Importance: Many older women are screened for breast cancer beyond guideline-recommended thresholds. Messaging holds promise to reduce overscreening.
Objective: To investigate the effect of a message on older women's support for and intentions of stopping breast cancer screening.
Background: Public health campaigns have often used persuasive techniques to promote healthy behaviors but the use of persuasion by doctors is controversial. We sought to examine older women's perspectives.
Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 community-dwelling older women from the Baltimore metropolitan area.
Importance: Since 1999, over 1 million people have died of a drug overdose in the US. However, little is known about the bereaved, meaning their family, friends, and acquaintances, and their views on the importance of addiction as a policy priority.
Objectives: To quantify the scope of the drug overdose crisis in terms of personal overdose loss (ie, knowing someone who died of a drug overdose) and to assess the policy implications of this loss.
Introduction: Research has suggested that individual health may influence policy attitudes, yet the relationship between mental health and policy support is understudied. Clarifying this relationship may help inform policies that can improve the population mental health. To address this gap, this study measures national support for 5 social determinants of health policy priorities and their relation to mental health and political affiliation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite considerable evidence that exposure to conflicting health information can have undesirable effects on outcomes including public understanding about and trust in health recommendations, comparatively little is known about whether such exposure influences intentions to engage in two communication behaviors central to public health promotion: information sharing and information seeking. The purpose of the current study is to test whether exposure to conflicting information influences intentions to share and seek information about six health topics. We analyzed data from two waves of a longitudinal survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Many older women are screened for breast cancer beyond guideline-recommended thresholds. One contributor is pro-screening messaging from health care professionals, media, and family/friends. In this project, we developed and evaluated messages for reducing overscreening in older women.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEfforts to expand access to health insurance in the United States are key to addressing health inequities and ensuring that all individuals have access to health care during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Yet, attempts to expand public insurance programs, including Medicaid, continue to face opposition in state and federal policymaking. Limited policy success raises questions about the health insurance information environment and the extent that available information signals both available resources and the need for policy reform.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: Media messaging matters for public opinion and policy, and analyzing patterns of campaign strategy can provide important windows into policy priorities.
Methods: The authors used content analysis supplemented with keyword-based text analysis to assess the volume, proportion, and distribution of media attention to race-related issues in comparison to gender-related issues during the general election period of the 2022 midterm campaigns for federal office in the United States.
Findings: Race-related mentions in campaign advertising were overwhelmingly focused on crime and law and order, with very little attention to racism, racial injustice, and the structural barriers that lead to widespread inequities.
Republicans and Democrats responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in starkly different ways, from their attitudes in 2020 about whether the virus posed a threat to whether the pandemic ended in 2023. The consequences of COVID-19 for health equity have been a central concern in public health, and the concept of health equity has also been beset by partisan polarization. In this article, the authors present and discuss nationally representative survey data from 2023 on US public perceptions of disparities in COVID-19 mortality (building on a previous multiwave survey effort) as well as causal attributions for racial disparities, the contribution of structural racism, and broader attitudes about public health authority.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Communication research demonstrates that messages often have unintended consequences, but this work has received limited attention in implementation science. This dissemination experiment sought to determine whether state-tailored policy briefs about the behavioral health consequences of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), compared to national policy briefs on the topic, increased state legislators'/staffers' perceptions of the policy brief relevance and parental blame for the consequences of ACEs, and whether effects differed between Democrats and Republicans.
Method: A preregistered, web-based survey experiment with U.
Objective: Examine how women aged 35-50 respond to messages about limiting cancer screening.
Methods: A national sample of women aged 35-50 (n = 983) were randomly assigned to read one of four media vignettes: three provided information about potential harms of mammograms using evidence, norms, or an anecdote strategy, and one provided no such information. Participants listed thoughts they had about the message, and after coding these themes, we tested for associations between the themes evoked, message exposure, and mammogram history.
Background: The public is often exposed to conflicting health information, with evidence of concerning consequences, yet little attention has been paid to identifying strategies that can mitigate its effects.
Objective: The current study tests whether three different approaches to communicating about the process of scientific discovery-a rational appeal using analogical evidence, a rational appeal using testimonial evidence, and a logic-based inoculation approach-could reduce the adverse effects of exposure to conflict by positively framing how people construe the scientific process, increasing their perceived knowledge about the scientific process, and helping them to respond to critiques about the scientific process, which, in turn, might make them less apt to counterargue the science they subsequently encounter in health news stories and other exposures to conflict.
Methods: We fielded a survey experiment in May 2022 with a national sample of U.
Objective: To understand how equity appeared in news about food assistance from 2021.
Methods: We assessed a national sample of news articles (=298) for equity arguments and language about racial and health equity.
Results: Only 28% of coverage argued that food assistance programs promote equity.
Early care and education (ECE), or the care young children receive before entering formal schooling, can take multiple forms and is delivered in different settings, such as a center, church, or public school. Federal and state governments regularly fund ECE programs and policies through the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act (CCDBG). Many families, however, face significant challenges in access, cost, and quality of ECE programs, and ECE professionals report substantial challenges in the workplace (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolicy Points Medicalization is a historical process by which personal, behavioral, and social issues are increasingly viewed through a biomedical lens and "diagnosed and treated" as individual pathologies and problems by medical authorities. Medicalization in the United States has led to a conflation of "health" and "health care" and a confusion between individual social needs versus the social, political, and economic determinants of health. The essential and important work of population health science, public health practice, and health policy writ large is being thwarted by a medicalized view of health and an overemphasis on personal health services and the health care delivery system as the major focal point for addressing societal health issues and health inequality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Policy Points Many studies have explored the impact of message strategies to build support for policies that advance racial equity, but few studies examine the effects of richer stories of lived experience and detailed accounts of the ways racism is embedded in policy design and implementation. Longer messages framed to emphasize social and structural causes of racial inequity hold significant potential to enhance support for policies to advance racial equity. There is an urgent need to develop, test, and disseminate communication interventions that center perspectives from historically marginalized people and promote policy advocacy, community mobilization, and collective action to advance racial equity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile the overall impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on U.S. population health has been devastating, it has not affected everyone equally.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Health Polit Policy Law
June 2023
Context: Although the COVID-19 pandemic has affected all Americans, its effects have been unequally distributed across geographic areas. These variations in the pandemic's severity-and public perceptions thereof-likely have political consequences. This study examines the factors that shape perceptions of COVID-19 at the local level and assesses the consequences of these perceptions for public opinion and political behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTelevised public service announcements were one of the ways that the U.S. federal government distributed health information about the COVID-19 pandemic to Americans in 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objective of this research was to examine the health messages conveyed in public service announcements (PSAs) affiliated with the U.S. federal government response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJAMA Health Forum
February 2022
This article discusses the public's spending of the stimulus checks issued by the US government during 2020 and 2021.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Many individuals eligible for coverage in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace remain unenrolled because of information barriers. Whether the private sector or the public sector should conduct outreach to address these barriers is a topic of active debate.
Objective: To determine whether cuts to the funding of the ACA navigator program were associated with changes in the volume of private sector advertising.