Abstract: Throughout the past 30+ years, health communication has developed as an essential field of study that focuses on human roles and mediated communication in disease prevention and service delivery (Kreps, Bonaguro, & Query, 1998). In the past, strategic planning for public health communication focused on determining the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of individuals deemed at risk for infection. Variables contributing to the behavior were identified, a theory was then developed to explain how these variables linked together, and finally, an intervention was then designed to influence these variables with the goal of producing a desired effect (Witte, 1998). These earlier approaches to behavior change communication centered on the provision of correct information, without addressing other variables in the behavior change pathway, such as structural and social barriers (Becker-Benton, Bertrand, & McKee, 2004). In Health Communication in Southern Africa, edited by Luuk Lagerwerf, Henk Boer, and Herman Wasserman, it is evident that health communication has moved beyond its nascent stages of simply communicating correct health information. This book, segmented into case studies, provides an illustrative portrait of the diverse ways health communication has recently been used in southern Africa, mostly in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-11-04
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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