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Developing Health Risk Communications: Four Lessons Learned

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Psychological Perspectives on Risk and Risk Analysis

Abstract

In this chapter, we summarize our research on the development of health risk communications and focus on four lessons we have learned from doing so: (1) Effective communications must be accessible and actionable to the intended audience; (2) effective communications must use an appropriate delivery method; (3) effective communications must be pretested and evaluated prior to wide-scale rollout; and (4) effective communication design and evaluation requires interdisciplinary teams. While the examples provided in this chapter focus on the health domain, we believe that the four lessons outlined here will be helpful to those who wish to implement effective risk communications to a wide range of target audiences on a broad set of applied topics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of General Internal Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Tamar Krishnamurti

  2. Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Tamar Krishnamurti

  3. Centre for Decision Research, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Wändi Bruine de Bruin

  4. Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Wändi Bruine de Bruin

Authors
  1. Tamar Krishnamurti
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  2. Wändi Bruine de Bruin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tamar Krishnamurti .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Agelab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Martina Raue

  2. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Eva Lermer

  3. Institute of Psychology, UMIT - Private University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Hall in Tyrol, Austria

    Bernhard Streicher

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Krishnamurti, T., Bruine de Bruin, W. (2018). Developing Health Risk Communications: Four Lessons Learned. In: Raue, M., Lermer, E., Streicher, B. (eds) Psychological Perspectives on Risk and Risk Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92478-6_13

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