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Overview Faculty Courses Summary of Department Research Contact


University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  
Department of Speech Communication
 

Overview

People facing illness or trying to maintain good mental or physical health face many challenges:  making decisions about treatments and other courses of action, managing uncertainty about their future or the trajectory of an illness, coping with large volumes of information containing potentially conflicting advice, and responding to changes in their identities and relationships as a consequence of illness.

Faculty and graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conduct research on the associations between (a) communication and (b) mental or physical health, including how communication affects and is affected by health and illness. This research is conducted from interpersonal, organizational, and mass-mediated perspectives.

The graduate program leading to master’s and doctoral degrees in health communication includes a broad array of courses from these different perspectives within the Department of Speech Communication. In addition, graduate coursework may include classes from other outstanding departments on campus, including Psychology, Community Health, Kinesiology, Social Work, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences.

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Faculty

Dale E. Brashers (Ph.D., University of Arizona): The management of uncertainty in illness; patient self-advocacy; social support; communication and people living with HIV

John P. Caughlin (Ph.D., University of Texas): Interpersonal and family communication;  effects of parent-child communication on health risk behaviors

Daena J. Goldsmith (Ph.D., University of Washington): Communication in personal relationships, especially advice-giving and social support; the role of communication in coping with chronic illness

Kristen Harrison (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison): Mass communication processes and effects, including the impact of media exposure on body image and eating disorders

John Lammers (Ph.D., University of California at Davis): Organizational communication; health communication; work teams in health care settings; leadership and communication in public health care

Maria Mastronardi (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Cultural studies; media studies; feminist theory and methodologies; social and cultural relationships among gender, health, and adolescence.

Peggy Miller (Ph.D., Columbia University): Variation in communication within and across cultures, including communication and the development of self-esteem; early socialization; ethnographic methods

Barbara J. Wilson (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison): Social and psychological effects of mass media; developmental differences in children’s responses to mass media; children’s emotional and cognitive processing of mass media; impact of media violence

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Courses

SPCM 427: Children and the Media

SPCM 462: Interpersonal Health Communication

SPCM 496: Organizational Health Communication

SPCM 496: Health and Media

SPCM 496: Media and the Body

SPCM 529: Social Influence in Health Care Interactions

SPCM 529: Social Support

SPCM 529: Identity and Illness

SPCM 529: Communication and Uncertainty Management

SPCM 529: Ethnography of Communication

SPCM 529: Ethnographic Research Methods

SPCM 529: Mass Media Effects

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Summary of Department Research Completed or in Process

Funded by the University of Illinois Research Board, John Caughlin is studying how parents and adolescents discuss conflict issues including alcohol and drug use. Early results indicate that how parents and adolescents deal with mundane conflict issues has important implications for whether the adolescents engage in health risk behaviors like using illicit substances.

Kristen Harrison is conducting a longitudinal project, funded by a Faculty Scholars Award from the William T. Grant Foundation, to study (a) the effects of early childhood media exposure on the development of self-discrepancies in elementary school children, and (b) the effects of these discrepancies on self-esteem and eating disorders. 

Peggy Miller’s study titled "The meanings and discourses of self-esteem: Ethnotheories across time and space" explores the assumption shared by many American parents, teachers, and mental health professionals that self-esteem is associated with a variety of psychological strengths and thus should be embraced as a childrearing and educational goal. The study includes comparisons between U.S. and Taiwanese mothers and grandmothers: These cross-cultural and generational perspectives will shed fresh light on self-esteem as a culturally and historically situated discourse.

Dale Brashers, Daena Goldsmith, and Daniel O'Keefe currently are conducting a meta-analysis and meta-synthesis of the effects of social support on health and psychosocial outcomes in persons living with HIV or AIDS. This project is funded through the National Institute of Mental health, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Maria Mastronardi is completing a book manuscript entitled After Ophelia: Feminism, Popular Culture, and Female Adolescence in Crisis that examines how public discourse of “troubled” female adolescence shifts in order to reinforce conservative social arrangements, which includes an analysis of public discourse on the “pro anorexia” movement and a critical analysis of health campaigns aimed at teenage girls.

Funded by the University of Illinois Research Board, John Lammers is working on a project that examines the formalizing role that managed care plays in health communication among providers and between patients and providers.  He has collected data from large samples of physicians in three U.S. cities characterized by varying levels of managed care penetration.

Many other research projects from our faculty and graduate students are described on our health communication website at http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/projects/healthcomm/.

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For more information, please contact:

Dale Brashers
Department of Speech Communication
702 S. Wright Street MC456
244 Lincoln Hall
University of Illinois
Urbana IL 61801
Email: 
dbrasher@uiuc.edu
Phone Number (217)333-2683
Fax Number  (217) 244-1598


Websites

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   http://www.uiuc.edu/
Department of Speech Communication 
http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/
Health Communication at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/projects/healthcomm/

 

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Last Updated May 1, 2006
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