RESEARCH
My primary research focuses on the interactive effects of communication behaviors and the audience’s social contexts on the audience’s knowledge acquisition, attitude formation, and behavior change. I have been examining these issues primarily in the domain of public health. To be more specific: (1) I investigate how communication behaviors interact with audience’s social networks and social capital and how these two factors jointly influence the audience’s health knowledge, health-related attitudes, and healthy lifestyle behaviors; (2) I explore what roles communication should play in addressing the pre-existing health disparities; (3) I examine the effects of audience’s exposure to contradictory health information and health-related misinformation on the audience’s health-related cognitions, emotions, and behaviors; (4) In addition to these major categories of my research interests, I have collaborated with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Pennsylvania, the Ohio State University, and Cornell University on how health & science reporting is related to public beliefs about and attitudes toward health and science-related issues, such as nanotechnology, cancer, and artificial intelligence (AI). (5) As a complement to my substantive studies, I have done original methodological work on establishing the validity and reliability of media exposure measures, as well as learning the methods appropriate to studying the interaction of media exposure and social contexts: macro-level measurement and multi-level modeling.
Interplay between Communication Behaviors and Social Environments. My research mainly focuses on how communication behaviors manifest their influences in the context of the audience’s social environment, including social networks, as well as the community’s physical environment, social structure, and social cohesion (e.g., social capital). In particular, I explored how individuals’ use of media for health information and interpersonal health communication interact and jointly influence healthy lifestyle behaviors (Kam & Lee, 2013; Lee, 2009). Building on this study, I examined the interactive effects of media exposure and social capital at both individual and community levels on interpersonal health communication and healthy lifestyle behaviors (Lee, 2014; Lee & Kam, 2015; Lee & Kim, 2013).
Second, the role of communication is not sufficiently appreciated in studies of social capital and health. I argue that communication scholarship can complement the existing studies in this area, by exploring how media exposure interacts with macro-social factors, such as state- and county-level social capital (Lee, 2014; Lee & Kim, 2013). This will move the communication field forward, as well, given that most studies examining the role of an audience’s social contexts in media effects have focused mainly on the audience’s proximate social environment.
Third, to understand the processes surrounding the translation of the concept of social capital into communication, I conducted a citation network analysis and a citation content analysis of communication articles on social capital (Lee & Sohn, 2016). This paper revealed the structure of the literature of social capital in communication. To be more specific, I examined which articles have been heavily cited by social capital researchers in communication and demonstrate the extent to which communication scholars have utilized social capital in a way that marginalizes Bourdieu’s conception of social capital, thereby arguing that communication scholars should expand the scope of their social capital research.
By redressing limitations of the existing research, I believe that my research program contributes to the disciplines of communication, public health, and medical sociology.
The Roles of Communication in Eliminating Health Disparities. In my second line of research, I investigate the roles that communication plays in redressing health disparities. First, I have examined whether and how the effects of the VERB campaign differed across socioeconomic status (SES) and racial/ethnic groups (Pena-y-Lillo & Lee, 2019). Using a three-wave longitudinal survey dataset, we found that the VERB campaign messages were more likely to reach Caucasian children, those from high income households, and those with more educated parents. Also, high income and Caucasian children were more successful than were low income and racial/ethnic minority children in turning their intentions into the actual practice of organized time physical activity. Based on these findings, I contend that disparities in physical activities across SES and racial/ethnic groups can be explained at least in part by the communication inequalities.
Moreover, I have examined whether media coverage of health disparities and interpersonal communication about this issue can cultivate public support for policies intended to address health disparities and personal activism to mitigate this problem (Lee, Bigman, Choi, & Zhao, 2022). By analyzing the data from a survey with a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, we found that communication can play an important role in eliminating health disparities by forming favorable attitudes toward government policies to address health disparities and increasing personal activism. This study well demonstrates that health educators and public health practitioners should consider communication not only as an educational tool but also as a political weapon (i.e., media advocacy) in solving such a serious public health problem as health disparities.
Effects of Misinformation and Contradictory Information. By collaborating with my colleagues, such as Andy Tan at the University of Pennsylvania, Cabral Bigman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Rebekah Nagler at the University of Minnesota, I have explored the effects of exposure to contradictory information on health-related beliefs and attitudes, and behaviors in the contexts of nutrition and e-cigarettes using either longitudinal panel survey (Lee, Nagler, & Wang, 2018; Tan, Lee, & Bigman, 2015) or randomized controlled experiment (Tan, Lee, Nagler, & Bigman, 2017).
Moreover, my colleagues and I have looked at diverse effects of exposure to misinformation and its mechanisms in the context of cancer, using data from a longitudinal panel survey with a nationally representative survey with U.S. adults (Tan, Lee, & Chae, 2015). My colleagues and I also examined the mechanisms underlying the disparities in beliefs in cancer-related misinformation across different SES and racial/ethnic groups using data from a nationally representative survey with U.S. adults, and found that both cancer information overload and health literacy at least in part accounted for the effects of SES and race/ethnicity on beliefs in cancer-related misinformation (Lee, Kim, & Ko, under review). Most recently, my colleague and I found that social media use positively influences beliefs in HPV-vaccine-related misinformation, which in turn negatively affects support for policies intended to support HPV vaccination, and that this mediation was detected only among people with low levels of trust in public agents managing HPV vaccination (Oh, Lee, & Park, 2022).
Health & Science Journalism. In addition to my main research interests, by employing survey methods and quantitative content analysis, I investigate how U.S. media report health and science-related issues, how people think about and feel about these issues on social media, and how such media coverage and social media messages influence people’s beliefs about and attitudes towards these issues. First, using data from a national telephone survey, Dietram A. Scheufele, Bruce V. Lewenstein, and I found that emotional heuristics moderated the effect that knowledge about nanotechnology has on people’s overall attitudes toward nanotechnology, with knowledge having a weaker effect on attitudes for people who show strong emotional reactions to the topic (Lee & Scheufele, 2006; Lee, Scheufele, & Lewenstein, 2005).
Jean Brechman, Joseph N. Cappella, and I also examined the presentation of cancer genetics (i.e., genetic influences on prostate cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, smoking and obesity) in academic journals, press releases, and newspapers. Central claims, expressing gene-outcome relationships, were extracted and evaluated. We found that the intermediary press release may serve as a source of distortion in the dissemination of science to the lay public (Brechman, Lee, & Cappella, 2009, 2011).
Jeff Niederdeppe and I analyzed data from a two-wave national representative survey and demonstrated that local TV news cultivates fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention over time (Lee & Niederdeppe, 2011). Assuming that some problematic characteristics of local TV cancer news may cause fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention, Marilee Long, Michael Slater, Wen Song, and I compared local TV news with national TV news in terms of cancer coverage using a nationally representative sample of local nightly TV and national network TV cancer news stories (Lee, Long, Slater, & Song, 2014). Compared to national TV news, local TV cancer stories were (a) much shorter in length, (b) less likely to report on cancer prevention, and (c) less likely to reference national organizations that have made clear recommendations about ways to prevent cancer.
Most recently, I am currently analyzing social media messages about AI using unsupervised machine learning techniques (e.g., topic modeling), and both manual- and automated content analysis. I compared the AI-related social media messages with legacy media’s coverage of AI. Also, I am conducting a survey and an experiment with a national sample of U.S. adults to figure out the effects of exposure to AI-related media messages on the attitudes and emotions towards AI, and the AI-related policy opinions.
Social Scientific Research Methods. In order to test empirically my primary research questions – the interactive effects of media exposure and macro-social factors on health-related cognitions and behaviors – I am applying social scientific research methods to my ongoing projects. To accurately calculate the reliability of media exposure measures, reliability should be separated from stability. Using a structural equation model, Robert C. Hornik, Michael Hennessy, and I found that for a set of general media exposure measures the estimates of reliability change when stability is taken into account, and that reliability and stability vary sharply across media, and between populations (Lee, Hornik, & Hennessy, 2008).
There are two approaches to construct community-level variables: aggregating individual responses from a sample survey and developing measures independent of a study sample. Thus, I constructed my community-level social capital indices in multiple ways: compiling some external datasets, as well as aggregating a nationally representative survey at a community level. I systematically compared the two approaches in the context of understanding effects on communication outcomes (Lee & Kim, 2013).
Summary In sum, I am interested in and have been examining the interactive effects of communication behaviors and audience’s social contexts in the area of public health. Also, I examine a variety of roles that communication may play in mitigating health disparities by adopting a communication-inequalities perspective in the contexts of public health communication campaigns and natural coverage effects. Moreover, I test the effects of exposure to misinformation and/or contradictory information in the contexts of nutrition, e-cigarette, and cancer, using either longitudinal panel survey or randomized controlled experiment. In addition, I have participated in health & science journalism projects, which have provided me with an opportunity to learn and develop my research skills. This experience is now being complemented by my original methodological work and the application of macro-level measurement and multi-level modeling.
Future Research I will extend and improve on my current work on the interplay of social capital, interpersonal communication, and communication behaviors on health-related behaviors in the following directions. First, I am working on a theory paper, entitled “Health behaviors, social capital, and communication behaviors: Theorizing the roles of social capital in public health communication.” In this manuscript, I critically review previous studies of social capital and communication in the context of public health in the field of communication and other closely related disciplines. I then summarize the roles of social capital in public health communication. Based on these, I will propose a theoretical model that may account for how and why social capital matters in public health communication, thereby providing directions for future research. This paper will serve as a roadmap for my future research in this area. Second, by adopting the Bourdieu’s approach to social capital, I will keep testing the role of social capital measured via position generator in ameliorating or exacerbating the pre-existing health disparities. My colleagues and I, for instance, are exploring how social capital is related to health information acquisition from the media and health professionals, and whether these relationships are moderated by health literacy. Also, I am focusing on the mediating roles of social capital in the associations between media exposure and socioeconomic disparities in fruit and vegetable consumption. Third, I will provide more empirical evidence of the roles of social capital and interpersonal health communication in public health communication, by utilizing campaign evaluation surveys (e.g., Legacy Media Tracking Survey, Youth Media Campaign Longitudinal Survey) and nationally representative surveys (e.g., Health Information National Trends Survey).
Second, I will explore whether there are gaps in terms of exposure to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) “The Real Cost” campaign messages across SES and racial/ethnic groups. More importantly, I will test whether the effects of “The Real Cost” campaign on smoking-related cognitions and behaviors differed across SES and racial/ethnic groups. Also, using the ad purchase data capturing the potential campaign exposure at a community level, I will explore whether campaign-specific information environment may have reinforcing or substituting influences on the associations between self-reported individual-level campaign exposure and its intended outcomes.
Third, I will continue with my research on the effects of contradictory information and misinformation in the contexts of science and health. One of my ongoing projects aims to examine the indirect effects of COVID-19-related misinformation and contradictory information on protective behaviors recommended by the public health agencies. This project includes measures of (1) patterns and levels of exposure to COVID-19-related misinformation and contradictory information, (2) size and diversity of health-related social networks, types of social support, and online and offline social capital, (3) COVID-19-related beliefs, and (4) COVID-19-related coping behaviors and behavioral intentions. I am now collecting data by conducting a two-wave panel survey through the online survey firm in South Korea, Embrain.
In addition to these substantive studies, I will keep improving my methodical and statistical skills needed to validate my theoretical accounts in the most rigorous manner. In particular, I will keep learning the most advanced techniques available in Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Also, I will keep applying and modifying computational social science methods to study communication processes and effects in the digital era. My ongoing projects include (1) automating content analyses to monitor public health information environment, (2) comparing the validity of various sentiment analysis methods, (3) providing guidelines for crowdsourced content analyses of social media content, and (4) extracting frames related to major health and science issues using topic modeling and semantic network analysis.
(Updated on May 6, 2021)