The Society and Journal published its inaugural Special Issue: Successes and Failures: Everything We Learned from Health Communication Campaigns and Programs, which includes nine peer-reviewed research papers from health communication programs in the US and around the world. It features insights from the consequences of campaigns, studies with innovative and/or robust evaluations that yielded less than desirable results, and lessons learned from crisis communication efforts. The entire Special Issue is being provided free to view for the next 30 days by Taylor & Francis. 

The Special Issue spotlights the scientific process and how scientists rigorously documented health communication failures, mistakes, and lessons learned to affect people’s health knowledge, beliefs and behaviors. The Issue offers evidence across three broad themes including making sense of scientific failures to find communication effects; existing evidence on how emotion and other factors can condition effects; and lessons learned about how campaign development and evaluation shapes our understanding of what constitutes useful health communication activities. By focusing on the mistakes, unintended consequences and lessons learned from health communication efforts, the Special Issue seeks to generate thoughtful consideration of theory and evidence building as complex, messy, and yet still able to generate improvements in health communication practice. 

The second Special Issue Call for Papers “Getting Creative: Engaging Communities through Innovative Communication Approaches” will be open for submissions by the end of April.