Answering the Call for Scholarship: The Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research

Crisis events have the potential to create broad impacts across a variety of contexts and require multi-disciplinary approaches to understand the causes and consequences. Communication is instrumental to both the understanding and the management of risks and crises and needs to be systematically examined within these contexts. The Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research is designed to be an outlet for multi-disciplinary inquiry of communication phenomena within a wide range of crises and risks using multiple methods and perspectives

Best Practices in Crisis Communication: An Expert Panel Process

The description of ''best practices'' is widely used to improve organizational and professional practice. This analysis describes best practices in crisis communication as a form of grounded theoretical approach for improving the effectiveness of crisis communication specifically within the context of large publicly-managed crises. The results of a panel of crisis communication experts are reviewed. Ten best practices for effective crisis communication, which were synthesized from this process, are presented and described. The purpose of this analysis is to describe best practices in crisis communication. My goal is to characterize the best practices approach as a form of grounded theory for process improvement and to specifically describe the role of best practices in crisis communication. The results of a best practices panel of crisis communication experts are also presented. These are then synthesized into a set of ten general best practices for effective crisis communication

Peer-to-Peer Model to Educate and Spread Awareness of Vaccines in Detroit

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, national vaccination rates show a dangerous decline with Detroit being amongst the lowest with only 41.3% of adolescents completing the vaccine series. The Vaccine Ambassador program was created to mitigate the decline in vaccination rates through the education and empowerment of youth via train-the-trainer model of education. The program was implemented over the course of two years with a total of 28 high school students who received education on the history and mechanism of vaccines, herd immunity, and how to effectively communicate. The program was created in collaboration with physicians in Infectious Diseases and a professor of communication at Wayne State University. Ambassadors aimed to spread this knowledge to youth in Detroit communities through outreach events. The impact of the program was measured through a two-pronged approach—through a pre- and post-survey given to the Vaccine Ambassadors and through a pre- and post-test given to the youth at the events. The survey for the Ambassadors included thirty-one items that measured their knowledge about vaccines and immunity. The test for the youth at the outreach events included seven items that tested knowledge about vaccines. Based on both pre-test responses, it is apparent that Detroit’s youth lack knowledge regarding vaccines. The Vaccine Ambassador program increased the ambassador’s depth of knowledge and reaffirmed their positive attitudes about vaccines. Youth can apply their knowledge and teach others, and by doing so, can make informed decisions when older and enact behavioral changes that promote healthier living

Crisis Communication Research In The United States

Crisis communication research in the United States (US) is multidisciplinary and expansive. This chapter summarizes US crisis communication research through the identification of six primary research streams: public relations, sociology of disaster, crisis occurrence, crisis development, crisis management, and mediating crises. Within these research streams, we explore concepts such as image repair, warnings, failures in foresight, stages through which crises evolve, mindfulness, and news framing. Each model, theory, or concept helps to explain the complexity and simultaneous order of a crisis event. Although US crises vary widely, the streams of research provide a sense pattern to the communication that occurs before, during, and after their onset

The Complexities Of Place In Crisis Renewal Discourse: A Case Study Of The Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting

The discourse of renewal is an established strategy for crisis recovery. The current analysis examines the role that place plays in postcrisis communication, in general, and the discourse of renewal, specifically. We describe the extent to which place-bound crises affect the ability of an organization to enact a discourse of renewal. We propose a modification of renewal discourse to include place as a condition that may make the successful enactment of renewal rhetoric more likely. Specifically, we argue that the place of the crisis can be a decisive element in whether or how renewal is enacted. We analyse the case of the Sandy Hook School shooting to explicate the opportunities and challenges of dealing with a place-bound crisis