ABSTRACT
Health communication research has emerged during the 1970s and 1980s as an exciting applied area of communication inquiry concerned with examining the influences of human interaction on the provision of health care and the promotion of health (Arntson, 1985; Kreps, 1988a; Thompson, 1984). It is an inherently applied area of communication inquiry, with many health communication studies designed to either identify, examine, or solve health-care/promotion problems. Health communication is also an extremely broad area of inquiry, examining communication at many different levels and in many different contexts. For example, health communication research has examined such diverse issues as the role of interpersonal communication in developing effective health-care provider/consumer relationships, the role of comforting communication in providing social support, the effects of various media and presentation strategies on the dissemination of health information to people who need such information, the use of communication in coordinating the activities of interdependent health-care providers, and the use of communication strategies for administering complex health-care delivery systems. Four important levels of health communication inquiry are selectively reviewed here: interpersonal, group, organizational, and mediated communication in health care. The chapter also identifies future directions for conducting applied health communication research that can help increase the effectiveness of health-care delivery.
