The End

I can't believe the semester is over - time flies when you barely have time to breathe!
Just wanted to say great job to everyone on the final presentations! Quite honestly, when we had the guest presenter on the hypertension awareness campaign earlier in the semester, I was pretty doubtful that any of the groups in our class could come up with such a professional campaign. But I was wrong - everyone did an equally impressive job in our class. Way to go, guys! Seeing what a difference all of the groups made was truly inspiring. Thanks to everyone for a great class!

Week 14

Last week...last blog!! Hooray! Sorry to say, but I'm still not a blogger. I have had fun writing and gotten a good laugh out of it sometimes, but I guess I usually prefer to read things other people have written rather than write my own thoughts. I am stuck with my own thoughts 24 hours a day - why not read what others have to say instead??? So I hope everyone else keeps blogging so I can keep reading - ha, ha, ha!
If anyone is applying for a PhD program and would like any advice/help, feel free to contact me. Granted, my program is in Psychology, but it's similar enough, I think. Applications suck, as someone else wrote, but all the work pays off in the end - I promise! You have job security for the next 5-6 years if you get in...they just can't guarantee a top-notch starting salary :)
I've enjoyed getting to know y'all this semester, and I hope to have you guys in classes in the future! Good luck to everyone on presentations next week!

Week 13

So, I forgot to blog by noon today - thanks for the reminder, Shelby! Like finally getting access to our real target population this late in the game, better late than never, right?!? Hopefully Dr. E will agree :)
As everyone else has already said, kudos to all of the groups on their presentations this week! I, too, was incredibly impressed with the quality of the posters in all of the other groups. Admittedly, I was largely responsible for the comparatively sub-par quality of the Walking School Bus posters. In my own defense, however, I don't have any fancy-schmancy publishing software - just good 'old MS Word for me (2003 Version, at that - my trial version of Vista ran out a month ago). So...looks like we need to find a "friend" who is poster-savvy and has a soft spot for preventing the childhood obesity epidemic one walk to school at a time! Anyone, anyone? Bueller, Bueller?

Week 12

Not to sound like a broken record, but I totally agree with the other posts about how interesting this week's class was! Talking about movies and tv shows is always fun, and relating them to health was extra cool :) I loved the Saved by the Bell and other classic show examples that were already brought up in other posts! Those shows definitely were awesome - and they sneaked in those health messages without creating too much stir or controversy. Another one that came to my mind was the short-lived Nickelodeon show "Fifteen" - did anyone else watch that?? It was SOOO good! One of the characters (a jock, Todd) had an alcohol problem, and his poor little Miss Perfect girlfriend Ashley was beside herself. I think that brought attention to the fact that alcoholism can hit anyone at any age (to an extent). Anyway, lots of stuff is out there. Unfortunately, I think that more negative health messages (e.g., unsafe sex) are presented than positive ones, but maybe that's just me...

Week 11

Learning about Web 2.0 was pretty interesting. I still think it's funny that I immediately thought it was an "outdated" version of the web :) Version 2.0 just sounds so old! SPSS is already at 15.0 or later. The web certainly needs to catch-up...or maybe it's just that SPSS makes a lot more money everytime they make an update that more people want to purchase.
Anyway, I agree that Web 2.0 is changing the way things are done. I heard something on GMA or some other show like that - they said that people now are not taking action to evoke changes like they used to by writing to their congressmen or starting a lobbying campaign, etc., because they are just blogging about it instead. They feel better after getting their feelings out, and they feel like they're making a difference because other people will certainly see their blog; also, they read other blogs by people who agree with them, so they feel validated. But then the momentum just stops at that - nothing happens because of the blogs. They just remain in cyberspace, and life goes on. Interesting point of view, I thought. Although allowing everyone to have a voice on the Internet is nice in theory, if you really think about it, the more blogs, information, etc. that is out there, the fewer people will read each one because of the diffusion. Maybe our voices aren't heard so much as we think!

Week 10

I don't really have strong opinions either way about PR. Seems like a lot of people in the class are very anti-PR, but maybe only the few who were quick to blog about the lecture (only six people have posted so far) really care that much. Maybe the rest of us are a little less passionate about the topic - I know I am. I do admit, however, that I frequently roll my eyes at the allegedly objective news that I hear on tv or read in the newspaper. Almost all reporters have an obvious slant, particularly when politics are involved. No wonder politicians can go from #1 to #10 in the polls nearly overnight - they are so scrutinized that something they say can be taken completely out of context and blasted all over the media with a completely different meaning than they originally intended. That said, politcians are essentially PR people themselves, especially when they are running for office, but that's another topic.
Anyway, the FEMA ordeal was crazy - I had heard about it before class (fortunately saving me from being lambasted by our guest speaker...) and thought it was utterly ridiculous. Many other PR stunts are also laughable, so I'll just laugh and move on with my day :)

Week 9

Wow - what else is there to say about the fires? Devastating, sad, depressing, scary, all-around terrible. My heart goes out to everyone affected directly or indirectly. I can't even fathom the idea that someone may have started one or more of them on purpose. What in the heck could drive someone to do such a thing??? Since that person or people will likely never be caught, I just hope that he/she/they are feeling so guilty that they can barely take it anymore. But more importantly, I just hope that everyone who had a home that was destroyed is able to rebuild as quickly and painlessly as possible. What an amazing display of San Diegans' hearts through all of this, though. The community has really come together. And the news coverage and other health communication has been phenomenal, in my opinion, as nothing else was even on tv or radio for a few days (on local stations for those of us who do not have cable). However, I have heard a few people interviewed who have said that they were not given word about their neighborhoods' mandatory evacuations until they were almost too late (i.e., the fires almost consumed them). I wonder what went wrong...why were they not made more aware? What were they doing, if not watching the news 24/7 like the rest of us?
On another note, I have come across a few articles unrelated to the fires during these past few days, as I have been wasting hours of time doing nothing at my computer. The first one is about the lack of health literacy among poor people, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071023/hl_nm/india_health_information_dc;_ylt=AvjGA7cSMLBG26qsqDoaD4MQ.3QA
The second one addresses different kinds of ads (e.g., emotional appeal, informative, etc.), as we discussed the last time we met (I think) in the context of the obesity epidemic: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071022/ap_on_he_me/diet_obesity_ads;_ylt=Aqd4fpSDv2qLZ5vUpDYCYX4R.3QA
Finally, the last one pertains to my group's cause (the walking schoolbus), as it talks about the nationwide attempt to get these things started in various locations: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071026/ap_on_he_me/fitness_school_commuters;_ylt=AkD7Hz7pUz_6CH0ZH92M1Xpa24cA
Stay safe, everyone!

Week 8

I don't really have much to say this week for some reason, but I'll give it a shot...
Great job to all of the groups, as everyone else has already said! I enjoyed hearing about the other projects and all of their nuances. Can't wait to see the final products! Hopefully we will be able to gather more info. this weekend for the Walking School Bus target audience. Funny how they say they want our help, but they are really not making a big effort to let us in to be able to figure out how to help. Hmmm.... We want to walk the walk, not just talk the talk!
The exercise on making the decision about saving people or allowing them to die was definitely an example of how semantics can change people's perceptions of and decisions about issues. While our examples in class are health-related, many other realms could easily be used to generate examples. For instance, the odds of winning the lottery are slim at best, but they can be phrased in such a way as to give thousands of people enough hope to spend their money on a ticket. My personal example is of my obsession with The Price is Right (during the Bob Barker era - Drew Carey is not cutting it). Although the chance of winning big - or even being selected to "Come on Down" - is tiny, I still had enough hope to wait in line overnight multiple times in attempt to capitalize on that chance. Somehow the message was framed in my mind that I would be the one to make it to the showcase showdown to spin the big wheel - how exciting! Another real world example is politics in general; the way messages are framed definitely influences the way people perceive politicians, policies, laws, etc.

Article link

Today I came across this press release of a study's results and thought it really spoke to what we discussed in class regarding health literacy: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071011/hl_nm/medication_errors_dc;_ylt=ApkOZcRNhaQQnmWZjTxbuT8Q.3QA
I also read a meta-analysis for another class about non-compliance rates in patients, linking them to some demographic information, type of treatment, type of disease for which the treatment was prescribed, and method of assessing compliance. It revealed an average non-compliance rate of around 25% across the board, with highly varying rates depending largely on the factors listed above. Not surprisingly, people were more compliant with medications for short-term problems than chronic conditions and with medication treatments than behavioral changes (e.g., exercise, diet). Anyway, funny how these things came up in my life when we were studying them in this class!

Week 7

Wow, health illiteracy is a HUGE problem! The statistics were staggering - around 50% of the population has inadequate functional literacy. How scary and how sad! No wonder so many people end up with complications due to failure to comply with medications properly! Actually, I'm surprised that more people are not in the emergency room for such things after seeing that! The part about filling out forms without being about to read them was especially scary. Perhaps asking every single person who reports to a clinic for the first time if he/she can read and understand medical literature would be useful. Maybe not being able to read well or understand medical terminology would not be so stigmatizing if the person at the desk asked in a non-threatening way and normalized the inability to do so. Very trick, though...
Regarding what Danette wrote about in her blog, I have not personally interacted with such populations, but in my Cultural Psychology class last year we studied the Hmong culture's different view of illness, medicine, and healing. Also, I took a course called Religion, Health, and Healing as an undergrad and learned a lot about Shamans and other healers. While these different views do not have anything to do with literacy in the strictest sense (i.e., written word or math), they definitely affect the beholders' understanding of our Western health/medical system and, in effect, the part that they will play in their healthcare. The debate is whether to meet them where they are or to try to force our views of health and illness on them.
Anyway, regardless of all of these other cultural issues, we should definitely strive to make our language as simple and understandable as possible.

Week 6

As everyone else has already said, the guest presenter was extremely impressive. What an interesting topic, and what a fabulous campaign! I really like the fact that we are actually assigned to real projects that will make a difference in the community rather than creating mock situations and campaigns. What a great way to get involved in the health topics of our communities! I am looking forward to the PTA Meeting at Montgomery Middle School this Friday night (even though Friday night seems like an odd time to have such a meeting - I wonder how many parents actually attend...) in order to learn more about the school, kids, and their families. From what I can sense so far, they are very involved and vested in their well-being and are being pro-active in their health and safety.
Let's see, other stuff from class... Listening to others' spill-your-guts about health stories was interesting. I especially liked the one about the hair dresser who spent 5 hours talking and working on that person's hair (forgot who it was - sorry!). The point that Dr. Engelberg made about how people frequently don't really want advice but rather just want to talk and tell their stories was so true. We were trained to use active listening with our therapy clients more often than offering advice because 1) people can usually generate their own solutions if they talk through their thoughts aloud with someone else, and 2) they are more likely to implement changes if they came up with the idea and its benefits themselves than if someone else told them what to do. Sometimes (often) holding back from offering my own opinion is really challenging, but it's usually rewarding in the long run.
Finally, I re-set my settings to allow site feeds, but I am not really sure what else to do with it. I'm still a little new to all of this networking stuff...

Week 5

Like many others who have already posted their blogs, I also enjoyed the video on the research that goes on behind the scenes as commercials/advertisements are created. I very rarely devote my full attention to commercials, but my tv is almost always on when I am home, so unless the advertisers use a catchy auditory message, they will not be reaching me! I am amazed at how many do use good songs, funny jokes, etc., but do not bother to say the name of the product auditorily in the commercial. That tactic is probably used to get viewers to look at the screen out of curiosity and pay attention, but that doesn't work for me, so it probably doesn't work for others, either. The few commercials that I do see drive me crazy because they usually have NOTHING to do with the product they are advertising - kind of like the 7up commercial with the butterfly girl we saw in the in-class video. Maybe it's just me, and most people are able to connect flying insects with carbonated beverages...
Anyway, another thing that I have been thinking about related to advertisting health messages is something that we discussed in my Behavioral Medicine Seminar a couple of weeks ago, when the topic was obesity. We were talking about ways to get people to exercise - joining and going to the gym being one of the most automatic types of exercise we wanted to promote. Most commercials/advertisements for gyms are for the big chain ones like 24-Hour Fitness, and they definitely use the sex appeal (back-door or wrong way approach). Although they are appealing to younger, hipper crowds, they are missing a much larger segment of the population - namely, middle-aged and older people who are comparatively "average" and probably overweight, etc. If 24-Hour Fitness is happy with their membership numbers and "types" of members, that's fine for them. But no one is reaching out to the majority of the population - the people who REALLY NEED to go to the gym because of potential or existing health problems. When these people see the commercials of thin and/or buff, young individuals, they assume that all gym-goers (at all gyms) look like those people. As a result, they are intimidated, insecure, and ashamed of their bodies, so they don't even want to reveal their bodies in public by taking a walk in their neighborhood, let alone at the gym. So, in my opinion, the public health realm has gone too far with the "wrong-way" approach in this case, and perhaps they should attempt a "right-way" message for joining a gym (e.g., YMCA, Curves, etc.). How about a commercial with people of average weight (read: overweight or obese in America, where that's the average) working out and talking about how much better they feel and healthier they are, without even talking about the side effect of losing weight along the way? I think I'll get started on that...tomorrow.

Week 4

Again, class was very interesting this week. I do really enjoy the lack of Power Point in this class. At first I was pretty surprised that we didn't have slides since Dr. Engelberg is so into media, but now I understand why he refrains from using PP for class lectures. This is only my second professor in graduate school so far who has not used PP, and I have to say that I pay a lot closer attention in class because of it. We actually have to TAKE OUR OWN NOTES - HEAVEN FORBID!!! I don't even remember when PP began to become popular in teaching, but I do know that since its implementation, I am much more likely to work on something else or zone out in class when I know that I can always refer back to my slides later. I do think that some PP presentations can still be presented in an interesting manner. However, I experienced one that was terrible (even though the topic was very interesting) first thing Tuesday morning - the day after this week's class. I was shocked that one of my supervisors had such a terrible presentation. She literally read from her slides and did not incorporate any additional info. on most of them. She also seemed surprised by some of the slides' content, even though she had made the slides herself. I was embarrassed for her, really.
Anyway, the rest of the class was fine, too, but I had done the active listening exercise one too many times in other psych. courses, so that was not much fun for me. Seeing that others got a lot out of it was interesting, though. It is a good exercise when done for the first time!

Week 2

Today's class was full of an array of activities. Some of the highlights included comparing our definitions of communication and health communication from the "Code your own communication" assignment. Although the definitions did not seem to differ substantially, the numbers of total communication instances in different people's days did vary considerably. I believe this conundrum was primarily due to differences in how people spent the one day that they recorded - supporting the notion that one "experiment" is rarely reliable, no matter how well-designed it may be. Perhaps if we had each coded an entire week (or at least three days) and calculate the means, our numbers would have been more similar.
Another interesting activity was the group campaign idea presentations. My group (the "5-a-Dayer's") was asked to design a program targeting teens' nutrition. I liked our ideas and thought they should be implemented somewhere :) Maybe someday I'll take on such a large burden...ha, ha, ha!!! Listening to the other groups' ideas was very interesting. Funny how celebrity endorsement was very popular, but we tended to plan to bring celebrities in to reach out locally (a rather unlikely feat) rather than to (relatively) simply have them participate in a campaign by making a commercial or something, even though they would reach a much wider audience. I guess we all still tend to think along the lines of personalization in this modern world of mass media campaigns on the Internet and television.

Fall 2007 Week 1

Day 1 of Health Communications at SDSU was unlike many first days of classes; for example, we actually met for the entire class time (2 hours and 40 minutes), and we barely even went over the syllabus! Instead, we jumped right in and started learning the course material without hesitation. The short video we watched about the past 50 years of health was both entertaining and enlightening - not to mention a little sad since we are still dealing with many of the same health issues/concerns that we faced 50 years ago. In fact, some of them have even gotten worse (e.g., the unhealthy eating that has led us to become such an overweight/obese nation). On the other hand, we have nearly eradicated some of the problems, particularly the infectious diseases for which we have vaccinations and treatments - at least in developed nations. Anyway, I think this video should air regularly on tv and YouTube and other websites where people would be likely to watch it. Not that I think it's going to change the world or anything, but it certainly might open people's eyes and make them start to think about some health issues that they would otherwise ignore. And since repetition makes things sink in over time, if it aired enough, it would be like commercials that impact people's decisions like which items to purchase, etc. Maybe it would stir-up some conversations around the water cooler about health topics that otherwise would remain un-addressed. As we discussed in class, media is the most powerful tool of communication in the modern world...

blogging thoughts

So, this is my first time to "blog", and I have mixed feelings about it. I'm not very good at, nor comfortable with, using the short-hand type of writing that I see other bloggers using (e.g., celebs whose blogs are shown on all sorts of tv shows, websites, etc.). Frankly, they usually come off looking quite stupid and non-sensical. Anyway, I am going to give this a whirl and try to combine intelligent thoughts about and insights into the topics we discuss in Health Communications with this pop-culture blogging thing. We'll see how it goes...