ABSTRACT
The aim of health communicators is to impart knowledge and thus to change health attitudes, perceptions, and health-related behaviors of the audience. However, the impact of health messages on the audience, and the audience's response to such communication, are co-determined by a variety of factors. Among these factors of particular importance are the content of health messages, the personal characteristics and motivation of the audience, and the effect of social environment in which such communication takes place. Although all these factors are important, this chapter focuses on the role of the social environment on health messages. By “social environment” we mean phenomena that in European social science have, for a long time, been explored in terms of “collective representations” (Durkheim, 1898) or “social representations” (Farr & Moscovici, 1984; Jodelet, 1991; Markova & Wilkie, 1987; Moscovici, 1984). Social representations are systems of values, ideas, and practices adopted by members of a particular society; they are the perspectives in terms of which social events are conceptualized and explained. Because people are born into a world of already existing social representations, they adopt them in the same ways that they adopt the other aspects of the physical and social reality.
