Mass Media and Health: Examining Media Impact on Individuals and the Health Environment covers media health influences from a variety of angles, including the impact on individual and public health, the intentionality of these effects, and the nature of the outcomes. Author Kim Walsh-Childers helps readers understand the influence that mass media has on an individual's health beliefs and, in turn, their behaviors. She explains how public health policy can be affected, altering the environment in which a community's members make choices, and discusses the unintentional health effects of mass media, examining them through the strategic lens of news framing and advocacy campaigns.
Written for students across a variety of disciplines, Mass Media and Health will serve as primary reading for courses examining the broader view of mass media and health impacts, as well as providing supplemental reading for courses on health communication, public health campaigns, health journalism, and media effects.
About the Author: Dr. Kim Walsh-Childers is a former newspaper health reporter who teaches courses in mass media and health, along with courses in journalism and media ethics, at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Her research focuses on news coverage of health issues, the effects of health news coverage on individual health and health policy, cancer communication, and individuals' use of online health information. Her work has been published in Health Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Newspaper Research Journal, Science Communication, Communication Research, Pediatrics, AIDS Education and Prevention, and the Journal of Adolescent Health Care, among others. Her research has been supported by grants from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, and the Department of Defense. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland during the 2004-2005 academic year, studying the impact of news coverage on Irish health policy.
