Theoretical Approaches of Health Campaigns and Practical Applications to COVID-19 Campaigns

Abstract

Public communication campaigns are the focus of this contribution, especially in the field of health, that fulfill an important function in today’s civic society by informing the public about risky behaviors like AIDS, tobacco, alcohol, drug abuse, obesity or currently in the field of COVID-19. In addition they are stimulating preventive behavior in domains like increasing physical activity, healthier nutrition or keeping distance because of COVID-19, but also in areas like traffic safety or environmental protection. But they also try to alter non-healthy risk behaviors like smoking or too much drinking. Especially the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020 hit the health systems of all countries hard and almost all health ministries or departments of public health started to develop and implement COVID-19 communication campaigns together with technical and legal interventions like vaccination. Based on a system model with focus on problem analysis, definition of goals, selection of target groups, development of campaign messages, and empirical campaign evaluation, it is the goal of this contribution to focus on public health campaigns and its underlying theoretical perspectives like information seeking, cognitive dissonance theory, activation and entertainment-education, social cognitive theory, persuasion research or approaches from health sciences. Based on this background of relevant communication theories, the contribution is asking: What have we learned from theory to optimize health campaigns and especially COVID-19 campaigns?

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