ATHENS, Ga. – The University of Georgia 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.”
The new UGA center is one of two Centers of Excellence in
Health Marketing and Health Communication recently funded by the CDC Office of
Public Health and its “Health Protection Research Initiative.” This research
program was designed to discover strategies and tools that increase the ability
of health departments, physicians and other health care providers to promote
health and prevent diseases, injuries or disabilities.
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.
Collaborating organizations outside UGA include the
Morehouse School of Medicine, the University
of Alabama, the Georgia
Division of Public Health and ORC Macro, a private sector firm with extensive
experience in health communications and marketing.
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.
“If you add ‘genes’ to a list of possible risks for a
disease, many low income people see it as something they can’t change,” said
Condit. “We are looking to see how their health behaviors are shaped by such
fatalistic attitudes and create messages that motivate these individuals to
overcome them and adopt better long term health behaviors.”
For the second study, speech communication associate
professor Jennifer Monahan and colleagues at the University of Alabama
will examine adolescents’ attitudes toward smoking.
“Messages people give to adolescents about smoking risks
tend to be very rational messages. Kids, however, tend to be more experiential,
or more about feeling and doing, than logical in their thinking,” she said. The
group will use this information to develop anti-smoking media messages that
effectively address this adolescent decision making style.
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.
“Addressing health disparities is an area where there is a
lot of work needed,” said Freimuth. “The center will be able to respond to this
need and work toward helping Americans benefit equally from new advances in
health and medicine.”
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