Health culture

I developed the theory of health culture (culture en santé). Its purpose is to give public health communication a theoretical framework for communication that earns people's support.

Public health communication seeks to change behaviors or to encourage the adoption of new ones. Health behaviors, however, are complex and depend on many individual and social determinants. Top-down communication strategies that ignore these determinants too often undermine the effectiveness of health programs, and can even provoke hostile reactions.

The theory of health culture proposes drawing on the target population's culture regarding the health issue at hand in order to define communication strategies and produce suitable communication tools. I define this culture as 'the whole set of knowledge, traditions and beliefs, together with the forms of individual and social behavior, that influence health-related representations and behaviors'.

The health culture approach is circular: it proposes a communication strategy, plans and messages grounded in the population's knowledge and representations, then adjusts them as needed in light of how the population perceives the messages, of changes in the health issue itself (for example, new epidemiological data) or of shifts in knowledge and representations (for example, growing awareness of a risk or, conversely, its denial).

It is a multidisciplinary approach that draws on anthropology and sociology to analyze knowledge and representations, on health psychology to study the mechanisms of behavior change, and on psychology to anticipate how messages will be perceived.

The theory of health culture demands a rigorous approach, one that anchors public health communication in the social sciences as a discipline of public health. It is what guarantees effective communication in the service of public health, for ministries of health, national and international health organizations, and NGOs.