A new course at MU, taught by Vu Nguyen, gives students in the Master of Public Health Department real life examples of which health campaigns are effective and which campaigns fail to inform their audience.
“Many people believe that knowledge is enough to change behaviors and that educating the public is all it takes to influence change,” Nguyen said in a news release. “For example, some people may believe, ‘If people only knew how bad an unhealthy behavior is for them, or how good a healthy behavior is for them, then they would change their behavior for the better.’ Unfortunately, that is not the case and it is not that simple.”
Nguyen teaches the class in a short lecture and uses the majority of class time for group discussion. During the discussions, students evaluate elements of real health campaigns and decide what makes them successful and unsuccessful in terms of changing behaviors, being cost effective and other aspects, according to a news release.
Nguyen said the lectures and group discussions teach students the skills and creativity they need to create their own public health campaigns. By using real life examples in his classes, Nguyen hopes to show his students which campaigns are successful and which are not when presented to the general public.
“Dr. Nguyen’s class touches not only on the successes and failures of public health campaigns, but it also details the design of these campaigns,” Jennifer Bogener, a student in Nguyen’s class, said in the release.
Nguyen showed two different public health campaigns for seatbelt use, the Click-it or Ticket campaign and a general crash-test dummy commercial, as an example for his class. The comparison revealed, according to the news release, that the message of wearing seatbelts to avoid getting a ticket was more successful than the wearing of them to save lives.
Nguyen is a Mizzou Advantage Fellow as a part of the One Health/One Medicine initiative of Mizzou Advantage. The Mizzou Advantage aims to increase MU’s visibility and stature in higher education and to strengthen the quality of faculty and students, instructional programs, value of an MU degree, success of grant proposals, United States and Missouri economies and venture-capital investment.
“In order to be successful, public health campaigns need to draw on a number of content areas including effective communication, scientific evidence in support of a particular approach and an understanding of human behavior and culture,” Lise Saffran, associate director of the Master of Public Health Program said in the release. “The course Dr. Nguyen is teaching is a perfect fit for Mizzou Advantage – and for the Master of Public Health Program which is interdisciplinary at its heart.”
The class was first offered for the fall 2011 semester and is offered to graduate students for the spring semester.