ABSTRACT
Health communication, as an area of theory, research, and practice, focuses on the relationships between communication and health, health beliefs, and health and risk behavior. Health communication research has focused more on formal than informal contexts and on planned than incidental or everyday messages. When investigating informal contexts and everyday messages, researchers have attended more to mass than to interpersonal communication. The purpose of this chapter is to address the “missing box,” the role of everyday interpersonal interaction as an arena of health communication. The chapter presents a rationale and a social infl uence framework for exploring everyday interpersonal communication and health. A review of the literature on various roles of everyday interpersonal communication and HIV/AIDS clarifi es the potentially powerful and often neglected infl uence of everyday interaction on health and provides road signs for future research and practice.
