Extending Communication Campaign from Health to Peacebuilding: A Locally Driven Communication Campaign Approach as Part of A Peacebuilding Initiative in Liberia.

A vast amount of literature exists on communication campaign design, implementation, and evaluation, especially in health contexts. Despite recent calls to center the role of local citizens in designing and implementing campaign initiatives, limited literature exists on how to integrate local expertise with the expertise of those external to the local context. Drawing on health communication campaigns literature, peacebuilding literature, and our experiences collaborating on a multi-year communication campaign for peacebuilding and health promotion in Liberia, West Africa, we advance a locally driven communication campaign approach that integrates expertise of local citizens, campaign researchers, and campaign practitioners. We make a critical linkage between health communication and peacebuilding to discuss implications about how a locally driven communication campaign approach can contribute to communication campaigns in general, as well as health and peacebuilding specifically.

A Culture-Centered Community-Grounded Approach to Disseminating Health Information among African Americans.

This study highlights the role of local communities in creating culturally rooted health information resources based on comparative effectiveness research (CER), depicting the role of culture in creating entry points for building community-grounded communication structures for evidence-based health knowledge. We report the results from running a year-long culture-centered campaign that was carried out among African American communities in two counties, Lake and Marion County, in Indiana addressing basic evidence-based knowledge on four areas of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Campaign effectiveness was tested through an experimental design with post-test knowledge of CER among African Americans in these counties compared to CER knowledge among African Americans in a comparable control county (Allen). Our campaign, based on the principles of the culture-centered approach (CCA), increased community CER knowledge in the experimental communities relative to a community that did not receive the culturally centered health information campaign. The CCA-based campaign developed by community members and distributed through the mass media, community wide channels such as health fairs and church meetings, postcards, and face-to-face interventions explaining the postcards improved CER knowledge in specific areas (ACE-I/ARBs, atrial fibrillation, and renal artery stenosis) in the CCA communities as compared to the control community.

Narratives of Stress in Health Meanings of African Americans in Lake County, Indiana.

Across the life course, African Americans bear an unequal burden of disease compared to other racial groups. In spite of the widespread acknowledgment of racial health disparities, the voices of African Americans, their articulations of health and their local etiologies of health disparities are limited. In this article, we highlight the important role of communication scholarship to understand the everyday enactment of health disparities. Drawing upon the culture-centered approach (CCA) to co-construct narratives of health with African Americans residents of Lake County, Indiana, we explore the presence of stress in the everyday narratives of health. These narratives voice the social and structural sources of stress, and articulate resistive coping strategies embedded in relationship to structures.

Social context surrounding HIV diagnosis and construction of masculinity: a qualitative study of stigma experiences of heterosexual HIV positive men in southwest Nigeria.

BACKGROUND: Though research has documented experiences of stigma and its effects on the lives of women living with HIV/AIDS, there is limited research on heterosexual positive HIV men experience of stigma in Nigeria. This study explored how social context surrounding HIV diagnosis impacts stigma experiences of heterosexual HIV positive men and their construction of masculinity in southwest Nigeria. METHODS: Using purposive sampling, 17 heterosexual HIV positive men were recruited through community based organization to participate in two hours focus group discussions or 45 min in-depth interviews that were audio-recorded. Without using the word stigma, discussions and interviews were guided by four questions that explored participants' experiences of living with HIV/AIDS. Interviews and discussions were conducted in three languages: English, Yoruba and Pidgin English. Thematic data analysis approach was in coding transcribed data, while social constructivist thinking guided data analysis. RESULTS: Participants ranged in age from 30 to 57 years old, and all were receiving antiretroviral therapy. Findings indicated that participants' experiences of stigma might be moderated by the social context surrounding their HIV diagnosis, and whether they have met the socio-cultural construction of masculinity. Participants whose diagnosis were preceded by immediate family members' diagnosis were less likely to report experiencing HIV stigma and more likely to report "not feeling less than a man" and educating others about HIV/AIDS. Contrarily, participants whose diagnosis was preceded by their own sickness were more likely to report isolation, sigma and feeling of being less than a man. All participants reported limiting their sexual intimacy, and those with children reported adjusting how they performed their role as fathers. CONCLUSIONS: Social context surrounding HIV diagnosis impact how heterosexual HIV positive men experience HIV related stigma and how they perceive themselves as men, which may influence their care seeking behaviors. These findings have implications for HIV programs geared towards African heterosexual men in general and HIV positive men in particular.

Narratives of Food Insecurity in Tippecanoe County, Indiana: Economic Constraints in Local Meanings of Hunger.

Food insecurity and its most extreme form, hunger, have increased exponentially in the United States since 2006. This essay seeks to contribute to our understanding of hunger by attending to the context of the financial crisis as an organizing frame for understanding local meanings of hunger. Within a broader framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) that works to identify and develop locally rooted solutions to food insecurity, we describe through locally grounded stories of food insecurity the financial climate where large percentages of U.S. households have been cast into poverty because of the crash of an unregulated economy. These local understandings of hunger in the context of the economy offer entry points for organizing a food-insecure coalition that seeks to address the stigma around food insecurity.