Subalternity and sex work: Re(scripting) contours of health communication in the realm of HIV /AIDS

This study seeks to understand and document how sex workers in a community in Kalighat, India communicate about health and HIV/AIDS. Sex worker voices have been largely erased from mainstream HIV/AIDS discourse, which has sought to instruct them and persuade them about increased condom use and regular HIV screenings. This study aims to question the absence of sex worker voices in the dominant HIV/AIDS discourse by locating how sex workers inscribe cultural understandings at the core of their HIV/AIDS-related practices. The culture-centered approach to health communication provides the theoretical lens and the methodological framework for this study because it calls for a recalibration of mainstream health discourse in terms of culture, structure, and the enactment of participant agency. I conducted an eight-week field study in the Kalighat sex worker community, over which I engaged in 46 face-to-face interviews and wrote reflexive journal entries and field notes. I learnt that communication on HIV/AIDS in the Kalighat sex worker community is navigated around an autonomous consciousness. This autonomous rationality is locally constituted and is enacted through an engagement with local cultural meanings, availability of healthful structures, and through contested communication modalities of resistance, assimilation, and restructuring of the dominant discourse. Key to this fractured HIV/AIDS discourse is New Light (a NGO) and a community participatory effort it initiates and partakes in. It is through an understanding of this local participatory discourse that my study contributes, in several meaningful ways, to research and praxis on HIV/AIDS communication in sex worker spaces

The Message Development Tool: A Case for Effective Operationalization of Messaging in Social Marketing Practice

That messages are essential, if not the most critical component of any communicative process, seems like an obvious claim. More so when the communication is about health—one of the most vital and elemental of human experiences (Babrow & Mattson, 2003 Babrow , A. S. , & Mattson , M. ( 2003 ). Theorizing about health communication . In T. L. Thompson , A. M. Dorsey , K. I. Miller & R. Parrot (Eds.), Handbook of health communication (pp. 35 – 62 ). Mahwah , NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates . [Google Scholar]). Any communication campaign that aims to change a target audience\u27s health behaviors needs to centralize messages. Even though messaging strategies are an essential component of social marketing and are a widely used campaign model, health campaigns based on this framework have not always been able to effectively operationalize this key component, leading to cases where initiating and sustaining prescribed health behavior has been difficult (MacStravic, 2000 MacStravic , S. (2000). The missing links in social marketing. Journal of Health Communication , 5, 255–263.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). Based on an examination of the VERB campaign and an Australian breastfeeding promotion campaign, we propose a message development tool within the ambit of the social marketing framework that aims to extend the framework and ensure that the messaging component of the model is contextualized at the core of planning, implementation, and evaluation efforts

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Economics Working Paper Series Is Literacy Shared Within Households? Theory and Evidence from Bangladesh Is literacy shared within households? Theory and evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract: A member of a collective-action household may or may not share the benefits of literacy with others in that household; the shared gains from doing so may well be offset by a shift in the balance of power within the family. Using household survey data for Bangladesh we find strong external effects of education on individual earnings. Holding a range of personal attributes constant, an illiterate adult earns significantly more in the non-farm economy when living in a family with at least one literate member. These effects are strongest, and most robust, for women. Omitted-variable bias cannot be ruled out, but would also be consistent with an intra-household externality of literacy

Branding as a Health Campaign Marketing Strategy

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of branding in public health campaigns. Design/methodology/approach: The paper reviews public health campaigns, and their goals and objectives vis‐à‐vis the current health market conditions. The imperatives for branding public health campaigns are enumerated. The paper then discusses salient features of branding that can be applied to health campaigns before drawing on an exemplar to illustrate how branding can be effectively harnessed in the realm of public health campaign theorizing and praxis. Findings: Given the clutter of campaigns and their messages in a saturated health consumer market, uptake and sustained use of health campaigns needs alternative pathways to keep consumers interested and gainfully engaged with the products being offered. Branding, as a communicative strategy, can meet this need. Originality/value: As the fundamental goal of a public health campaign is to induce and sustain health behavior among the public, efforts must be kept up to theorize about improved modes of delivering campaign products to consumers. This paper takes the initial steps in that direction

Center for Disease Control’s Diethylstilbestrol Update: A Case for Effective Operationalization of Messaging in Social Marketing Practice

The Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Update, a campaign to educate people who may have been exposed to the drug DES, is framed on the premises of the social marketing model, namely formative research, audience segmentation, product, price, placement, promotion, and campaign evaluation. More than that, the campaign takes a critical step in extending the social marketing paradigm by highlighting the need to situate the messaging process at the heart of any health communication campaign. This article uses CDC’s DES Update as a case study to illustrate an application of a message development tool within social marketing. This tool promotes the operationalization of messaging within health campaigns. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to extend the social marketing model and provide useful theoretical guidance to health campaign practitioners on how to accomplish stellar communication within a social marketing campaign