Health Campaign Development and Evaluation

How can we effectively inform people about dangers to their health? How can we persuade them to abandon unhealthy behaviors and engage in activities beneficial for their health? These questions have guided researchers, practitioners and policy makers for decades, resulting in best practices when developing, implementing and evaluating health campaigns. 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 as well as research methods in behavioral sciences. The course equips students with the fundamental knowledge and skills for future activities in health promotion and disease prevention.

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 presenza

The course consists of frontal lectures and a seminar. Students following the 3 ECTS option attend the frontal lectures only and students following the 6 ECTS option attend both the frontal lectures and the seminar.

Students’ regular attendance is requested. Absence requires justification and prompt information of the course director.

3 ECTS course

The first part consists of frontal 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 frontal lectures. 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.