Week 2 Reflection: Time to Get Creative!

I was a little confused by this week's reading, as I felt it was a little out of my realm of study. However, when we started discussing it in class, I understood what it was talking about and how it can be applied to health communication, especially our topic of sexual practices. As a group we decided to focus on the new Gardasil HPV vaccine for men that is going to be available soon. Utilizing two separate ad campaigns that focus on central and peripheral routes of exposure, respectively, would ensure that we reach a wide variety of men. I think that central route campaigns are much easier to create, whereas peripheral routes require a lot more creativity and formative knowledge about your target audience. As far as theory goes, I think this was just a review of the importance of theory in guiding one's research, but it was also good to begin to be introduced to other theories that might be more readily applied to our topic, such as fear appraisal.