Effects of message delivery on cross-cultural biosecurity compliance: Insights from experimental simulations.

Background: Effective biosecurity communication of transmission risks and associated protective behaviors can reduce the impacts of infectious diseases in US animal agriculture. Yet, more than 1/5 of animal production workers speak a language other than English at home, and more than 40 percent are less than fluent in English. Communicating with these workers often involves translating into their primary languages.

Message Delivery Strategy Influences Willingness to Comply With Biosecurity.

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues worldwide, it has become increasingly clear that effective communication of disease transmission risks associated with protective behaviors is essential, and that communication tactics are not ubiquitously and homogenously understood. Analogous to Covid-19, communicable diseases in the hog industry result in millions of animal deaths and in the United States costs hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Protective behaviors such as preventative biosecurity practices are implemented to reduce these costs.

Engaging stakeholders through social media and emergent organizations: The West Virginia Water Crisis Recovery as a case study.

The West Virginia water contamination crisis began on the morning of January 9, 2014, and left approximately 300,000 customers of the West Virginia American Water Company unable to use the water in their homes for any purpose other than flushing their toilets. Given the lack of appropriate response from the established organizations involved, many emergent organizations formed to help fill unmet informational and physical needs of the affected population. Crisis researchers have observed these ephemeral organizations for decades, but the recent proliferation of information communication technologies have made their activities more widespread and observable.

The IDEA model for effective instructional risk and crisis communication by emergency managers and other key spokespersons.

Emergency managers are very often the key spokespersons charged with instructing people to take appropriate self-protective actions during natural disasters and other extreme events. Doing so successfully poses unique challenges including, for instance, convincing people to pay attention, translating complex information intelligibly to non-scientific publics, and motivating people to actually take appropriate actions for self-protection. These challenges are complicated further by the uncertainty surrounding many crisis events and the short response time demanded of emergency managers to offer such information and instructions.

The Role of the Message Convergence Framework in Medical Decision Making.

This study investigated numerous complexities in medical decision making among obstetricians treating high-risk or complex pregnancies. Obstetricians in a southeastern state (N = 28) were interviewed using a guide based on the framework of message convergence. The study assessed how the physicians manage uncertainty surrounding patient care and engage in medical decision making in the midst of either unclear evidence or competing messages.

Terse messaging and public health in the midst of natural disasters: the case of the Boulder floods.

Social media are quickly becoming the channel of choice for disseminating emergency warning messages. However, relatively little data-driven research exists to inform effective message design when using these media. The present study addresses that void by examining terse health-related warning messages sent by public safety agencies over Twitter during the 2013 Boulder, CO, floods.

Expanding the concept of significant choice through consideration of health literacy during crises.

Nilsen defined the concept of the ethic of significant as "choice making that is voluntary, free from physical or mental coercion . . .

Instructional messages during health-related crises: essential content for self-protection.

Mediated instructional messages have the potential to enhance individuals' knowledge and self-efficacy to take self-protective actions during a food-related health crisis. This two-phased study used content analysis to examine the presence of instructions during an actual egg recall crisis (n = 566 television broadcasts). Next, these messages were used in a pretest-posttest experiment to explore changes in participants' (n = 651) foodborne illness knowledge and self-efficacy after watching a standard media message or a high instruction media message.

The value of instructional communication in crisis situations: restoring order to chaos.

This article explores the nature of instructional communication in responding to crisis situations. Through the lens of chaos theory, the relevance of instructional messages in restoring order is established. This perspective is further advanced through an explanation of how various learning styles impact the receptivity of various instructional messages during the acute phase of crises.

CERC as a theoretical framework for research and practice.

Health communicators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have developed an integrated model titled Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) as a tool to educate and equip public health professionals for the expanding communication responsibilities of public health in emergency situations. This essay focuses on CERC as a general theoretical framework for explaining how health communication functions within the contexts of risk and crisis. Specifically, the authors provide an overview of CERC and examine the relationship of risk communication to crisis communication, the role of communication in emergency response, and the theoretical underpinnings of CERC.