Health communication instruction: toward identifying common learning goals, course content, and pedagogical strategies to guide curricular development.

Health communication is a vibrant and growing area of the communication discipline, with an abundance of theoretically grounded scholarship and practical application at many levels. Despite this growth, there has yet to be a published description of health communication pedagogy that could identify common conceptual approaches and teaching practices. To help address this gap, an online survey of health communication instructors at 77 colleges and universities throughout the United States was conducted.

Medical Student Attitudes Toward Communication Skills Training and Knowledge of Appropriate Provider-Patient Communication: A Comparison of First-Year and Fourth-Year Medical Students.

Drawing upon Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives as a theoretical framework, this study examines attitudes toward communication skills training, knowledge of appropriate provider-patient communication, and confidence communicating with patients between first-year and fourth-year medical students at a large medical school in the southern United States. The study findings indicate that fourth-year medical students do not differ from first-year medical students in terms of attitudes towards communication skills training or knowledge of appropriate provider-patient communication, but they have significantly higher confidence scores about communicating with patients. In addition, positive attitudes towards communication skills training are significantly related to perceived importance of communication skills and confidence when communicating with patients.

Assessing communication competence in an online study: toward informing subsequent interventions among older adults with cancer, their lay caregivers, and peers.

Employing quantitative and qualitative measures, online and paper versions, we tested Kreps's (1988) relational health communication model by examining relations among social support, communication competence, and perceived stress in a study of well-elders, elderly individuals with cancer, and their lay caregivers (N = 76). Grounding the qualitative part of the study in the narrative paradigm (Fisher, 1984), we used the critical incident technique (Flanagan, 1954) to collect participant narratives focusing on positive and negative expressions of social support. The results indicated partial support for the relational health communication model.