We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers who study how media and messaging shape opinions, attitudes, and behaviors of multiple audiences. We co-design, conduct, and disseminate results of this research to enhance understanding of the ways that communication can help to advance health and racial equity through health and social policy.
Our research is conceptually organized around a vision of three interconnected research areas that inform communication strategies to advance health and racial equity.
Our core team includes researchers at three institutions: Cornell University, Wesleyan University, and the University of Minnesota. While each institution leads a research hub focused on a particular approach to the study of communication, with a focus on media and messaging (as described in the figure above), our team’s work is fundamentally interconnected, and we all share an emphasis on promoting and supporting policies to advance health and racial equity. Collectively, our research tracks the content of media (including news and advertisements); examines the impact of media messaging on attitudes, values, and behavior; and identifies new opportunities to work with journalists, public health officials, affected communities, and advocacy organizations to put the research findings into practice to advance health and racial equity.
We organize our work in three areas:
These three hubs of our media research collaborative are fundamentally interconnected: the insights from each hub inform and position the others to collectively build and learn from strategic efforts to shift opinions and change narratives to advance health and racial equity through health and social policy.
