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Health Campaign Development and Evaluation

People

Camerini A. L.

Course director

Description

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, students will have learned about the:

  • elements of a state-of-the-art health campaign;
  • frameworks and theories for campaign development;
  • methods and tools for campaign evaluation.

Course Description

The COVID-19 pandemic once again showed us how important it is to design and disseminate effective health campaigns to promote, for example, compliance with prevention measures and vaccination uptake. High-standard health campaigns should be theory-driven and use a participatory design approach. Their effectiveness should be evaluated using rigorous and systematic research methodologies. This course teaches students about the different elements of an effective health communication campaign that meets the current standards by building on and extending their knowledge of health communication and behavior theories and research methods and by introducing campaign-specific frameworks and advancements, including the ACME and RE-AIM framework, to name just a few. As such, it equips students with the fundamental knowledge for future activities in public health organizations.

Learning Methods
The course consists of in-class sessions, but it will be adapted according to the pandemic situation. In-class activities include front lectures with discussion of distributed material and ad-hoc tasks to apply newly learned information to different contexts and steps in health campaigning. Students will be also guided in the step-by-step development of their fictitious health campaign.

Attendance

Students’ class attendance is requested. If, for substantiated health-related reasons, participation in class is not possible, students are required study the covered content independently using the material provided by the course instructor online.

Examination Information

The final grade will be composed of:

  • 10%: active and constructive participation during in-class discussions
  • 20%: presentation of a fictitious health campaign developed by the students
  • 70%: individual paper (4500-5000 words, excl. index, abstract, and bibliography) that describes in a detailed and structured way the same fictitious campaign, elaborating on each necessary step from the identification of the topic to the evaluation of the campaign’s effectiveness

Required Material

Selected introductory readings (further readings and material will be available on iCorsi):

  • Silk, K. J., Atkin, C. K., & Salmon, C. T. (2011). Developing Effective Media Campaigns for Health Promotion. In The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication (pp. 230-246). Routledge.
  • Wakefield, M. A., Loken, B., & Hornik, R. C. (2010). Use of mass media campaigns to change health behaviour. Lancet, 376(9748), 1261–1271.

Education