Health

Health matters to all of us, but people tend to think about it in narrow, stigmatizing, and fatalistic ways. Framing can help widen the lens.

Too often, factors and circumstances that shape our health are devalued or ignored. The public, elected officials, and some health providers tend to focus narrowly on lifestyles and behaviors.

Language can entrench and spread misconceptions—or it can unlock alternative ideas and perspectives.

Explore these studies to find frames that help explain the social determinants of health and health equity.

Featured Work

Framing Resource

Talking about Health Equity

Here are three sample definitions that use the phrases “fair and full” or “fair and just,” which can complement or replace the word equity.

Toolkit

Boosting Public Discourse: Reframing Childhood Immunization

Find guidance and resources to advocate for expanding access to childhood and adolescent vaccination.

Framing Resource

Explaining the Social Determinants of Health

Here are helpful things to keep in mind when you’re trying to explain why some demographic groups experience better or worse health outcomes than others.

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Report

“Kids Must Have Mental Health … But They Can’t, Can They?”: How Albertans Think About Child Mental Health

This report compares the cultural patterns of understanding that Americans and Albertans apply in making sense of the issue of child mental health.

Report

Destiny or Destructive Environments: How Peer Discourse Sessions Toggle Between Child Mental Health and Illness

This report shares insights from 8 peer discourse sessions - small group discussions - that focused on child mental health.

Report

From the Mouths of Babes: How the Media Frames the Issue of Child Oral Health

This report examines more than a year‘s worth of news coverage on this issue (from August 2008 to November 2009) from more than a dozen newspapers nationwide. The findings from this work serve...

Report

Advancing Support for Child Mental Health Policies: Early Results from Strategic Frame Analysis™ Experimental Research

This report reviews the effects of frame elements (values, child development principles and explanatory metaphors) on child mental health policy preferences.

Report

Competing Frames of Mental Health and Mental Illness: Media Frames and the Public Understandings of Child Mental Health as Part of Strategic Frame Analysis™

This report examines 80 news articles focused on child mental health drawn from large and regional newspapers May 2008 – May 2009.

Report

Understanding Public Thinking About Child Mental Health

This report examines the differences between the ways that experts and the general public think about mental health and mental illness in young children.

Report

Refining the Core Story of Early Childhood Development: The Effects of Science and Health Frames

To translate the science of early childhood development, we need to draw on the science of communication. This report shares findings from a framing experiment.

Report

Determinism Leavened by Will Power: The Challenge of Closing the Gaps Between the Public and Expert Explanations of Gene-Environment Interaction

Epigenetics has important implications for health policy - but lay perceptions of genetics are out of step with current science. This study pinpoints the gaps.

Report

Framing Healthy Communities: Strategic Communications and the Social Determinants of Health

Details the results of experiments conducted as part of a larger study of health communications research funded by The California Endowment and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. This study aims to...

Toolkit

Framing Food and Fitness as a Public Issue

Welcome to Framing Food and Fitness as a Public Issue—a framing toolkit of research and applications exploring how Americans think about nutrition and physical activity, the community...

Report

Framing Community Health as if Food and Fitness Mattered

This message memo synthesizes our research and recommends strategies to communicate more effectively about community health issues, such as food and fitness.

Frame Testing Recommendations

How to Talk About Food, Fitness, and Community Health

This Message Brief distills strategies for framing issues like obesity, fitness, and nutrition from a social determinants of health perspective.