Digital Storytelling Discourses in International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Mobile Cinema Campaign Against the 2024 Cholera Outbreak in Nigeria
Article
This study examines the potential of mobile cinema and digital storytelling as innovative strategies for public health campaigns in response to the 2024 cholera outbreak in Nigeria. Employing the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method, the study undertook three layers of analysis of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ (IFRC’s) mobile cinema titled How Cholera Spreads (produced in collaboration with the Global Health Media Project). Besides the video’s popularity and wide circulation across digital media platforms in Nigeria, its rich treatment of thematic issues relating to the nature, history, symptoms, spread, and prevention of cholera necessitated its adoption for analysis. The health-themed narratives embedded in the mobile cinema suggest the need to create awareness and orient the public to make informed decisions in the face of the cholera outbreak. The study revealed the IFRC mobile cinema’s portrayal of the significance of systemic and socio-environmental approaches as key to addressing the underlying causes of the cholera outbreak. From an interpretive standpoint, the digital storytelling discourses sustained in the mobile cinema reflect strategies for behaviour change through the tendentious portrayal of preventive measures that, when adhered to, may have a profound impact in preventing/reducing further incidence of cholera disease.
Building familiar-looking bridges and reaching familiar-looking outcomes: Information behaviors of recovered mental health patients and their roles in sense-making their mental health
Article
This paper explores the motivations of recovered Filipino mental health patients (RMHPs) for seeking and processing mental health-related information, as well as these information behaviors’ roles in helping them make sense of their mental health. The findings show that practical motivators such as the need to alleviate pain and socio-psychological motivators shaped RMHPs’ information seeking, information processing, and privacy management. In particular, the pain of enduring symptoms and the expectations to get better increased their intentions to seek information, engage with their concerns more effortfully, and craft lenient privacy boundaries that helped them gain more insights about their mental health. RMHPs labeled these behaviors as guides that helped them achieve an acceptable but not ideal outcome. That is because RMHPs wish to feel “normal” again after having engaged so much with their concerns. This implies that the role of information in sense-making may be that of helping people reach familiar but not ideal outcomes.
Bridging Health: Exploring Participatory Communication among Health Communication Planners and Implementers in the Philippines
Article
This study explores a framework for theorizing the participatory media approach by examining local experiences on communication and development through the perspectives of health communication technicians, their relationships with senders and receivers in health programs and projects, and how they conduct the process of communication planning, implementation, and evaluation. The study addresses the following three main questions: (1) Who are the health communicators and what are their roles in participatory communication? (2) What is the level of participatory communication in health programs and projects? and (3) What are the approaches and characteristics of participatory communication in health programs and projects in the Philippines? The study reveals that communication technicians perceive their communication strategies as long-term processes that address the felt needs of communities with the participation of beneficiaries in planning communication that is sensitive to the culture of, beneficial to the majority of, and owned by the community.
The (Mistica) Doctor Is In: Communicating Health at Suprema dela Iglesia del Ciudad Mistica de Dios
Article
Throughout history, religion, spirituality, health, and the practice of medicine have been intertwined but are all united in seeking inproved health for all. Medical organizations and faith-based institutions consider caring for the sick as their primary mission, sometimes drawing from each other’s knowledge about healing to address patients’ concerns. This paper examines the role of spirituality and religion on the health of a populace and explains how a faith-based organization uses spirituality as the foundation for communicating health even as the community avails itself of medical science through the provision of a barangay health center.
