Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #119131

A. Susana Ramirez, BA, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, 215-573-8438, sramirez@asc.upenn.edu

It is assumed that, by focusing a campaign on specific racial and ethnic groups, communication campaigns can help to reduce health disparities. There is little empirical support for this assumption. There is no common understanding about what it means to “focus” a health communication campaign on racial and ethnic groups: “segmentation,” “targeting” and “tailoring,” are used often interchangeably to mean very different things. The words are used to mean selecting different media outlets, showing actors of the concerned race/ethnicity, choosing messages to appeal to cultural factors, or some combination of these or other variables. I explicate the logic of segmentation, targeting and tailoring of health communication campaign audiences and messages. My focus will be on health communication campaigns that use mass media channels. I argue that the literature confounds the related constructs of segmentation, targeting and cultural tailoring, and that this confusion makes it difficult to compare campaign efforts and thus make inferences about what works and what doesn't. I will offer a typology of campaign variables commonly used to address racial/ethnic personalization and present examples from the literature in which each of these variables has been used. The goals of this paper are: first, to propose a common definition of campaign variables so as to provide a common ground to describe the specific efforts that have made campaigns successful (or not) and to make replication and comparison easier; second, to consider which of these variables can have a racial/ethnic orientation and when it may make sense to do so.

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