Complications in Segmenting Campaign Publics: Women of Color Explain Their Problems, Involvement, and Constraints in Reading Heart Disease Communication

Abstract

This research on public relations campaigns, heart disease, and meaning making addresses individual-level and community-level decisions that influence women's retention and understanding of health messages. This research is grounded in several theoretical bases of knowledge: culture and communication campaigns, the situational theory of publics, and health communication campaigns directed at women of color. Women of color from across the United States were interviewed to discover how they made meaning of messages disseminated in a national heart disease communication campaign. Despite having seen heart disease messages in the media, the participants did not feel the Heart Truth campaign messages provided them with new information. Many women indicated that they did not plan to change their heart health preventive behaviors based on seeing the messages. Findings suggest that campaign designers should look to a variety of cultural meaning-making factors such as women's feelings of empowerment of knowledge, their imagined sense of the heart-diseased body, and their understandings of heart disease through loss when developing preventive messages for women of color.