April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Promoting Vaccine Equity in BIPOC Communities: Comprehensive Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-Being
Generally taken to mean broad in scope or inclusive, the concept ‘comprehensive’ begs scholars to capture more: more of the communication process, more of relationships, more than just the messages or billboards we produce. Thinking systemically brings greater depth to our work and urges us to realize that the communication strategies we employ to promote comprehensive well-being must be accounted for in our comprehensive efforts to enact change. Treating every interaction as an intervention, we move beyond the messages and campaigns we create to include the processes of creation as part of the “intervention” itself. Because communication is bioactive, meaning it influences our biology, to claim to be comprehensive in our scholarship we must attend to how we communicate, not just what we communicate. Thus, the current project, whilst producing useful campaign materials to promote vaccine uptake in BIPOC communities, is as much about the process of engagement with the community as the product itself. Rather than a top-down, rolled-out intervention introduced into the community, we worked with them as stakeholders to ensure we were making something they accepted to be useful. Funded by a grant by the National Minority Quality Forum (NMQF), we produced: two edited videos in the English language–one promoting flu shots and one promoting the COVID-19 vaccine; one edited video in the Spanish language promoting the flu shot; over one dozen hours of interview footage (data), ripe for re-editing into myriad campaign materials ranging from Instagram shorts to posters; and many useful relationships upon which to build our future work. The videos have been shared by several institutions including the Indiana Red Cross, NMQF, The Kheprw Institute, and Eskenazi Health. Ongoing work will include focus groups with members of the community to figure out what works (or doesn’t) about the videos for future campaigns and to gain deeper understanding of and appreciation for community members’ concerns regarding vaccines, systemic racism, and the healthcare system at large. As this work is applied in nature, ongoing, and grant-funded, we both had product to deliver and scholarly considerations to make. This presentation naturally focuses on the latter, asking: what can we learn from attending to the communication process as a constitutive part of the comprehensive well-being of the communities we both inhabit and serve? As developed from the lens of Communication Complex, the meta-theoretical framework of Parrish-Sprowl and Parrish-Sprowl, this approach is discussed to encourage different ways to think about the impact of our communication strategies in the sphere of public health.