Many studies of the effectiveness of public health information already exist but communication of public health messages to people with English as an additional language has been highlighted as an area of research interest (ARI) by the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, and there have been calls for studies to identify effective strategies for ensuring that public health messaging reaches all members of society equally. The proposed project therefore uses corpus linguistics and image and video processing tools to examine the phraseology and imagery of public health information in order to understand how linguistic and visual representations combine to shape COVID-19 public health information messages. It then explores the reception of these messages by identifying their perceived effects on EAL speakers in the UK via online focus group discussions. The project combines work in Applied Linguistics, Communication and Media, Computer Science, Epidemiology, and Public Health and responds to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences research themes of Digital Humanities and Health, Medicine and Technology.
Researchers: David Oakey, Christian Jones (English), Kay O'Halloran (Communications and Media), Gautam Pal, Minhao Jin (Computer Science), John Tulloch (Institute of Infection and Global Health), Kate Fleming (Institute of Population Health Sciences), Nathan Bray (School of Health Sciences, Bangor University)
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