Communicating about Nutrition

Week 2: How Theory Shapes Health Campaigns

Certainly theory is an important aspect of Health Promotion. It helps guide our understanding of human behavior and gives us insight about the methods and interventions that may or may not be effective for promoting healthy choices and changing behavior. I found the summary of the the 5 dimensions of communication in the lecture to be helpful: Source, Message, Channel, Receiver, and Destination. I tend to favor step by step approaches to implementing a project or campaign, as the question that always pops into my head at the beginning is, "So, what do I do first?" While it may be easy to get bogged down with all of the different theories at our disposal, I think for novice health promoters as ourselves, it is best to just pick one of the most relevant and tried-and-true theories to start with, and just stick to it. I think that only through experience with the implementation of different theories are we really going to get a grasp on what works for us in different populations.

While the lecture was concise and easy to understand, the Scholton (1996) reading was frankly too dense with complicated and ever-changing terminology (once one term is introduced, the reader is then bombarded with another new term to describe the previous one) that distracted me from the overall message of the article. Talking about communication... I got hardly an ounce of understanding out of the entire article, to say the least. Perhaps someone in the field of advertising would more easily be able to decipher the article; however, for students of public health I would suggest a more relatable read.

As for the homework assignment, Code Your Own Communication, I found it mildly helpful to sit down and determine my own definitions of 'communication' and 'health communication'. Perhaps it was just my own step-by-step mentality that prohibited me from truly grasping the assignment, but I found myself agonizing over the meaning of 'communication messages' and, like one of our classmates, I think I mistakenly took it to include interpersonal communication, which further complicated my coding scheme. Nevertheless, I think the true value of the assignment emerged in our class discussion when we were all able to share ideas about our thoughts and experiences related to the meaning of 'health communication.'

On a final note, the purpose of the distracting image of a soda machine at the top of my post is to comment on Chelsea's idea of changing our target population to college students and soda consumption. While my personal interest is in children, I agree for her reasons to change our target population and I think we should continue down that route. Also exploring fast-food consumption among college students may be interesting, especially given the large array of fast-food options here on campus. When I went to undergrad at the University of Georgia, which has a comparable student population to SDSU, the only dining options on campus included four larger-than-life dining halls which provided food prepared solely by the university's food services (which, by the way, prided itself on the numerous 'outstanding food services' awards it won). There were no commercial or fast-food options available on campus. Is that just a southern thing? Oh, and we had actual dormitories on campus. You know, the kind where two people share one small room and share a bathroom with an entire hallway of people. But that's just a side note.