Final Blog

Health communications has been an interesting and informative class. Prior to this class, I had no idea how much work went into a campaign. I have found myself noticing that "communication is everywhere" and I now pay more attention to various forms of communication. Through working on the pan flu project, our team realized how beneficial focus groups can be for creating and disseminating messages. Although it was time consuming to continually change our message, strategy, and channels, we ended up with (hopefully) a more effective campaign. From this class, I intend to look into health communication careers... thanks!

Formative Evaluation

I also appreciated the information on careers in health communication. I have really enjoyed this class this semester and would be really interested in going into a health communication profession. The lecture on formative evaluation was also helpful as it showed how the research aspect in health campaigns is a cyclical process. In creating our messages for the pan flu project, we learned the great importance of formative research, as it is not only necessary in the beginning stages of message development, but also during and after. We ended up changing our messages and strategies several times throughout the semester based on the helpful information we received from our target audience. Had we not done any research and created messages and channels based on our assumptions of the target audience, we would have been way off track!