Using the consumer-oriented approach of social and commercial marketers, this article presents a process for crafting messages designed to improve people's health behaviors. The process, termed consumer-based health communications (CHC), transforms scientific recommendations into message strategies that are relevant to the consumer. The core of CHC is consumer research conducted to understand t...

Reducing fear of cancer is significant in developing cancer screening interventions, but the levels of fear may vary depending on the degrees of media exposure as well as individuals' socioeconomic positions (SEP). However, few studies have examined how the SEP influences the fear of cancer under the moderating process of general and specific forms of media exposure. We investigated the moderat...

While studies of communication effects on consumer behavior of the young have focused mainly on the effects of mass media, little research has examined the effects of interpersonal communication. One finds relatively little theoretical and empirical work regarding the role of interpersonal communication in the development of materialistic values of young people. This article deals with one impo...

Development scholars are moving toward an emphasis on noneconomic factors (social values, social advancement, equality, individual freedom) and their interactions with labor, capital, and technology. People are now conceptualized as the agents of change, and they in turn must be convinced of the need for change. This new approach implies a need for a review of the role of mass communication i...

The study of mass communications is a broad, multidisciplinary field to which sociology has made major contributions. Some of these contributions have been reviewed in earlier works by Riley & Riley (1959), Larsen (1964), Janowitz (1968), McQuail (1969), Davison & Yu (1974), & Ball-Rokeach (1975), and Wright (1975a). Several chapters in Annual Review of Psychology, although not explicitly socio...

How did the discipline and practice of development communication begin? Who were the founders and how were the first experiments implemented? The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of development communication. To do so, the first section focuses on the theoretical perspective and evolution of development communication. This study then specifies the components of development commun...

The decade following World War II saw the rapid rise of research on the effects of mass communication. Most of this research focused on the persuasive influence of mediated messages – first in print form, and later through radio and television broadcasts. Many, in fact, feared the assumed power of the media to shape and control the ideas, attitudes, and behaviors of societal members (Berelson, ...