Health Communication Theory

Rhetorical studies of health and medicine have increasingly embraced theoretical frameworks and methods that can account for the complexities of language as social action, shifting our focus from texts to the networks, ecologies, and activity systems that shape health‐related discourse and its effects. Many rhetoricians of health and medicine are looking beyond traditional rhetorical theory and methods – with their emphases on the persuasive moves of authors in texts – to explore other means of rhetorical inquiry… that foreground interconnectedness, materiality, and movement in health and medicine.

(Scott, Segal, and Keranën 2013, p. 3)

Indeed, Jensen (2015) positioned the articulation and tracing of health‐related arguments in and through time as a major objective of scholarship in rhetoric of health and medicine, and she offered two different but related orientations for engaging this approach. In the first, research focuses on the interaction of different kinds of rhetoric across a largely chronological timeline to constitute broader health landscapes. As an example, Jensen (2016) drew from doctor–patient correspondence, oral histories, and contemporary popular and scientific news coverage to trace the transformation of language surrounding infertility and the implications of those rhetorical constructions on individuals and the societies in which they live.

In the second approach, research demonstrates how historical arguments about health percolate up at distinct, chronologically disjointed moments: “The exploration of health as it was conceptualized in even the distant past can be understood… as a valuable contribution to delineating conceptualizations of health today that may not follow a linear or rational logic” (Jensen 2015, p. 524). To illustrate, consider the notable study on mothering, media, and medical expertise conducted by historian Bethany Johnson and health communication scholar Maggie Quinlan (2019). They engaged historical texts (e.g. doctors’ notes and family papers) and present‐day social media texts (e.g. comments and hashtags) to discover how such discourses have challenged and continue to challenge and create expertise and power relations in defining the good mother. Other studies have examined the rhetorical work of genres, such as Cole and Carmon’s (2019) analysis of addiction‐related obituaries, and the rhetoric of a particular area or topic, like Miller’s (2019) analysis of fat stigma as rhetorical disability or Alderton’s (2018) analysis of the aesthetics of self‐harm (i.e. visual rhetoric) in online communities.

Zoller and Kline (2008) defined the goal of interpretive, critical, and rhetorical health communication research as seeking “to better understand interpretation and the process of meaning making … [and] to provide in‐depth understanding of lived experience or a unique, well‐argued and defended interpretation of a discourse to impart some insight into the multiple ways in which communication fosters particular meanings” (p. 93). From these paradigms, grounded theory, narrative theorizing, autoethnography, and rhetoric of health and medicine intertwine theory and method to contribute a rich body of interdisciplinary scholarship in health‐related contexts.

Special thanks to Barbara Sharf for the insightful comments that prompted the creation of this chapter and the generous feedback provided as I wrote it.

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