Week 7 - So Much Reading

Honestly, with all the reading I've been doing for my literature review, I don't know what I would do without Zotero. It's a software program that helps you organize all your references for a project, doing all that tedious bibliography work for you and keeping all the readings you've saved in one place. So much time has been saved, let me tell you!

During our meeting this week, my supervisor and I went over my research questions and how I want to address them in my survey. I don't think I've put my research questions up here on the blog, so I'll do that now.

With this research project, I hope to gain insight into the following three questions (taken from my detailed proposal):

1. What are students’ perceptions and attitudes regarding the current ways that MWI* is being communicated?
2. Through which media do students prefer to receive MWI?
3. How can MWI be communicated in an accessible way, such that UW undergraduate students not only receive the information, but also feel capable of making changes towards better mental well-being in the form of (a) developing new coping strategies and/or (b) seeking help from university services?

*MWI = Mental Wellness-related Information, which consists of (1) information about the services run by the university and its peer health groups, and (2) general mental wellness advice, such as coping strategies for stress.

We decided that the survey will be divided into five main sections:

1. Questions about opinions/perceptions/attitudes regarding mental wellness communication at UW.
2. Questions addressing students' familiarity with the mental wellness services on campus.
3. Questions about preferred methods of receiving mental wellness information.
4. Questions that involve hypothetical scenarios in which students will be given a scenario and relevant mental wellness information. For these questions, we'll look into self-reported attitudes and predicted behaviour.
5. Questions about general mental wellness issues related to students.

The focus of my literature review right now is to find out how health advice/information can be communicated effectively, which will help me develop the scenarios for section 4. A big issue with communicating about health is that services need to persuade their target audience to either use their service or to follow certain advice. One model of persuasive communication I've found really interesting is called the Matrix of Persuasion by William McGuire (Bettinghaus, 1986), which considers the various elements of the communication process (e.g., source, message, channel, receiver, destination) and the behavioural steps in attitude change (e.g., attention, comprehension, yielding, retention, action). I can look at all these factors to determine how to facilitate effective communication.

Another model I'd like to look into is the Health Belief Model, which I still need to look into, but looks promising!

Sources Cited

Bettinghaus, E. P. (1986). Health promotion and the knowledge-attitude-behavior continuum. Preventive Medicine, 15(5), 475–491.