The latest Newhouse Impact research roundup also covers more about healthcare communications campaigns and loneliness.
A new study in the journal “Journalism,” investigates differences in news beat coverage between female and male journalists and their potential effects on audiences. The study’s authors are Newhouse School postdoctoral scholar Martina Santia; professor of communications and John Ben Snow Endowed Research Chair Lars Willnat; and doctoral candidate Stan Jastrzebski.
This year’s Newhouse Impact summit will be held Aug. 1-2 at the Newhouse School. Titled “Advances and Opportunities in Immersive Storytelling Technologies,” the event will feature speakers from around the world presenting their innovative and provocative creative and scholarly work on the past, present and future of storytelling through extended reality technologies.
A recent episode of the Newhouse Impact podcast covered research on loneliness and how health care professionals and those who create public information campaigns about wellness seek to learn more about stress impacts different groups.
Amy Barone, a student in the master’s of public relations program spoke with host Chris Bolt about her research on how loneliness impacts specific demographic groups and what can be done to address it. Barone, who also teaches in the writing studies, rhetoric and composition department in the College of Arts and Sciences, worked with Hua Jiang, associate dean of academic affairs at the Newhouse School and a professor of public relations.
Excerpts from the interview are below. Listen to the full show by visiting the WAER episode page.
What led you to research loneliness and the effects of the pandemic and politics upon it?
Barone
That’s a great question. I had spent the past four-five years in the classroom, creating writing courses focused on mental health. And students were writing about these topics. We were having conversations about and exploring scientific, peer-reviewed research on them. The students were just really eager to talk about what was transpiring in their personal lives and how that spilled over into their experiences in college.
I also have a little bit of a background in mental health. Through that, I have learned that people are not necessarily aware of their loneliness, but feel lonely, nonetheless. So, I wanted to use this research opportunity to further explore the implications of that and determine how it connects to the field of healthcare communications.
We know that people are feeling more isolated due to the pandemic and the current divisiveness of the political climate. But what exactly were you looking for in terms of a more scientific or research-supported view of that?
Barone
We started by doing a tremendous amount of secondary research. From those statistics, we learned that one in five adults live with mental illness, and that people are experiencing loneliness in epidemic proportions. In fact, it was the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, who [brought] to the public the idea that loneliness is currently an epidemic of sorts. This concept also came up in clinical studies in the [United Kingdom] to the degree that their government specifically appointed a minister to deal with it.
This is a serious mental health issue, and a physical one as well. But is it also something that might be ameliorated through effective healthcare communication?
Hua, you were sort of the guide for the students going into this research course. What did you think they could learn about loneliness that was scientifically-supported as opposed to anecdotal?
Jiang
In this course, we really encourage students to do both secondary and primary research, and to connect what was done in the past with what is happening now. We first got a lot of data from past studies, and then used that as the foundation of our primary research. This primary research consisted of surveys, social listening with focus groups and interviews. We wanted to get information directly from people. We also checked to see whether our findings coincided with those of the secondary research.
Our ultimate goal was to generate information for medical practitioners, pharmaceutical companies, and others from the health field. To provide them with insights that would be useful in developing communication campaigns to target specific stakeholder groups in the real world.
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