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The Vision

The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication’s Health Communication Initiative (HCI) supports research, teaching and service that facilitates the exploration, delivery and practice of communication messages and processes to develop healthy individuals, relationships, organizations and communities

The Health Communication Initiative is unique because it adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to engage health communication based on two foundational assumptions:

• Health Communication is a process and product of discourse: The Health Communication Initiative assumes that health communication is influenced by and, in turn, influences social discourses, including gender, race, class and culture.
• Health communication is an engaged practice: HCI also assumes that health communication is enacted in locally specific communication interactions.

This two-pronged approach enables our faculty to explore the complexities of health communication in an increasingly global world and to offer appropriately nuanced and locally-specific solutions to communication dilemmas in health care contexts. For example, our faculty will explore how the culture of college campuses influence students’ decisions about alcohol use and abuse in their everyday lives, a unique approach to the national problem of alcohol abuse on college campuses. Similarly, our faculty is poised to explore how cultural beliefs about gender impact the delivery and efficacy of health care messages to women living in border communities.

Multiple Methods in Health Communication Research

Our unprecedented approach to the study of health communication requires that we go beyond the traditional approaches we use and incorporate innovative and varied research methods. Our faculty will bring to bear the traditional tools of social science, including experimental, survey research and ethnographic methods. In the lab, our faculty are already working to identify how affectionate communication in personal relationships is associated with cardiovascular, endocrine and immune system health. These studies are being undertaken to provide health care practitioners with valuable information about the health effects of communication. Outside the lab, in field studies of health issues that impact people’s everyday lives, our faculty and their graduate students draw upon a wide array of methods, including participatory action research, narrative, and performance methods to study health communication as "lived" experience. For instance, one ongoing research project explores how hospice patients can create empowering life histories when they are given the institutional and relational space to tell their own dying narratives which has implications for practitioners dealing with death and dying.

Multiple Outcomes for Researchers, Practitioners, and Clients

Through our varied approaches, we produce a variety of important research products and practical outcomes, including scholarly articles and books, public performances, and transformative practices. Our faculty have already established a solid record of funded research and have amassed an impressive track record of published articles and books on health communication topics. In addition, we have created a repertoire of applied research outcomes designed with the public in mind, such as public performances that, for example, document the experience and celebrate survivors of breast cancer, and communication-based prevention strategies for use on campus that help college students make healthy choices about alcohol and drug use.

For further information, please contact:

Professor Kory Floyd, professor

Professor Kellie E. Palazzolo, assistant professor