Week 5 - Target audience Segmentation

I can't believe it took 5 weeks for me to finally post a YouTube video in my blog! I still feel that "blogging" thing is still a little foreign to me. But hey, I posted a video this week! Anyway, I thought this video really related to our class topic this week of target audience segmentation. The video is very specific about targeting children to "get up" and move. It's a childhood obesity health communication campaign. I think it's very smart to use the main characters in Shrek, c'mon who doesn't like donkey! Correct me if I'm wrong, but do you know a 4 or 5 year old who doesn't know Shrek, donkey and Fiona. Just hearing donkey sing in this video made me want to get up and dance!We covered many topics in class last Monday, from seeing a video on formative research that talked about learning the values, attitudes, and behavior of consumers to our outdoor group exercise on our target audience segmentation. One thing that really stayed in my mind was when Professor Engelberg emphasized the importance of "knowing" our own values, attitudes, and behavior as health promoters/communicators. I think it's true that if we are not aware of our own values, attitudes, and behavior we can perhaps try to "manipulate", in a bad way, a health campaign into what "we" think is the right path to take and ignore our target populations' needs. As we talked about in class, we might not feel empathy for our target audience. I know for sure that as a breast health educator and case manager of breast cancer patient, I was trying to feel empathy for the mix emotions, and grieving process that my patients feel during their diagnosis. However, I know that I could never ever put myself in their shoes due to the fact that I've never experienced what it is like to have breast cancer. I would not wish this disease on anybody.

Peace everyone and stay healthy and happy!

Childhood Obesity Prevention featuring Shrek (english, 30s)

Week 4 - Active Listening and Selective Memory

As usual I learned a lot in class today about active listening and question asking. I found a good site in the internet that talks about active listening and what we can do to improve it in our career and everyday life. It's an interesting site. Here it is and I hope you all find it relevant to our class like I did: http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/Mind%20Tools%20Listening.pdf. The lab in our class was again a little tough to do. It was certainly hard to apply my active listening skills...such as paraphrasing, asking open ended questions, and paying extra attention to the verbal and non-verbal cues. The person in my group was really good at playing a 15 year old boy! Since I don't usually "deal" with teenagers other than in the mall settings...it was tough to "actively listen" and apply, without hesitation, the skill that we talked about in class. Anyway, I also like the part in our lecture on "value of selective" such as selective attention, perception and memory. Selective memory is what my husband accuses me of always practicing on him when I'm "mad". I think it's a good skill to have to survive in any relationship!!! So check out my "selective memory" cartoon above, this really reminds me of what talked about in class! Have a great weekend everyone!

Week 3-Theories of Health Communication

The lecture this week was very interesting, especially the part on Dual Process Persuasion. I am realizing that health communication has many different parts and that for us to modify a behavior it important to think about the source, message, channel, receiver, and destination of our health communication campaign. The group exercise in class was also very interesting, it was difficult for me to think about the different ideas on how to get low involvement seniors to get up and be motivated to exercise. In theory it seems so easy to understand, but the application process was much harder than I thought it was going to be, but having people "brainstorm" in a group can inspire some great ideas! One aspect of the lecture that Dr. Engelberg talked about that I can really relate to is the concept of personal relevance. Looking at my own behavior, I do tend to pay attention more closely to issues that are personally relevant to my own life. It's an "AHA!" moment for me that health communication is partly about finding out what makes our target population "tick"!

Another topic was that health communication involves manipulation in a "good way", well I agree with that since we are trying to convince people to modify a bad health behavior. Modifying people's bad health behavior is a very difficult task to accomplish and using all the tools available to us to affect a behavior to change in positive way, I think I can live with...it kind feels like the cartoon I posted above).

See you all Monday!

Week 2 of Health Communication

Hello everyone,

Well, the second week of the semester is almost over...tomorrow is Friday! I did the homework today and was not really surprise (working in the hospital setting) that most of "health communication" I observed was mostly about colon, stomach and breast cancer prevention (60%). Although many treatments (40%) still occur by way of surgery (appendectomy, breast lump removal, colon resections etc.), but mostly the clinic deals with breast exams, colonoscopies, and endoscopy (stomach cancer screening) patients. We perform approximately 6 to 7 upper and lower scopes a day in the clinic and this does not include the breast exams done by the surgeons in the clinic. Health communication, I think, need to include educating individual, patients, and groups about disease treatment and prevention. It's good to see that this particular clinic spends more time on prevention and screening practices versus the traditional view point of medicine that focuses on treatment and not prevention. I still think that preventive medicine has a long way to go, it's still not fully embraced by our society or by the medical community as whole. But as we've discussed in class, certain "corporations" have more money to spend and treatment (drugs, pharmaceutical) is where the "big" bucks come from....
Anyway, I better stop talking....


See you all monday!

The first week of PH663-Health Communication

Hello everyone,

Last week was an experienced of "massive" confusion for me. I'm sure all of us have experienced a week or a day in our lives where everything seem to be happening at once. Well, last week was that week for me and my family. My husband and I had the task of juggling moving to our new home, starting school for me, and taking care of our 2 1/2 year old little girl. Now, everyone is probably wondering how is this related to health communication? Well, it so happen that my daughter's immunization appointment was scheduled the same week! With the week being so "crazy" I had forgotten to "communicate" to my husband that he needed to bring my daughter to see the doctor since, due to poor planning on my part, her appointment was the same time as my PH668 class! So basicallyI feel that last week, I did not do well in my "communication" to my husband about my daughters required immunization which is important in maintaining her "health". Maybe if I could have utilized other "media/medium" of communication other than just writing the appointment in my personal calendar...perhaps the appointment might not have been missed! Perhaps I could have utilized a community calendar for my family easily seen by everyone (including me) posted in the kitchen area? Or perhaps I could have used a posted note on the refrigerator? In relating my experience to our class discussion, we have to use more than one strategy to make health communication successful.

See you all next Monday,
Maria