Public Health Communication
A. SUSANA RAMÍREZ, PhD, MPH
  • Home
  • ABOUT

Information deserts

11/3/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
This week I am at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting in Chicago. I'm presenting work funded by the Hellman Foundation that sought to map the health information environment in Merced County.

Decades of communication science have established that media are an important source for health information, and can contribute to behavior change. This is especially true for ethnic minority populations who rely on and trust information from the media. However, health information is unequally distributed - that is, different groups of people have different access to and ability to make sense of information - and this inequality may be compounded in rural regions with geographically-dispersed populations that face multiple barriers to health, including high rates of poverty and unemployment, low educational attainment, and lack of access to healthy foods, opportunities to engage in physical activity, and medical care. These are precisely the kinds of places that can benefit from information from the mass media, which can diffuse health information across wide spaces, and where the majority Latino population are heavy users of media and place trust in media as a source of information. 

Our research demonstrated that there is a dearth of health information available in the region as a whole, and that there are communities that suffer especially hard -- areas that we can characterize as "information deserts"*. Like food deserts, information deserts are communities that lack access to health information in general, especially information that can be useful to improve health. 

We are working to publish this work and moving toward interventions to remedy the situation. 

* Thanks to Amy Leader for helping me to coin this term!
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    A. SUSANA RAMÍREZ
    ​Associate Profesor
    ​Public Health Communication

    sramirez37 at ucmerced dot edu

    ABOUT

    Archives

    December 2020
    July 2020
    October 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014

    Categories

    All
    Academia
    CBPR
    Conferences
    Fatalism
    Food Insecurity
    Health Disparities
    Hiring
    Information Overload
    In The Media
    Latino Health
    MHealth
    Obesity
    Personal
    Publications
    SJV
    Teaching

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.