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Female sex workers (FSWs) in Nepal continue to be disproportionately at risk for Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), including HIV. Due to stigma related to sex work and HIV, FSWs keep their sex work information hidden, which poses a barrier to seeking health services. Emerging research indicates a high uptake of mobile phones among FSWs in Nepal. Mobile health (mHealth) interventions can provide health information and linkage to care. However, largely missing from the literature is FSWs’ experience of managing the information about their involvement in sex work in a culture where sharing personal information and belongings is a part of the social norm, and maintaining privacy could have negative social repercussions. The current study aims to understand how FSWs perceive and manage privacy when they share their mobile phones. Using the Communication Privacy Management theory, we explore FSWs’ perception of the threat to their privacy posed by mobile phones. We conducted 30 in-depth interviews among FSWs in Kathmandu, Nepal. Results showed that all participants owned mobile phones, and sharing devices was common. Mobile phones pose a considerable challenge in keeping sex work information private, and FSWs use various communication strategies to circumvent privacy threats. The findings highlight the mental and emotional burden FSWs face trying to conceal their private information in a sharing culture. The study discusses the importance of theorizing privacy in the cultural context of the Global South and the practical implications for developing mHealth interventions for this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by crisis communication literature and dialogic communication theory, this study proposed an internal crisis communication model for the COVID-19 pandemic, considering base crisis responses (i.e., instructing information, adjusting information) and dialogic competency (i.e., mutuality, openness) as key variables. Trust in organizational commitment related to the COVID-19 pandemic was presented as a mediator. Through this model, we examined how employees' sense of belonging to their organization, relational satisfaction, and their support for organizational decisions about COVID-19 were related to the factors presented. An online survey of full-time employees in the U.S. was conducted. The study found that instructing information in the context of COVID-19 was positively associated with employee trust in their organization's pandemic-related commitment and, in turn, increased employees' support for organizational decisions, sense of belonging, and relationship satisfaction. Conversely, adjusting information had a negative effect on employee trust in organizational commitment. The dialogic competency of employers in COVID-19-related internal crisis communication, characterized by mutuality and openness, was not only indirectly related to positive employee responses through trust in their organization's commitment, but was also directly related to greater support of organizational decisions, a sense of belonging, and relationship satisfaction. Based on the findings, theoretical and practical implications were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study examines women's experiences with risk information exchange during their pregnancy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 women (aged 25–38) from September 2018 to February 2019. A non-random purposive sample of women who had given birth in the past year was invited to participate in the study. Women were invited by reaching out to personal contacts as well as through sending out a bulk institutional email, posting on mothers' Facebook groups' pages, and by giving out flyers to OB/mid-wife offices. The women represent an educated sample, and nearly half of the participants reported experiencing complications. Thematic analysis was conducted, with researchers individually engaging in open coding, and then collectively engaging in selective coding across multiple analysis sessions. Thematic analysis showed that all the women had different information preferences. Women who had a prior history of pregnancy risk reported engaging in active information seeking. All of the women in this study felt that information was withheld from them, with the exception of information about C-sections, birth plans, and genetic testing. Some women also reported that information was withheld from them when complications occurred during the pregnancy. Lastly, the data illustrate a need for verifying underlying emotions during information exchange as noted by all women. Women in this study reported varying preferences for information exchange. The women reported unmet information needs. The women highlight the need for providers to attend to emotions during information exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's family planning policy prioritizes the state and has historically silenced the voices of women in their own reproductive discourse. Unwed single Chinese mothers are in particular penalized and remain invisible in the national reproductive health discourse that promotes childbirth only within the institution of marriage. Drawing on Giddens' theoretical framework of structure-agency, thirty in-depth interviews were conducted to understand the lived experiences of Chinese unwed single mothers. Specifically, this study explored the ways in which structural violence is communicatively enacted in the interactions within institutions such as police station, family planning office and health care system; and interpersonal relationships such as family and neighbors that silence the voices of the unwed single mothers. Further the study also explored the ways in which the women enact their agency to navigate these macro and micro level constrains and limitations. The findings revealed that the women's experience of structural violence is often a manifestation of the state-controlled sexuality discourse in the social institutions and interpersonal relationships, and highlighted the women's agency enactment through employing various communicative behaviors to manage these day-to-day struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination uptake in Singapore is low among young women. Low uptake has been found to be linked to low awareness. Thus, this study aimed to understand active and passive vaccine information-seeking behavior. Furthermore, guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), this study examined young women’s (aged 21-26 years) processing of information they acquired in their decision to get vaccinated. ELM postulates that information processing could be through the central (i.e., logic-based) or peripheral (i.e., heuristic-based) route. Twenty-six in-depth interviews were conducted from January to March 2016. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Two meta-themes—information acquisition and vaccination decision—revealed the heuristic-based information processing was employed. These young women acquired information passively within their social network and actively in healthcare settings. However, they used heuristic cues, such as closeness and trust, to process the information. Similarly, vaccination decisions revealed that women relied on heuristic cues, such as sense of belonging and validation among peers and source credibility and likability in medical settings, in their decision to get vaccinated. The findings of this study highlight that intervention efforts should focus on strengthening social support among personal networks to increase the uptake of the vaccine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extends the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS) to online health information seeking in the context of India. This study considers the Internet (i.e., media) use an antecedent factor and the personal relevance factor salience is separated into two dimensions - susceptibility and severity. Structural equation modeling analysis (N = 990) tested the associations between health-related antecedents, information-carrier factors, and their direct effects on online information seeking. The results among online health information seekers in India showed significant relationships between length and frequency of media use and self-efficacy to engage in preventive behavior to the information carrier utility. As predicted, demographics have no significant relationship with utility of the Internet, and direct experience with illness resulted in negative relationship with the Internet utility. Contrary to expectations, susceptibility and severity produced negative relationships with the Internet utility. Result shows that both information-carrier factors - characteristics related to trust and utility related to perceived usefulness and relevance of information - directly affect online health-information-seeking behavior. Unlike the original CMIS that primarily focused on specific illnesses, the current modified CMIS can be adapted and tailored to general online health-information-seeking behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Singapore, the responsibility of caring for persons with dementia falls on family members who cope with a long-term caregiver burden, depending on available support resources. Hiring foreign domestic workers to alleviate caregiver burden becomes a prevalent coping strategy that caregivers adopt. This strategy allows caregivers to provide home care as part of fulfilling family obligations while managing the caregiver burden. This study aimed to investigate primary caregivers’ relationship with hired support and its impact on coping with caregiver burden. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted with primary caregivers who hired live-in domestic helpers to take care of their family members with dementia. The findings revealed that caregivers perceived the normative obligations to provide home care to family members with dementia. They sought support from domestic helpers to cope with physical and mental burnout, disruption of normal routines, and avoidance of financial strain. A mutual-support relationship was built between caregivers and domestic helpers through trust and interdependence. The presence of domestic helpers as a coping resource reveals the positive outcomes of problem-, emotional-, and diversion-focused coping. This study illustrates that coping strategies are employed in different ways depending on the needs of caregivers, access to infrastructure, cultural expectations, and available resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigated the functions of family support in older Chinese Singaporean women's daily health management in a Confucian cultural context, wherein family solidarity and women's caregiving responsibilities are emphasized. Thirty-eight interviews were conducted with ethnic Chinese women above the age of 60 in Singapore. Our thematic analysis showed that older women played dual roles as support providers and recipients in the family. Their caregiver identity and intent to preserve tradition resulted in a downward transmission of informational and physical support and their hesitance to accept resources provided by younger family members. The asymmetrical flow of family support generated mixed impacts on the women's daily health management. In their transition between tradition and modernity, older women fulfilled their family responsibilities but did not require their children to do so. Our findings suggested an integration of familial and institutional resources to meet older women's support needs and help them enhance their health behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lived experiences of women sex workers illustrate that sex work is frequently a manifestation of limited access to education, resources and jobs due to violence, oppression and patriarchy. However, some Nepalese sex workers reconstitute sex work as a viable form of work that provides food and shelter for their families and allows fulfillment of their duties as mothers. Through a culture-centred approach to research, which emphasis the voices of the marginalised and their own articulations of how marginalised spaces are negotiated, this paper offers an entry point to locating sex workers as active participants in their day-to-day lives. Thirty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with street-based female sex workers. Thematic analysis revealed the following three themes: (1) surviving through sex work, (2) financial security in sex work and (3) surviving sex work stigma. These findings have implications for health promotion involving members of this population. Lived experiences illustrate the need to move away from traditional, top-down, linear behaviour-change health campaigns to reconstitute health interventions within a participatory bottom-up approach that includes the voices of participants and is situated within their own context and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information behavior includes activities of active information seeking, passive acquisition of information, and information use. Guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model, this study explored elderly Singaporean women’s health information behavior to understand how they sought, evaluated, and used health information in everyday lives. Twenty-two in-depth interviews were conducted with elderly Chinese women aged 61 to 79. Qualitative analysis of the interview data yielded three meta-themes: information-seeking patterns, trustworthiness of health information, and peripheral route of decision making. Results revealed that elderly women took both systematic and heuristic approaches to processing information but relied on interpersonal networks to negotiate health choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While pedagogy is predominantly viewed from the perspective of classroom instruction, educators worldwide invariably play a critical pastoral role of shaping the personal development of their students and nurturing in them life skills. With the avid use of participatory media by young people in peer interaction, educators need to be aware of the attendant risks and opportunities so that they may offer counsel and render appropriate advice. To this end, through interviews with 36 Singaporean male juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk, this study explores how these youths utilise participatory media in their peer interaction. The findings indicate that for this vulnerable youth population, participatory media such as social networking sites can become a platform through which they are unwittingly drawn into criminal behaviour and post-rehabilitation, participatory media may offer an insidious route to recidivism. Participatory media complicates peer interaction by presenting risk factors such as network transparency, negative peer modelling, network seepage and network persistence, all of which have implications for these youths sliding further into delinquency and criminal activity. This article concludes with recommendations on the strategies which youths-at-risk can employ to avoid the risks of participatory media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pandemics challenge conventional assumptions about health promotion, message development, community engagement, and the role of news media. To understand the use of press releases in news coverage of pandemics, this study traces the development of framing devices from a government public health agency's press releases to news stories about the 2009 H1N1 A influenza pandemic. The communication management of the H1N1 pandemic, an international news event with local implications, by the Singapore government is a rich locus for understanding the dynamics of public relations, health communication, and journalism. A content analysis shows that the evolution of information from press release to news is marked by significant changes in media frames, including the expansion and diversification in dominant frames and emotion appeals, stronger thematic framing, more sources of information, conversion of loss frames into gain frames, and amplification of positive tone favoring the public health agency's position. Contrary to previous research that suggests that government information subsidies passed almost unchanged through media gatekeepers, the news coverage of the pandemic reflects journalists’ selectivity in disseminating the government press releases and in mediating the information flow and frames from the press releases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information behavior includes activities of active information seeking, passive acquisition of information, and information use. Guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model, this study explored elderly Singaporean women’s health information behavior to understand how they sought, evaluated, and used health information in everyday lives. Twenty-two in-depth interviews were conducted with elderly Chinese women aged 61 to 79. Qualitative analysis of the interview data yielded three meta-themes: information-seeking patterns, trustworthiness of health information, and peripheral route of decision making. Results revealed that elderly women took both systematic and heuristic approaches to processing information but relied on interpersonal networks to negotiate health choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon the culture-centered approach that foregrounds the relevance of interrogating the taken-for-granted assumptions that circulate in the dominant models of health communication on family planning, this article argues that traditional approaches to reproductive health campaigns are concerned with safe motherhood (e.g., fertility, birth spacing, hospital delivery) rather than with the processes through which women construct, negotiate, and maintain meanings of motherhood and health within their cultural contexts. In doing so, this traditional framework leaves out the broader sociocultural, political, and economic contexts of social structures that constrain and enable the possibilities for health in the realm of motherhood. The culture-centered approach notes the erasure of these voices of women from dominant epistemic structures, and seeks to interrupt knowledge production by co-constructing meanings of reproductive health through dialogues with women at the margins. Therefore, in-depth interviews were conducted to centralize experiences of the cultural participants, allowing alternative health meanings to emerge within their local contexts. In particular, highlighting narratives of young Nepalese women living under poverty, we are able to understand how women actively (re)construct meanings of motherhood within their localized cultural spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have become an important platform for health promotion. Based on the Information-Community-Action Framework, we conducted a content analysis of 1,481 Facebook postings by Singapore's Health Promotion Board. Results showed that organizational information and health benefit information dissemination were positively associated with online audience engagement. Also, organization-audience interaction had a positive relationship with online audience engagement. In addition, messages that help build confidence for health behavior change increased online audience engagement. In addition to these main effects, organization-audience interaction also played a moderating role that strengthened the effects of information dissemination and action confidence building on online audience engagement. This study offers important theoretical contributions to the Information-Community-Action Framework and has practical implications for enhancing the effectiveness of health promotion in this digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the increasing amount of new information that is emerging about COVID-19, traditional and web-based information sources are commonly used to spread and seek information. This study compared differences in information seeking, trust of information sources, and use of protective behaviors (e.g., mask wearing) among individuals in the US and China during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 722 valid responses in the US and 493 valid responses in China were collected via online surveys in May 2020. Pearson's Chi-square tests, independent samples t-tests, and multiple linear regressions were used to conduct the analyses. Results showed that US respondents accessed significantly fewer COVID-19 information sources, rated significantly lower levels of trust in these sources, and reported significantly lower levels of protective behaviors than the Chinese respondents. In both countries, trust in newspapers, radio/community broadcasting, and news portals were significantly positively correlated with protective behaviors. While trust of TV was significant in both populations, in China it was positively correlated, whereas in the US was negatively correlated, with protective behaviors. Findings from this study showed that coordinated and consistent messages from governmental officials, health authorities, and media platforms are important to promote and encourage protective behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]