Public Communication About the Causes of Disease: The Rhetoric of Responsibility

Abstract

Beliefs about the causes of disease and hence about responsibility for disease are central to all cultural understandings of the human condition. i%is essay explores how public communication influences such beliefs. We argue that although attributions of responsibility may appear to be medical or scientqic claims, such claims are better understood rhetorically, as means of influencing attitudes and behavior. After discussing three nontechnical audiences and related exigencies to which messages about causes of disease are often addressed, we analyze how attributions of responsibility are accomplished in selected examples ofpublic communication. In closing, we discuss implications for developing a model ofpublic communication about causes of disease and propose research to test and refine the model.

Health Activism: Communication Theory and Action for Social Change

“…Health communication can contribute to our understanding of activists' interpretive choices surrounding health and illness causation. The field can apply existing research about risk communication and the rhetoric of causality (Kirkwood & Brown, 1995;McKnight, 1988) to the study of activist discourses so as to improve the practice of health activism. Additional research could examine relationships between illness narratives (Sharf & Vandeford, 2003) and activism, which would provide unique insight into how activists discursively construct health itself and how this discourse may change over time.…”

The Present and Future of Health Communication Scholarship: Overlooked Opportunities

“…In closing, I would like to make explicit certain issues of scholarship that I believe are implied in the kinds of topics and research questions I have raised in these examZExcellent studies on this subject have been written by Kirkwood and Brown (1995) and by Guttman (1996Guttman ( , 1997 ples. In addition to paying attention to contextualization, complexity, and consequences, these studies necessitate the diminution of boundaries between categorical dichotomies on which we often rely: interpersonal and mass media, and clinical care and public health.…”

Emphasizing "Communication" in Health Communication

“…Two additional citations come from ICA journals and were included in the previous review of published research. These included an article focusing on the rhetoric of responsibility (Kirkwood & Brown, 1995) and the research that compared campaign channels with regard to reach, specificity, and impact (Schooler et al, 1998).…”

“…Public communication about disease causation and the inherent links to societal versus individual responsibility has also sometimes been examined in published communication research, emphasizing that too little attention has been given to the communication processes associated with forming these beliefs about responsibility (Kirkwood & Brown, 1995). These macroillness causation beliefs implicitly form a backdrop for more specific illness causation beliefs.…”