designing maps to communicate a clear message given the complexity of modern health risk burdens. Various structural map features such as symbols, color, grouping of statistical data, scale, and legend must be considered for their impact on accurate comprehension and message clarity. Cognitive theory in relationship to map comprehension plays a role, as do insights from research on visualizing uncertainty, future trends in developing predictive mapping tools for public health planning, the use of geo-social and “big data,” as well as data ownership.

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Using Pictures in Health and Risk Messages  

Sarah C. Vos and Elisia Cohen

Using pictures (also called images) in health and risk messages increases attention to messages and facilitates increased retention of message content, especially in low-literate populations. In risk communication, researchers have found that pictorial warnings stimulate communication and that images without text can communicate risk information as effectively (or, in some cases, more effectively) than text. However, little empirically based guidance exists for designing images for health and risk messages because most studies use an absence-presence model and compare visual communication to textual communication, rather than compare different types of visual communication. In addition, visual communication theories focus on describing the “how” aspect of communication instead of offering proscriptive guidance for message design. Further complicating the design of visual messages is that the number of possibilities for a visual message is, like text-based messages, almost infinite. Choices include colors, shapes, arrangement, and the inclusion of text, logos, icons, and so on. As a result, best practices on visual messages often draw on design recommendations. Before the widespread advent of Internet use and the adoption of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, using images—especially color images—could be cost prohibitive. However, these online platforms facilitate the distribution of visual content, and many public health organizations use these platforms to distribute visual messages. The need for guidance and research on using pictures effectively is growing. Although there has been increasing focus on images in health messages, many questions still exist about how visual messages should be composed and what their effect is. The existing evidence suggests that visual information can improve persuasive and, on social networking sites, diffusion outcomes. However, visual information may be prone to misinterpretation. Researchers should also evaluate ethical considerations when choosing pictures. Message testing is highly recommended.

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Using Quotations in Health and Risk Message Design  

Rhonda Gibson

Quotations, something that a person says or writes that is then used by someone else in another setting, have long been a staple of news stories. Reporters use quotations—both direct and paraphrased—to document facts, opinions, and emotions from human and institutional sources. From a journalistic standpoint, quotations are beneficial because they add credibility to a news report and allow readers/viewers to consider the source of information when evaluating its usefulness. Quotations are also valued because they are seen as adding a “human” element to a news report by allowing sources to present information in their own words—thus providing an unfiltered first-person perspective that audiences may find more compelling and believable than a detached third-person summary. Research into the effects of news report quotations has documented what journalists long assumed: Quotations, especially direct quotes using the exact words of a speaker, draw the attention of news consumers and are often attended to in news stories more than statistical information. Studies show that the first-person perspective is considered both more vivid and more credible, a phenomenon that newspaper and website designers often capitalize on through the use of graphic elements such as the extracted quote. Quotations in news stories have also been found to serve as a powerful persuasive tool with the ability to influence perception of an issue even in the face of contradictory statistical information. This is especially true when the topic under consideration involves potential risk. Direct quotations from individuals who perceive high levels of risk in a situation can sway audience perceptions, regardless of whether the quoted risk assessments are supported by reality. The power of quotations remains strong in other forms of communication involving risk, such as public service, health-related, or promotional messages. The vivid, first-person nature of quotes draws the attention of audiences and makes the quoted information more likely to be remembered and to influence future judgments regarding the issue in question. This presents the message creator, whether it be a journalist or other type of communicator, with a powerful tool that should be constructed and deployed purposefully in an effort to leave audiences with an accurate perception of the topic under consideration.