Serving the Needs of the Latina Community for Health Information

Autores/as

  • R. A. Yaros University of Maryland-College Park
  • J. Roberts University of Maryland-College Park
  • E. Powers University of Maryland-College Park
  • L. Steiner University of Maryland-College Park

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/hcs.2015.158

Palabras clave:

health literacy, Latinas, news media, underserved, health communication

Resumen

Latinos remain the largest US population with limited health literacy (Andrulis D.P. & Brach, 2007). Concerned with how local media can meet the information needs of underserved audiences, we interviewed Latinas who were pregnant or mothers of young children living in a Spanish speaking community, and surveyed 33 local health professionals. Findings are that Latina women’s most common source of health information was family and friends. They said they tune to Spanish television and radio programs, but gave low grades to news media for health information. Medical professionals agreed that Latinas generally get their health information through friends and family, and rated the media poorly in terms of serving Latinas’ needs. Since the data indicate that the local news media are not serving Latinas’ health information needs as much as they could, we offer recommendations to potentially exploit new technological affordances and suggest expansion of conventional definitions of health literacy.

Biografía del autor/a

R. A. Yaros, University of Maryland-College Park

Associate Professor of Mobile and Multi-Platform Media in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and affiliated faculty in the Center of Health Literacy in the University's School of Public Health. His research, which has appeared in two book chapters and featured in more than 25 peer reviewed journals and conferences, focuses on the communication of critical health information to non experts in digital media.

J. Roberts, University of Maryland-College Park

Jessica Roberts completed her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in 2013 and is a lecturer at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. Her main areas of research include new media and journalism and the participatory audience. She has co-authored a book chapter on the shared philosophical foundations of public journalism and citizen journalism, and a chapter on the ethics of citizen journalism sites. Her dissertation explored the response of professional journalists to WikiLeaks, and what that response revealed about journalists’ attempts to define themselves and new media.

E. Powers, University of Maryland-College Park

Elia Powers is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. His main research interests are media, news and health literacy; journalism pedagogy; and audience engagement with digital media.  He has published articles about media literacy pedagogy and nonprofit news audiences in academic journals such as Journal of Media Business Studies, Journal of Communication Management and the Journal of Media Literacy Education.

L. Steiner, University of Maryland-College Park

Linda Steiner is Professor at the University of Maryland. Her ares of reserach include co-edited Key Concepts in Critical-Cultural Studies (2010) and co-edited The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender (2013); as well as single authored book chapters "Less Falseness as Antidote to the Anxiety of Postmodernism" in Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World (2013); and "Feminist Uses of New Technologies to Enter the Public Spere," in Feminist Media; Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship (2012).

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Publicado

2015-07-22

Número

Vol. 8 Núm. 1 (2015): Integration, Participation and Identity: Understanding Diversity

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