Research

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, this study investigates how U.S. higher education leaders have centered their crisis management on values and guiding ethical principles. We conducted 55 in-depth interviews with leaders from 30 U.S. higher education institutions, with most leaders participating in two interviews. We found that crisis plans created prior to the COVID-19 pandemic were inadequate due to the long duration and highly uncertain nature of the crisis. Instead, higher education leaders applied guiding principles on the fly to support their decision-making. If colleges and universities infuse shared values into their future crisis plans, they will not have to develop a moral compass on the fly for the next pandemic. This paper suggests the following somewhat universal shared values: (1) engage in accuracy, transparency, and accountability; (2) foster deliberative dialog; (3) prioritize safety; (4) support justice, fairness, and equity; and (5) engage in an ethic of care. To navigate ethics tensions, leaders need to possess crisis-relevant expertise or ensure that such expertise is present among crisis management team members. Standing up formal ethics committees composed of diverse stakeholders also is instrumental in navigating tensions inherent in crises. The next pandemic is already on the horizon according to experts. Through infusing values into future crisis plans, higher education leaders can be confident that their responses will be grounded in their communities’ shared values.

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Drug overdose is a leading cause of injury and death in the United States, and opioids are among the most significant of causes. For people with opioid use disorders (OUDs), opioid stigma can lead to devastating consequences, including anxiety and depression. Still, mass media may stigmatize people with OUDs by ascribing stigmatizing labels (e.g., “opioid addict”) and other stigma features to those individuals. However, it is unclear how these stigmatizing messages influence public perceptions of people with OUDs and public support for rehabilitation and Naloxone administration policies. The model of stigma communication (MSC) provides a framework for understanding these relationships. This study used the MSC in two online factorial experiments, the first among college undergraduates (N = 231) and the second among Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (N = 245), to examine how stigmatizing messages about people with OUDs influence stigma-related outcomes. Results reveal that opioid stigma messages influence different outcomes depending on the content of those messages. Classification messages with a stigmatizing mark (e.g., “Alex appears unkempt”) and label (e.g., “opioid addict”) led to greater perceptions of dangerousness and threat in both studies. High stigma classification messages also led to an increased desire for behavioral regulation and social distance in Study 2. Structural equation modeling in Study 1 also supported the applicability of the MSC in the opioid context. Implications for health communication theory development and practice are discussed.

Background: Social media has been widely used for health-related purposes, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous reviews have summarized social media uses for a specific health purpose such as health interventions, health campaigns, medical education, and disease outbreak surveillance. The most recent comprehensive review of social media uses for health purposes, however, was conducted in 2013. A systematic review that covers various health purposes is needed to reveal the new usages and research gaps that emerge in recent years.

Objective: This study aimed to provide a systematic review of social media uses for health purposes that have been identified in previous studies.

Methods: The researchers searched for peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2006 and 2020 in 12 databases covering medicine, public health, and social science. After coding the articles in terms of publication year, journal area, country, method, social media platform, and social media use for health purposes, the researchers provided a review of social media use for health purposes identified in these articles.

Results: This study summarized 10 social media uses for various health purposes by health institutions, health researchers and practitioners, and the public.

Conclusions: Social media can be used for various health purposes. Several new usages have emerged since 2013 including advancing health research and practice, social mobilization, and facilitating offline health-related services and events. Research gaps exist regarding advancing strategic use of social media based on audience segmentation, evaluating the impact of social media in health interventions, understanding the impact of health identity development, and addressing privacy concerns.

Understanding individual differences in communication behaviors is crucial to achieve strategical communication during a public health crisis. To advance this knowledge, the current study explored how Chinese publics with different levels of functional, communicative, and critical health literacy sought and shared information in different forms (i.e. traditional media, social media, and offline word-of-mouth communication) and from different sources (i.e. government, news agencies, health professionals, the company, and other publics) during the Quanjian crisis, a public health crisis happened in China. Findings suggest that higher functional and critical health literacy were associated with higher frequency of seeking and sharing information of almost all forms and sources. However, communicative health literacy was not associated with seeking and sharing information of most forms and sources. The study contributes to crisis communication literature and practice by suggesting health literacy, as an individual factor, can be used to identify influential publics in crisis information transmission. The study also adds to health literacy literature by suggesting the need to develop context-specific operationalizations of communicative health literacy.

Social media platforms have experienced unprecedented levels of growth and usage over the past decade, with Facebook hosting 2.7 billion active users worldwide, including over 200 million users in the United States. Facebook users have been underutilized and understudied by the academic community as a resource for participant recruitment. We performed a pilot study to explore the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of Facebook advertisements for the recruitment of an online agricultural health and safety survey. We undertook a 1-week advertising campaign utilizing the integrated, targeted advertising platform of Facebook Ads Manager with a target-spending limit of US $294. We created and posted three advertisements depicting varying levels of agricultural safety adoption leading to a brief survey on farm demographics and safety attitudes. We targeted our advertisements toward farm mothers aged 21-50 years in the United States and determined cost-effectiveness and potential biases. No participant incentive was offered. We reached 40,024 users and gathered 318 advertisement clicks. Twenty-nine participants consented to the survey with 24 completions. Including personnel costs, the cost per completed survey was US $17.42. Compared to the distribution of female producers in the United States, our advertisements were unexpectedly overrepresented in the eastern United States and were underrepresented in the western United States. Facebook Ads Manager represents a potentially cost-effective and timely method to recruit participants for online health and safety research when targeting a specific population. However, social media recruitment mirrors traditional recruitment methods in its limitations, exhibiting geographic, response, and self-selection biases that need to be addressed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, it affected every aspect of life, including education. The spread of this pandemic compelled the world to shift from traditional classroom education to online learning. This exploratory qualitative research study investigates the critical and timely topic of the sudden transition to online teaching amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It studies its multiple implications through in-depth interviews with a diverse group of international educators from different higher education institutions, representing different nationalities, ethnicities, genders, ranks, and generations. The findings reflect an early snapshot of the continuous teaching and learning development efforts on a large scale, across different regions of the world, and provide insights for future research and practice in the field of international education. The results also reveal some areas of concern in the educational digital environment, requiring further investigation moving forward, such as the digital divide, the gender gap, especially the gender digital gap, and the importance of meeting the needs of students with various physical and mental disabilities. The study offers suggestions to improve online education strategies, both amid the pandemic and in the post-pandemic era.

This study explores the impact of organization–public relationships (OPRs) and issue-related situational factors on publics’ intention to participate in CSR campaigns, based on relationship management theory and the situational theory of problem-solving (STOPS). We surveyed 698 respondents living in the United States about two CSR campaigns, one focused on girls’ empowerment and one on deforestation. The results showed that situational motivation and OPRs were strongly and directly related to publics’ participation intention for both CSR campaigns. Only two situational perceptions – constraint recognition and involvement recognition – were indirectly related to publics’ participation. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.

Self-affirmation theory has inspired numerous studies that have tried to understand the effects of self-affirmation on defensive processing of threatening health messages and subsequent behavior. Despite the overall positive effects of self-affirmation, psychological processes through which self-affirmation exerts such impact remain unclear. We examined Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC) as a potential moderator of the effects of self-affirmation on responses to graphic cigarette warning warnings, in an attempt to shed light on the psychological processes. We conducted an experimental study in which 925 African American smokers were instructed to self-affirm (or not) prior to viewing graphic cigarette warning labels. We found that smokers with stronger present time orientation (PTO) experienced higher defensive responses as measured by anger, perceived message manipulation, and message derogation, after viewing graphic cigarette warning labels; whereas smokers with stronger future time orientation (FTO) reported less message derogation. PTO interacted with self-affirmation in predicting defensive processing measures, such that self-affirmation reduced message derogation at lower levels of PTO and increased message derogation and perceived message manipulation at higher levels of PTO. Self-affirmation also had a conditional indirect effect on smoking intentions and intention to quit smoking through measures of defensive processing. We discuss implications of our study.

Background: Depressive symptoms are the most prevalent mental health concern among older adults (possibly heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic), which raises questions about how such symptoms can be lowered in this population. Existing research shows that offline social connectedness is a protective factor against depression in older adults; however, it is unknown whether web-based social connectedness can have similar effects.

Objective: This study investigates whether social connectedness on a support website protects older adults against depressive symptoms over the course of a year, above and beyond the protective effect of offline social connectedness. The secondary aim is to determine whether older adults with increased depressive symptoms are more likely to engage in social connectedness on this website. Thus, we examine depressive symptoms as both an outcome and predictor of web-based social connectedness to fully understand the chain of causality among these variables. Finally, we compare web-based social connectedness with offline social connectedness in their ability to lower depressive symptoms among older adults.

Methods: A total of 197 adults aged 65 years or older were given access to a social support website, where they were able to communicate with each other via a discussion forum for a year. Participants’ social connectedness on the web-based platform, conceptualized as message production and consumption, was measured using behavioral log data as the number of messages participants wrote and read, respectively, during the first 6 months (t₁) and the following 6 months (t₂) of the study. Participants self-reported their offline social connectedness as the number of people in their support networks, and they reported their depressive symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire-8 both at baseline (t₁) and at 12-month follow-up (t₂). To ascertain the flow of causality between these variables, we employed a cross-lagged panel design, in which all variables were measured at t₁ and t₂.

Results: After controlling for the effect of offline support networks at t₁, web-based message consumption at t₁ decreased older adults’ depressive symptoms at t₂ (β=−.11; P=.02), but web-based message production at t₁ did not impact t₂ depressive symptoms (β=.12; P=.34). Web-based message consumption had a larger effect (β=−.11; P=.02) than offline support networks (β=−.08; P=.03) in reducing older adults’ depressive symptoms over time. Higher baseline depressive symptoms did not predict increased web-based message consumption (β=.12; P=.36) or production (β=.02; P=.43) over time.

Conclusions: The more messages older adults read on the web-based forum for the first 6 months of the study, the less depressed they felt at the 1-year follow-up, above and beyond the availability of offline support networks at baseline. This pinpoints the substantial potential of web-based communication to combat depressive symptoms in this vulnerable population.