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UGA has been awarded a three-year
$3.5 million grant by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
to create a new center aimed at improving the health of the poor and near poor
living in the South through better health communication and marketing.
The Southern Center for Communication, Health and Poverty will focus on reducing
health disparities by discovering how the South’s poorest and disproportional
African-American populations respond to health risks and then developing interventions
that can help them make sound health decisions. The Biomedical and Health Sciences
Institute will assist in administrating the center grant.
“The poor suffer more from almost every health risk and disease,” said
Vicki Freimuth, professor of speech communication and journalism and principal
investigator for the center grant. “Communication and marketing can reduce
these gaps, but first we must learn more about making risk messages relevant
and culturally appropriate for the southern poor.”
At UGA, the center brings together a network of health researchers from the
Department of Speech Communication and the Grady College of Journalism and
Mass Communication, as well as investigators from the Terry College of Business,
the Institute for Behavioral Research and the Department of Sociology.
In addition to conducting specific research studies, the center will focus
on four core activities: research, communication and marketing, public health
workforce development and administration. Grady College of Journalism and Mass
Communication professor Jeff Springston will direct the research core while
Grady’s Dean Krugman will co-direct the communication/marketing core
with Doryn Chervin from ORC Macro. The public health workforce development
core will be led by Don Rubin, Department of Speech Communication, while Freimuth
will direct the administrative core.
The center will conduct a pilot study assessing the ways low income individuals
respond to multiple health risks, as well as two major research studies addressing
two different health issues – genetic predispositions to disease and
smoking.
The first research study, led by speech communication research professor Celeste
Condit, will focus on understanding how people process personalized genetic
risk information, while the second study, led by speech communication associate
professor Jennifer Monahan, will examine adolescents’ attitudes toward
smoking.
Freimuth and Chervin are co-investigators on the pilot study that will look
at the sources low income individuals use when weighing health decisions and
the depth in which they process messages about risk.
All three studies will examine the relationship between race and socioeconomic
class to see if there are differences in the way African Americans and white
Americans respond to health risks.
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“The
poor suffer more from almost every health risk and disease,” said Vicki
Freimuth, professor of speech communication and journalism and principal investigator
for the center grant.
