Today’s News from the University of Kansas
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LAWRENCE — A team from the University of Kansas Center for Community Health and Development has partnered with the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department and other community organizations to track and assess the countywide public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The work by CCHD, part of KU’s Life Span Institute, is supported by a $40,000 grant from the Kansas Health Foundation.
‘Relating Through Technology’ more important than ever
LAWRENCE — A new book offers key insights on how to sustain a healthy social life through technology during COVID-19. Jeffrey Hall, University of Kansas professor of communication studies, had no idea his book “Relating Through Technology” (Cambridge University Press) would be released during a worldwide pandemic, but its focus on the intersection between offline and online communication seems more relevant now than ever.
Study examines how Vietnamese journalists use social media
LAWRENCE — Social media plays a large role in today’s journalism practices, from media personalities sharing headlines to reporting what the president tweeted. In non-Western countries, social media and digital technology are changing the face of journalism as well, but in different ways and through different platforms. A new study from the University of Kansas explores how journalists in Vietnam view their professional roles, how they use Facebook in their work and why they defy assumptions about state-run media.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected],
Researchers join with Lawrence-Douglas County Health to monitor and evaluate COVID-19 response
LAWRENCE — A team from the University of Kansas Center for Community Health and Development has partnered with the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department and other community organizations to track and assess the countywide public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The work by CCHD, part of KU’s Life Span Institute, is supported by a $40,000 grant from the Kansas Health Foundation.
“The idea of the initiative is to help the local government and public health agency better understand and support their communitywide COVID-19 response efforts — and ultimately to reduce transmission and promote health in the community,” said Christina Holt, assistant director with the CCHD, who is leading the work under the grant.
“Over the years, a focus of our center’s research has been to determine what dose of community efforts are needed to change outcomes at the population level,” she said. “We’ve worked over decades helping communities document their public health interventions. So, we’re implementing an adaptation of that same systematic methodology for COVID-19 response and recovery efforts and will use that data to better understand and shape the local response efforts and share lessons learned more broadly.”
The CCHD team, including senior personnel, a graduate student and several undergraduates, is setting up a customized Community Check Box Evaluation System to gather and interpret COVID-19 data from multiple sources in Douglas County, connecting the information to changing policies and procedures meant to combat the spread of coronavirus in the county.
“The work of the Center for Community Health and Development to document and assess our local COVID-19 response efforts is the latest in a long line of collaborative projects,” said Dan Partridge, director of Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health. “We are excited to be able to leverage the center’s expertise and learn in near real time how we can best help our community stay safe and well.”
Factors such as phased business and school re-openings, or efforts to expand testing and contact tracing, will be associated with rising or falling numbers of COVID-19 cases.
“We’re helping them track what’s changing in the environment in order to help reduce COVID-19 transmissions,” Holt said. “There are different types of outcome data that we’re tracking — like new cases from community transmission, or hospitalizations — and associating trends in that data with the onset of new or modified programs, policies or practices in the community, such as the extension of Phase Three of the reopening. Other examples include local closures of schools, implementation of contact tracing, recommendations for social distancing and prohibitions on mass gatherings of certain sizes.”
In addition to the health department, the KU team is collecting information and providing useful data back to a unified command group that includes Douglas County Emergency Management, local government, LMH Health, the USD 497 school district, Heartland Community Health Center and KU’s Watkins Health Services.
Collaborating with these partners, the CCHD will:
- Design and implement a COVID-19 monitoring and evaluation system to document activities that make up the COVID-19 response in Lawrence-Douglas County
- Provide training, consultation and technical support use of the COVID-19 monitoring and evaluation system, including capturing and coding activities, characterizing their contribution and using information and graphs to communicate patterns.
- Provide quality control of data entry in the COVID-19 monitoring and evaluation system.
- Facilitate regular sessions with stakeholders on what patterns can be seen in accomplishments and implications for quality improvement.
“We’re obtaining response data from interviews, meeting notes and news accounts,” Holt said. “We will engage local stakeholders in checking completeness of the data and engaging in sensemaking and use of the data to inform local efforts.”
The work now being performed under the new KHF grant continues a longstanding partnership between the center and LDCH. In 2013, the two organizations partnered to establish an academic health department — the first academic health department in Kansas.
“It’s essentially an academic collaboration — if you think of medical students and the kind of experience they get — the idea is to pool assets from both institutions,” Holt said. “The health department benefits from the knowledge and the expertise of local researchers, and faculty and students are able to put research into practice to improve the public’s health, including through supporting local community health assessment and community health improvement planning efforts.”
The work now underway with the KHF grant mirrors other efforts at CCHD to combat the spread of COVID-19, including a recently announced partnership with the World Health Organization to monitor and evaluate the response by public health organizations in nations throughout Africa.
Holt said it’s a trying time for public health professionals locally and around the world, but one that shows the significance of the field to humanity.
“Historically, public health has been pretty underappreciated,” she said. “Because so much of it is prevention, it’s often not seen. COVID-19 has changed that — the pandemic is directly affecting people’s quality of life so much, the visibility of public health has been raised. This is a time for public health to be supported more and for public health practitioners to really show why public health is so critical, both during this global pandemic and going into the future.”
Along with Holt, CCHD personnel involved in the work include senior adviser Stephen Fawcett, doctoral student and researcher Ruaa Hassaballa and undergraduate student Anagha Anantharaman, a pre-med student. Two other students just came on board and will also help support this project.
“The COVID-19 response impacts the lives of everyone in our community, and I value the opportunity to work at the local level to document real-time progress, facilitate the quality improvement of the COVID-19 response and support data-informed decisions,” Hassaballa said. “As a doctoral student in the KU applied behavioral science department, collaborating with partners and colleagues provides me a rich opportunity to view the multifaceted response needed to address this pandemic and prevent future ones.”
The CCHD is in preliminary talks with Wyandotte County about a similar monitoring and evaluation project and could expand work to other counties in Kansas.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
‘Relating Through Technology’ more important than ever
LAWRENCE — A new book offers key insights on how to sustain a healthy social life through technology during COVID-19.
Jeffrey Hall, University of Kansas professor of communication studies, had no idea his book “Relating Through Technology” (Cambridge University Press) would be released during a worldwide pandemic, but its focus on the intersection between offline and online communication seems more relevant now than ever.
The book explores one of the most critical questions of our time: Does the vast connectivity afforded by mobile computing and social media lead to more personal connection with one another?
One thing is certain: The pandemic fundamentally reshuffled our normal patterns of communication.
“Based on the best available evidence, prior to the pandemic, two-thirds of all social interactions were face-to-face,” Hall said. “Many of them were routine conversations at work or in communities as people went about their everyday lives. Sadly, those types of conversations are not coming back soon.”
In March, as COVID-19 lockdowns were imposed and those opportunities for routine face-to-face contact shut down, it was clear Americans turned to media to connect. The rate of voice calls doubled their peak traffic from 2019, the length of calls increased by one-third, the use of Zoom quadrupled, and social media use increased, particularly on laptop and desktop computers.
“I’m not at all surprised that people turned toward those media,” Hall said.
“Relating Through Technology” argues that you can only understand how people use personal media by understanding people’s offline and online relationships.
“Throughout history, relationships have endured despite physical distance,” Hall said, “but never before have people had to adjust their patterns so quickly and had so many options to choose from to do so.”
But just as quickly, people began to realize the limitations of computer-mediated interactions.
“Soon after lockdown began, I began hearing people talk about getting Zoom fatigue. I was intrigued because the book explored that very topic,” Hall said.
“Relating Through Technology” argues – based on original research that Hall conducted — that certain modes of communication lend themselves to certain types of interaction.
By comparing over 4,000 social interactions from hundreds of people at randomly selected moments of their days over a week, Hall found that two things set video calls apart: First, they were more energy-intensive, and second, people felt lonelier after they were over. Although Zoom has been a lifesaver in education and business settings, it’s a reminder of physical distance on a personal level.
“Although video calls mirror many of the benefits of face-to-face conversation, they also require a great deal of attention and focus, with few natural breaks in either eye contact or in duration,” Hall said.
But why did traditional phone calls soar in frequency and length during the COVID-19 lockdown?
“Voice calls have long been reserved for engaged, intimate conversations, especially about important topics,” Hall said.
Such calls tend to be reserved for close partners and make us feel more connected to one another, he said. “People need to replace what is lost.”
“Relating Through Technology” poses other important questions, such as whether social media use is bad for you and whether it displaces face-to-face interaction. It reviews both the good and the bad of technology from a balanced perspective in order to understand the role of mobile and social media in our relational lives.
Will these new patterns persist, if and when something like normalcy returns? Some of them, like intentionally reaching out to far-flung friends and family, certainly should, according to Hall.
In the final chapter of “Relating Through Technology,” Hall suggests that we must choose to routinely and intentionally keep in touch.
“As advanced as technology gets,” he said, “it doesn’t matter unless you use it in a way that nourishes your relationships.”
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Study examines how Vietnamese journalists use social media
LAWRENCE — Social media plays a large role in today’s journalism practices, from media personalities sharing headlines to reporting what the president tweeted. In non-Western countries, social media and digital technology are changing the face of journalism as well, but in different ways and through different platforms. A new study from the University of Kansas explores how journalists in Vietnam view their professional roles, how they use Facebook in their work and why they defy assumptions about state-run media.
Facebook is the most popular social media platform in Vietnam, a socialist-communist, one-party nation. It is also widely used by journalists there, much more so than Twitter, which is used frequently by Western journalists. Hong Tien Vu, assistant professor of journalism & mass communications at KU, and co-authors surveyed journalists in Vietnam about how they view their roles as journalists and whether that influences how they use Facebook in their work. They found that, unlike most Western journalists, they view a large part of their job as loyalists, or reporting positive information about leaders and supporting government policy. They also use Facebook largely to engage with their audience, in addition to gathering and reporting information.
“We’ve been talking about technology and digital changes in the West, but the literature shows there is very little information about the Global South in this context. It’s part of my larger project to look at technology in the Global South,” Vu said. “Digital technologies are having huge effects in other countries as well. Before we started this project, we saw these Vietnamese journalists depended on Facebook a lot. Not just for building a brand, but also for gathering information and reporting. That has changed traditional newsroom practices.”
Vu co-wrote the study with Le Thanh Trieu of Vietnam National University and Hoa Thanh Nguyen of the University of Maryland. It was published in the journal Digital Journalism. They surveyed more than 425 journalists working at several mainstream media organizations. The findings further confirmed the fact that they routinely use Facebook in their work, though respondents use it for different purposes, which corresponded with how they view their professional roles.
Branding was the top use for Facebook, to build journalists’ personal brand, build their organization’s brand and to increase their influence. Audience engagement was the second most common use, while reporting routines such as looking for story ideas, researching/investigating, contacting sources and spotting trends in public discussion came third.
In terms of how the journalists view their professional roles, loyalist functions such as reporting positive information about the government and its policies scored highly. While that can be expected in authoritarian countries, Vu said, it was hardly unanimous or the only interpretation as respondents commonly said they view their roles as information disseminators who get information to the public quickly; or adversarial, in which they monitor government policy and use of the country’s resources. Others reported their role was a populist-mobilizer, to report on people’s opinions or bring people’s attention to important issues; or as interpretive, to provide analysis and discussion on complex problems and government policy.
The “universal” role perceptions of being a watchdog of government and informing the public among Vietnamese journalists show media in the country are not simply an arm of the government, despite common Western perceptions that the state controls all media, Vu said. While party loyalty and media control are present, most media organizations are operated as businesses and are given input by the government as to which topics to cover and how. Social media is also changing how journalists communicate with the public.
“Regardless if you’re in a democratic or authoritarian country, social media is bringing journalists closer to the audience. Newsroom work is becoming more transparent,” Vu said. “Hopefully, that can help boost credibility. If journalists can continue to use social media to inform people about how they do their work, they can help audiences understand what they’re doing and why.”
The survey findings also showed that journalists who viewed their roles as interpretive tended to use Facebook for informing their audience and reporting, while those who viewed their role as populist or advocating for the people tended to use Facebook to interact with the audience.
The findings not only help increase understanding of how journalism is practiced in Vietnam and other countries in the Global South, it sheds further light on how social media and digital technologies are changing journalism. In future work, Vu and colleagues hope to further analyze the diversity and dynamics of media in Vietnam and the role social media plays.
“We often think that in these countries, all information is in the hands of the government,” Vu said. “With social media and its use by news media, it’s much more dynamic than that, and digital technology is rapidly changing how journalism is practiced. Previously, journalists would rely on market research or ratings to understand how they were connecting with their audience. Now with social media, they can have real-time insights on what the audience wants and to interact with them to see what they’re saying about their work and to share information faster than the government can control.”
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