Trust and Public Health Emergency Events: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review.

The systematic review examined the phenomenon of trust during public health emergency events. The literature reviewed was field studies done with people directly affected or likely to be affected by such events and included quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method, and case study primary studies in English (N = 38) as well as Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (all non-English N = 30). Studies were mostly from high- and middle-income countries, and the event most covered was infectious disease. Findings from individual studies were first synthesized within methods and evaluated for certainty/confidence, and then synthesized across methods. The final set of 11 findings synthesized across methods identified a set of activities for enhancing trust and showed that it is a multi-faceted and dynamic concept.

Health-Related Disaster Communication and Social Media: Mixed-Method Systematic Review.

This mixed-method evidence synthesis drew on Cochrane methods and principles to systematically review literature published between 2003 and 2016 on the best social media practices to promote health protection and dispel misinformation during disasters. Seventy-nine studies employing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods on risk communication during disasters in all UN-languages were reviewed, finding that agencies need to contextualize the use of social media for particular populations and crises. Social media are tools that still have not become routine practices in many governmental agencies regarding public health in the countries studied. Social media, especially Twitter and Facebook (and equivalents in countries such as China), need to be incorporated into daily operations of governmental agencies and implementing partners to build familiarity with them before health-related crises happen. This was especially observed in U.S. agencies, local government, and first responders but also for city governments and school administrations in Europe. For those that do use social media during health-related risk communication, studies find that public relations officers, governmental agencies, and the general public have used social media successfully to spread truthful information and to verify information to dispel rumors during disasters. Few studies focused on the recovery and preparation phases and on countries in the Southern hemisphere, except for Australia. The vast majority of studies did not analyze the demographics of social media users beyond their geographic location, their status of being inside/outside the disaster zone; and their frequency and content of posting. Socioeconomic demographics were not collected and/or analyzed to drill deeper into the implications of using social media to reach vulnerable populations. Who exactly is reached via social media campaigns and who needs to be reached with other means has remained an understudied area.

Testing the effect of framing and sourcing in health news stories.

This study examines whether changing the way news stories report on health can induce shifts in readers' perceptions of problems of obesity, diabetes, immigrant health, and smoking. The authors manipulated two variables in a controlled experiment: the quality of sourcing-the number of sources and their expertise-and the framing-changing from an episodic, traditional frame to a thematic frame that incorporated information on context, risk factors, prevention strategies, and social attributions of responsibility. The authors found that a thematic frame made readers more supportive of public policy changes and encouraged them to improve their own health behaviors. However, it did not alter their attributions of responsibility for health problems from one of blaming individuals to seeing the larger social factors. Adding richer sourcing to the thematic frame did not increase these effects, nor did readers find the thematic stories to be more interesting, relevant, believable, important, and informative. In addition, there were differential results because of story topics that represent uncontrolled effects. The implications for improving health reporting to encourage positive change in society are discussed.

Shared vulnerability : The media and American perceptions of the Bhopal disaster

The research outlined in this book is based on two convictions. First, technological hazards are created by human beings and hence can be mitigated by human beings; and second, the mass media have a central role to play in societal discussion of ways to blunt the potencial harmful impact of otherwise useful technologies. This research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, may be divided into two parts: a content analysis of media coverage of the first two months of the Bhopal disaster, and the report of public opinion polls designed to discover what Americans remembered of the event and of media reports

Media coverage of the Bhopal disaster : A cultural myth in the making

This content analysis of media coverage of the Bhopal disaster examines the way in which twelve media outlets reported the tragedy. Generally, the media - both television and print outlets - covered Bhopal as a discrete event, giving relatively little time and space to the underlying policy issues centering on technological hazards. Individuals tended to be portrayed as victims, and the powerful actors in the reports were institutions or those who represented them. The majority of coverage ranged from mild to severe in thematic depictions of helplessness. In addition, television's visual portrayal of the event included a large number of images focusing on gas. The overall thematic thrust of the coverage is the creation of a new myth of societal extinction through industrial accident resulting from carefully designed political and economics policies. Individuals, even in democracies, are portrayed as having relatively little control in establishing the policy agenda