Health Campaign Development and Evaluation

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted once again the importance of designing and disseminating effective health campaigns to promote healthy behaviors such as compliance with containment 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.

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.

In presence

The course consists of 2 modules each including 7 weekly 4-hour in-person lectures. Students of the 3 ECTS course attend the first module only and students of the 6 ECTS attend both modules.

For each module, students’ attendance is requested. If for substantiated health-related reasons, participation in class is not possible, students are required to catch up with the covered content independently using the material provided by the course instructor on iCorsi.

3 ECTS course

The first module consists of front lectures given by the course instructor, which are altered with the discussion of distributed material and ad-hoc tasks to apply newly learned information to different contexts and steps in health campaigning. Students of the 3 ECTS course will present examples of health campaigns focusing on specific elements of campaign development and evaluation as indicated by the course instructor.

6 ECTS course

The second module has a seminar character where students are guided in the step-by-step development of their own fictitious health campaign and apply the newly learned information from the first module. Small exercises and supervised peer feedback will help students identify the appropriate campaign strategy to be presented in class.

3 ECTS course

The final grade will be composed of:

• 10%: active and constructive participation during in-class discussions
• 20%: presentation of an example of a health campaign
• 70%: final exam

6 ECTS course

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 student
• 70%: individual paper (4500-5000 words, excl. index, abstract, and bibliography) that describes in a detailed and structured way the same fictitious campaign

Required Material

Selected introductory readings (further readings and material will be made 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.