GHP 范嘉栩

Title: Multi-Disciplinary Research Into Health Communication

Dr. Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou is a Program Director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch (HCIRB) of the Behavioral Research Program (BRP) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Control and Population Science in the United States National Institute of Health (NIH). Dr. Chou’s research interests focus on social media, health misinformation, health literacy, and end-of-life cancer care. Trained as a sociolinguist, she has expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods analyses of health care and online interactions. Currently, she is working on funding initiatives targeting social media and substance use and addiction.

Today’s talk aimed to provide a broad overview of health communication. Dr. Chou defines health communications as the art and technique of information, influencing, and motivating individuals, institutional, and public audiences about important health issues with the goal of allowing timely access to high-quality, accurate, and understandable health information to all people, regardless of their socioeconomic status, age, and geographical location. Dr. Chou provided a sample of diverse approaches to empirical health communication research by sharing the diverse topics and methodologies of six of her prior projects. Her research includes but is not limited to cross-sectional surveys examining social media access and use, content analysis of cancer survivorship and YouTube, key informant interviews examining the perspectives of cancer clinical trial team members, eye-tracking methodology targeting navigation and processing of social media information, web-based experiments focused on covid myths narrative study, and scoping review on mitigating misinformation. Through today’s talk, Dr. Chou provided an overview of the health communication field's breadth and depth and emphasized the importance of conducting multidisciplinary research to foster relationship-centered communication and reduce distrust and health misinformation in health communication.