ABSTRACT
The family is a primary site for health education, information, and support that has a powerful infl uence on promoting health and wellness (Baxter, Bylund, Imes, & Scheive, 2005; Bylund, Imes, & Baxter, 2005; Kreps, 1990; Kreps & Sivaram, 2008; Zhang & Siminoff, 2003). Family communication performs a crucial role in socializing family members’ development of powerful culturally engrained beliefs about health and illness that infl uence health behaviors (Botelho, Bee-Horng, & Fiscella,1996; Kreps & Kunimoto, 1994). Family members are signifi cant sources for providing needed health information to other family members that strongly infl uence their adoption of health promotion, disease prevention, and health care activities (Arrington, 2005; Pecchioni, Thompson, & Anderson, 2006). Furthermore, family members (especially wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters) often provide needed home care to spouses, parents, and children and face tremendous stress as informal caregivers (Ballard-Reisch, 1996; Kreps, 1990). Parents also serve as health role models and have powerful infl uences on the development of their children’s orientations toward primary health issues such as nutritional patterns, exercise behaviors, leisure activities, and personal relationships (Weihs, Fisher, & Baird,, 2002). Family members provide important support and advocacy for one another within the complex health care system (Beach & Good, 2004; Petronio, Sargent, Andea, Reganis, & Cichocki, 2004; Rabow, Hauser, & Adams, 2004). Despite the central role that family communication performs in health, health care, and health promotion, there has been relatively little attention paid to studying the infl uences of family communication on health within the scholarly literature (Jones, Beach, & Jackson, 2004; Pecchioni & Sparks, 2006). The vast majority of health communication research has focused on formal health care delivery systems, such as doctor’s offi ces, hospitals, clinics, and public health settings, and not on the far more pervasive and ubiquitous delivery of informal care and health promotion within the family (Kreps & Bonaguro, 2009). I am hopeful that the chapters on family communication and health/wellness in this section of this book will encourage more careful study of the health-related infl uences of family communication. In this commentary, I will examine the contributions of the individual chapters in
this section and provide guidance for future research on family communication, health, and wellness.
