Undergraduate Survey Research in Interpersonal Health Communication

Cohort: 2016
Fellow: Erin Donovan

Each semester in CMS 330:Interpersonal Health Communication, students ask excellent questions that have not been answered yet in the academic literature. My project proposal is to give students the opportunity to collect high-quality survey data that would help students answer their questions. Students would create interpersonal health communication survey that would be administered by a research company to gather nationally representative data on important health communication topics that have currently been unexamined. This initiative would advance the learning objectives of the course because not only would students become actively involved in empirical research and social scientific writing, they would learn skills for answering stimulating questions. Undergraduates would develop qualitative and quantitative survey questions that advance a national conversation about how communication is implicated in physical and mental health. Additionally, students would have to think about how to present the findings in creative ways. These competencies will be transferable to their future endeavors. So far, students demonstrated increased knowledge of health communication research methods & reported satisfaction with the process of being involved in empirical research.