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Journal of Health Communication

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Introduction: 10 Years of Health

Communication Research
a

Timothy Edgar & Vicki S. Freimuth

Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA

Available online: 23 Feb 2007

To cite this article: Timothy Edgar & Vicki S. Freimuth (2006): Introduction: 10 Years of Health
Communication Research, Journal of Health Communication, 11:1, 7-9
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10810730500461034

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Journal of Health Communication, 11:79, 2006

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1081-0730 print/1087-0415 online
DOI: 10.1080/10810730500461034

Introduction: 10 Years of Health Communication

Research
TIMOTHY EDGAR
Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

VICKI S. FREIMUTH

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University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA

This anniversary issue of the Journal of Health Communication celebrates the publications contributions to health communication, describes the scholarship produced
during the past 10 years, and suggests some exciting directions for the future. The
journal undertook a similar task in the very first issue in 1996 when Everett Rogers
identified key lessons learned in the first 25 years of health communication research.
1) Carefully designed communication campaigns for preventive health can
have considerable effects on behavior change; 2) social marketing strategies play a key role in preventive health campaigns; 3) audience segmentation is a particularly useful health communication strategy that was
adapted from social marketing; 4) health communication research has
found the entertainment-education strategy to have strong effects in behavior changing; and 5) an important potential exists for the new, interactive
communication technologies, such as computer-mediated communication,
to facilitate health information exchange and optimal decision making, a
number of early applications indicate. (Rogers, 1996, p. 22)
This anniversary gives us an opportunity to reflect on what the Journal of Health
Communication and other publications have added to the knowledge and practice of
health communication since Professor Rogers made his observations 10 years ago.
When Scott Ratzan first invited us to guest edit this issue, we decided to commission
articles that would accomplish two goals. First, we wanted a review to summarize the
literature on health communication scholarship produced during the period of the
journals existence. Specifically, we wished to understand what 10 years of research
published in this journal as well as in other academic publications have taught us
about the role of communication as it relates to health. The guiding question we
posed to authors was, If the last 10 years of health communication research did
not exist, what insights and knowledge would we currently lack? The second goal
was to look forward and establish a research agenda for the next decade. To that
Address correspondence to Timothy Edgar, Department of Marketing Communication,
Emerson College, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116, USA. E-mail: timothy edgar@
emerson.edu

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T. Edgar and V. S. Freimuth

end, we requested that each of the authors outline key questions to guide health
communication scholarship in their areas of expertise for the next 10 years.
As we approached the task of inviting scholars to write the literature reviews,
our first inclination was to identify the most established health communication
researchers for each topic area we hoped to cover in the anniversary issue. They,
after all, are the individuals who either produced a substantial portion of the last
decade of research or, at the very least, influenced the direction of health communication scholarship in the last 10 years through the work they conducted prior to
1996. In the end, however, we settled on a different approach. Instead of commissioning articles from the most familiar names in the field, we looked to a new generation of scholars to summarize the last decade of research. Specifically, we
sought to identify young scholars who received at least a portion of their doctoral
training during the last decade and who have begun productive careers in the academy during the same period of time. We reasoned that the body of literature
produced from 1996 to the present heavily influenced their own agendas for scholarship and directed paradigmatic choices for framing their research questions.
Because the second goal of the special issue was to provide guidance for the
next decade, we also wished to identify individuals whose current track records
strongly suggest that they will be some of the most recognized and influential health
communication scholars of the next 10 years. Based on our own familiarity with
the literature and the advice of seasoned scholars in the various areas of interest,
we chose five individuals we believe will serve as models for the production of
outstanding health communication scholarship and will be viewed as key agenda
setters for the next generation of researchers. To provide the authors with feedback on the inclusion (as well as exclusion) and organizational choices they made
in their manuscripts as well as the soundness of their overall conclusions, two different senior health communication scholars for each article conducted blind reviews.
The task we gave contributors was not an easy one. Because health communication
has grown rapidly as an academic field since the Journal of Health Communication first
appeared in 1996, the number of studies published during that period of time is enormous. We told the contributors from the start that we did not expect them to conduct
and write reviews that included every study that directly related to their topic area.
Instead, we encouraged them to concentrate on helping the reader of the journal to
understand the major themes that have emerged from the literature during the past decade. Because we wished to include five review articles in this issue, we also had to limit
the size of the manuscripts to 5,000 words. To help them make the most of the space
available, the publisher of the journal granted the authors a special dispensation on
a few standard APA referencing guidelines. For instance, the contributors used
et al. in the citations within the text each time more than two individuals coauthored
a referenced article. Even with the word reduction strategies they used, the job of
condensing a decade of research findings into 5,000 words posed a major challenge.
We appreciate the efforts the contributors made to cover the key issues in a reasonable
amount of depth while remaining economical in their approach.
The first article in the issue, which is coauthored by Vicki Freimuth, Holly
Massett, and Wendy Meltzer, is not one of the literature reviews, but rather is a
data-driven paper that presents a descriptive analysis of 10 years of research
published in the Journal of Health Communication. The results, which were based
on the analysis of 321 peer-reviewed articles, drove the decisions we made about
which topics should be covered in the five review articles. Most of the articles

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Introduction

reported original research, equally divided among studies designed to analyze

audience characteristics, studies designed to examine message characteristics, studies
designed to describe content, and studies evaluating communication interventions.
More than half of the articles that focused on a particular communication channel
were about a mass media channel, with a fifth looking at interpersonal channels
and another fifth studying communication technology. The health topics covered
most frequently included HIV=AIDS, cancer, and tobacco=smoking.
In the first of the overview articles, Seth Noar argues that the last 10 years of
research on health-related mass media campaigns provide increasing evidence that targeted, well-executed campaigns can have small-to-moderate effects not only on health
knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes, but on behaviors as well, which can translate into significant, positive public health outcomes given the wide reach of mass media. Noar
notes, however, that the literature teaches us that desired results can be achieved only
if planners carefully follow well-established principles of effective campaign design.
Kimberly Kline also examines the literature on mass media from 1996 to present,
but, unlike Noar who focuses on planned communication interventions, Kline reports
the results of 10 years of research on the health and illness content of popular media in
the domains of advertising, journalism, and entertainment. Among other conclusions, Kline argues that the research questions whether popular media accurately
or appropriately have represented health challenges, giving the impression that there
are more right or wrong, complete or incomplete ways of representing an issue and
alluding to the possibility of consensus about basic understandings of a health issue.
In the third of the overview articles, Suzanne Suggs reviews the last decade of
research of one of the newer areas in our field: the use of new technologies to communicate about health. Suggss paper shows that even though the body of research
still is in its infancy there is compelling evidence that technologies such as touch
screen computer kiosks, CD-ROMs, handheld computers, the Web, telephony,
and tailored messaging have the power to serve as extremely effective mechanisms
for conveying information and influencing behavior change.
Katherine McComas next summarizes 10 years of defining studies that addressed the
social and psychological influences on risk communication related to health issues.
McComass article shows that social trust, the social amplification of risk framework,
and the affect heuristic figured prominently in the decade of scholarship. She also explains
that the use of mental models was a dominant method for developing risk message content, and she discusses studies that examined the use of risk comparisons, narratives, and
visuals in the production of risk messages. McComas also includes the results of research
on how providing information about a risks severity, social norms, and efficacy influence
communication behaviors and intentions to follow risk reduction measures.
Finally, Ashley Duggan tackles the domain of interpersonal communication
processes both within providerpatient communication and in interactions with individuals who are ill, need care, or are at risk for disease. Duggans summary of the
literature since 1996, which focuses heavily on a relational perspective, documents
the ways communication processes predict better outcomes in the providerpatient
interaction and key constructs for consideration in close relationships in which a
health issue in some way defines the relationship.

Reference
Rogers, E. M. (1996). Up-to-date report. Journal of Health Communication, 1(1), 1523.