Antibiotic resistance is growing threat to public health threat that calls for urgent attention. However, creating campaigns to slow the emergence and spread of drug-resistant pathogens is challenging because the goal—antibiotic stewardship—encompasses multiple behaviors. This study provided a novel approach to audience segmentation for a multifaceted goal, by using a person-centered approach to identify profiles of US adults based on shared stewardship intentions. The latent class analysis identified three groups: Stewards, Stockers, and Demanders. The findings suggest campaigns with goals aimed at encouraging Stewards to follow through on their intentions, encouraging Stockers to dispose of their leftover antibiotics, and convincing Demanders to accept provider’s evidence-based judgment when a prescription for antibiotics is not indicated. Covariate analysis showed that people who held more inaccurate beliefs about what antibiotics can treat had higher odds of being Demanders and Stockers instead of Stewards. People with stronger health mavenism also had higher odds of being Stockers instead of Stewards. The covariate analysis provided theoretical insight into the strategies to pursue in campaigns targeting these three groups.

Stigmas are profoundly negative stereotypes of a social group and its members that have diffused and normalized throughout a community. Being marked as a member of a stigmatized group does more than designate someone as different: stigmas denote people as discredited, devalued, and disgraced. Stigmas shape health and risk communication and are considered the leading—but least understood—barrier to health promotion. Communication and stigmas are dynamically connected. Communication is critical to a stigma’s existence, spread, expression, coping, and elimination. Using mediated and interpersonal communication, community members are socialized to recognize and react to stigmatized people. People use communication to enact the devaluation and ostracism of stigmatized people, and stigmatized people use communication to cope with stigmatization. Stigmas also shape communication: stigmas compel non-marked persons to engage in stigmatization and ostracism of marked persons, reduce marked people’s disclosure and encourage secrecy, and shape the characteristics of personal and community networks. Last, campaigns have used communication to attempt to eliminate existing stigmas. The accumulating research, conducted from diverse assumptions about human behavior (cultural determinism, evolutionary, socio-functional), shows how easily and effectively stigmas may be socialized; how challenging they are to manage; how many facets of health and wellbeing are devastated by their existence; and how difficult it is to attenuate them. While much has been uncovered about stigma, health, and risk, many questions remain. Among these include: How can one design messages that effectively alert the general public about imminent health threats and that successfully promote desirable behavioral changes without evoking stigma processes? How do different reactions to stigmatization influence targets and their social networks? What factors increase resistance or vulnerability to messages containing stigma-inducing content? How can one create an effective, reliable means to eliminate existing stigmas?

No abstract

No abstract