Content of Health Communication Messages on Infectious and Non-Communicable Diseases

Ting, Su Hie (2021) Content of Health Communication Messages on Infectious and Non-Communicable Diseases. In: 3rd International Conference on Language Studies 2021, 8-9 September 2021, Online.

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Abstract

The study examined the content of health communication messages on infectious and non-communicable diseases in pamphlets produced by health agencies in Malaysia. Altogether 34 pamphlets collected from websites, government hospitals, and private hospitals were analysed. The framework used to guide the content analysis was based on the Extended Parallel Process Model (Witte, 1992) that covers severity, susceptibility, and recommended action. The results showed that in the infectious disease pamphlets, 30.61% of the content was on severity, 27.55% was on susceptibility, and 41.84% was on recommended actions. As for the non-communicable diseases (which includes cancer), interestingly, the proportion of content on severity was played down (27.50%), but the susceptibility percentage was similar (28.75%). For non-communicable diseases, there was a stronger emphasis on recommended actions (48.42%) to motivate the public to undertake health protective measures to either detect the disease early or to seek treatment for the disease. The results suggest that non-communicable diseases may be less understood compared to infectious diseases, which heightens the need to create awareness of health protective measures.

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