The first insight, the five dimensions of communication, really has caused me to think about the importance of the implementation of health communication. Without the five dimensions, source, message, channel, receiver, and destination, it makes it hard to fully roll out what you want to change. Knowing these key points in health communication will allow us to fully be able to engage our population. For example with our topic of energy drinks, using these five dimensions will allow us to know who to target, how, with what, and emphasize the why. I truly believe that this is the foundation for any mode of communication.
My second insight, was the realization that I am REALLY rusty on my theories. I think this is also due to the fact that the last time I have really touched all this information was about a year and a half ago. So as we went through the theories it really helped me remember. I really never realized how integral theory is in shaping health campaigns. Although going through the theory really helped me to remember everything and understand its importance, I think that in the future they can really be reviewed in one class session. Theory, to be honest, is not a very exciting topic, and learning something we all know already may be better to just do a crash course/review of the theories in a day just to refresh our memory.
My last insight, is the use of communication channels. I thought I knew all the modes of communication and the importance of it, but after learning about the different channels, I can saw I had an aha! moment. There are really different ways to get your message across, from informing them of the problem, making it personal, using the fear tactic or just encouraging problem solving. All these messages can be used in different media channels to engage the population. Even having examples to see really helped to get a better perspective of the type of ads out there. Also involved with the communication channels was the question of LOW vs HIGH involvement. I think in the future, I'd like to see an introduction to this idea and with a definition of each. Maybe it was just me, but I felt as though it was just presented with no introduction of what they are, which made it a bit confusing for me to follow along and understand what each campaign was, whether it was high or low. So I think a bit of an introduction to this will be helpful, since I believe that this aspect is very important.
As far as questions or thoughts, I do have to agree with Chelsea, that I think that maybe in the future, when working on our project, we should talk to people from our target population first to get their view point prior to deciding on what our topic is going to be. We decided energy drinks, but the question is, will our health campaign be successful or are we targeting something that we really can't change people's minds about. If we would have spoken with our target population first that would have helped us out.
Overall, establishing frameworks for health communication, really taught me a lot, but now I'm really looking forward to the next module, Knowing your target audience, as I feel this will really help us out a lot in working on our own health campaign.
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