Thursday, October 05, 2006

Where to start

I've got a general question about where I can find some good literature on fear appeals and risk communication. I'm interested in reading up on fear appeals, risk perception, crisis communication...those types of topics. I'm new to the health comm field and I'm interested in taking some of those health comm ideas and applying them to the political comm field. Are there any good starting points for me...books or journal articles that are worth note? I can't be at the HCRG meeting on Monday, so I thought I'd ask on the blog, maybe it can help other students too. Thanks in advance!

3 comments:

Michael S said...

for fear appeals, I'd suggest starting with Kim Witte's work on the EPPM.
risk perceptions, depends on your focus. Salovey & Rothman on loss and gain frames are good.
Crisis communication...see the article by Vicki Freimuth in most recent issue of Health Communication on the fed response to the anthrax incident in 2001.

Lindsay Hoffman said...

You also might look at one of Mike Slater's own articles, which describes risk perceptions and their relationship with media use:

Slater, M. D., & Rasinski, K. A. (2005). Media Exposure and Attention as Mediating Variables Influencing Social Risk Judgments. Journal of Communication, 55(4), 810-827.

Nori Comello said...

Hi Kristen:

This is kind of a delayed response to your question, but for fear appeals, a specific article by Kim Witte you might look at is the recent meta-analysis she conducted of fear appeals:

A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns

Kim Witte & Mike Allen

Health Education & Behavior, Vol. 27, No. 5, 591-615 (2000)

Here's the link (copy and paste if it's not clickable)
http://heb.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/cgi/content/abstract/27/5/591

For risk perceptions, a lot of foundational work in this area is by Paul Slovic and Baruch Fischhoff. They published a lot of their work on dimensions of risk perceptions in the 80s, but you could do a Google Scholar search to see how those have been examined since then.

Hope this helps!

Nori