communication&health

Area D: Health and Media

D1. Quality of Health Related Messages in Mass Media.
This project analyses the coverage oh health related topics in newspapers, magazines, television.
Guiding theoretical perspectives are news values, media framing and media performance theories.
Research questions are the amount of coverage; the diversity of topics and issues covered, underlying media frames (benefits, risks, costs etc.); quality aspects like diversity, sources etc.
The aim of the project is to improve the user oriented quality of health journalism.
Funded by the University of Zürich.
Dissertation project started in Winter 2006.

D2. Smoking ban in the light of public opinion research.
The research is based on panel study on 1000 members of the Ticino population, 150 hotel and restaurants employees, 500 turists and monitors changes in public opinion with respect to the introduction of the non-smoking law in public buildings in Ticino.
Funded by the Swiss Federal Office for Public Health (BAG), Lugano.
Carmen Faustinelli, PhD candidate.

D3. Direct-to-Consumer-Advertising.
Direct-to-consumer-advertising of pharmaceutical products is legal in the United States and New Zeland, but not in other countries of the Western world beacause of the risk both of consumers' misinformation and inappropriate demand for prescription of these drugs.
By joining together perspectives from argumentation theory, pragmatics and marketing research we are investigating empirically the way readers process the ads, and searching explicit and implicit elements providing grounding for their inference.
The ultimate aim of the analysis is to understand whether these ads contain potentially misleading information and, if so, the impact it has on the persuasiveness of the ads themselves.
Funded requested through Health Institution, ICH, Lugano.
1 PhD position opened in Fall 2007.

D4. SCIRA. Structure and effects of social communication about non-ionising radiations (NIR).
The study focuses on the problem of communicating uncertain risk and the kind of message which could determine behaviour responses.
The research will study the problematic sides of communicative processes relative to NIR risks. This study will supply guidelines to design messages that do not lead to unwarrented fear of NIR; it will examine the interaction between the credibility of the source and the strategy of the message; it will explore the role and impact of micro-cultural change in Switzerland on the conception of information about health promotion.
Funded by FNSRS, national research programs
Start on 1st March 2006, for 36 months

Area A: Doctor - Patient communication
Area B: Communication between health professionals
Area C: Health Promotion Campaigns