Taiwan Health Communication Research

Since the successful experience of American Stanford Heart Disease Prevention in 1970s, Health communication and wellness programs have come over the world. In Taiwan, measures taken by local government for successfully preventing and relieving kinds of outbreak infectious diseases as malaria and plague began shortly after the Japan's occupation. Since the National Government's moving to Taiwan, research on health communication has a history of merely 10 years, and whether or not health communication could finally come true in Taiwan still remains a problem. Due to its great importance to Taiwan medical news history, the author set Min-Sheng Daily as research objective of this dissertation , hoping to construct a new evaluation index for Taiwan's health communication and to give the media systems some constructive suggestions on how to efficiently manage the important topics about infectious diseases.To comprehend how as a member of information carriers the Min-Sheng Daily could build a complete set of analysis frame during the past 21 years and to find what the power of media information resources and the power of outer information resources exactly mean, in this dissertation , cases of Tuberculosis, AIDS/HIV, SARS, and Avian Influenza outbreak between 1985 and 2005 in Taiwan are analyzed with the combined use of quantitative analysis, content analysis, and agenda-setting methods, all of which are widely used in social sciences' research.It is composed of five chapters. With a brief survey of previous research on related topics, the first chapter defines the backgrounds, objectives, focus of the present study, and research methods used in our work, for example, the sample-standard designed for selection of 3,229 pieces of news and the evaluation standard for eight index. Chapter Two evaluates and summarizes the precious achievements in the field and proposes a personal thinking about the development of health communication both in domestic and abroad. Chapter Three presents four infectious diseases, i.e. Tuberculosis, AIDS/HIV, SARS, and Avian Influenza as cases. It further discusses each of the contents, with the analyses results evidenced by statistic data. In the meanwhile, each development course of these four infectious diseases was constructed. Chapter Four discusses the relationship between the media and power of information resources on basis of the statistic data of the four infectious diseases. The last chapter (Chapter Five) is about the evaluation of Taiwan's health communication. With the above studies, it gives a conclusion that Taiwan could be a good place for performing the practical acts on health communication. Besides, it also points out some remaining problems and deficiency in this dissertation.