In PhiladelphiaTHE main causes of death are heart disease, cancer and overdose of unintentional drugs. While some of these deaths are caused by things out of our control – like genetics – many are vividly.
Avoidable deaths are the result of a series of decisions. That a person decides to smoke, to eat a lot of fried foods or to be a sofa potato, their decisions – sometimes unconsciously – can affect their health.
I am a Health communication expert And public health researcher At Temple University of North Philadelphia. I started working in public health at the end of the 1980s at the start of the HIV / AIDS epidemic, and before that, I worked in marketing and public relations. I spent my career thinking about how health decisions are like many decisions that consumers make every day around products to buy.
A key difference with health decisions is the inherent risks involved. There is not much risk to try a new brand of cereals, but there is a driving risk of a motorcycle without a helmet.
Many people have an attitude “which will not happen to me” when making a decision that involves a risk. This element of “Risk perceptionI guided my interest in health decisions and how to use commercial marketing techniques – the same as companies use to sell products – to encourage people to be vaccinated, to obtain colonoscopy or to be treated for a medical condition.
Public Health College of the University of the Temple
Break demography in psychography
A strategy I use is Segmentation analysis.
The analysis of segmentation is the process of researching groups of people who may resemble the all similar surface – like black women in the north of Philadelphia – then divide them into smaller groups depending on the differences in their attitudes, their beliefs or their behaviors.
Looking at these “psychography“Instead of demography as age or sex can help researchers in public health communication better understand how to communicate effectively.
For example, I conducted a study in 2021 which examined the connection Transgender women living in Philadelphia and in the Bay of San Francisco felt to other members of the Trans community. We wanted to see if messaging on preparation, or pre-exhibition prophylaxisThe drug used to prevent HIV infection should be different depending on the connection they felt.
We found that participants who were more committed to the Trans community were not only more informed about the preparation, but they were also more likely to see the advantages of using it in relation to those who were less committed.
This indicates that strategies to reach those that are not as connected may need to include, for example, to provide more basic information on what preparation is and how it works.
Public Health College of the University of the Temple
Mathematical models and 3D cards
Another powerful marketing tool that I use is a process known as perceptual cartography and modeling vector messages.
Using simple investigation responses, we can mathematically model the way people think about a health decision and present it on a three -dimensional map.
Similar to the way someone might think about the relationship between cities or countries with each other – as the place where Philadelphia is related to New York or Chicago – we can take responses from an investigation and convert them into distances. We ask people to agree or disagree with declarations on advantages or obstacles to a decision and to enter their responses in a computer program to create the card.
We can then model vector messages, which shows how to move the group to the desired decision.
Think of high school physics when you may have learned the amount of force, or push and shoot, necessary to move an object to another. The modeling of vector messages helps us to determine what beliefs to push or to draw to bring the group to evolve towards a particular decision, and this helps us to create the most convincing messages for this group.
When we use vector modeling with segmentation analysis, we can also compare how messaging may be necessary to be similar or different for different groups.
For example, I used segmentation analysis, then perceptual cartography and modeling vector messages to understand how Medical distrust could affect the decision To be vaccinated for COVID-19 among a group of philadelphians who had not yet been vaccinated.
Public Health College of the University of the Temple
Our team then examined the perceptual cards and the modeling of vector messages by levels of distrust. Vectors have shown that those who have high levels of medical mistrust would be more likely to respond to messages that responded to concerns about hoax pandemic, or the concern that minorities do not obtain the same treatment as others.
This allowed us to think about how to build messages around these problems in public media campaigns or other communication strategies that encourage vaccination.
Decision -making tools
I used these methods to create and test a number of different communication strategies to influence health decisions.
For example, I have developed web tools that have been used in philadelphia hospitals and clinics to encourage methadone patients with hepatitis C To receive antiviral treatment For their infection, patients with black cancer To participate in a clinical trial Or to do genetic testsand patients with low literacy and a higher risk of colorectal cancer have a colonoscopy.
Public Health College of the University of the Temple
My colleagues and I have also developed posters, brochures and publications on social networks that encourage low-income philadelphians and in Kensington vaccine to obtain photos of Booster COVID-19; Educational slides for adults from Philadelphia with low alteration On dirty bombs And how radioactive weapons could be used in a terrorist attack; and a comic strip for trans women to Discover the advantages of using the preparation.
Bringing people to make better decisions about their health can be a difficult battle. We all have our reasons not to do things that are good for us. For example, what have you eaten for lunch today? Was it healthy? If not, why did you eat it?
My job is to understand what makes people do what they do, then help them make decisions that keep them healthy.
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