Special Issue Editor’s Essay: Advancing Public Health Crisis and Risk Theory and Practice via Innovative and Inclusive Research on COVID-19 Communication

Abstract

For more than a year the world has tried to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. This special issue of the Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research (JICRCR) provides an expert evaluation of how different countries have responded to this global threat. As the pandemic has fundamentally affected most of our lives in a multitude of ways, lessons learned and insights gained from innovative and inclusive research have also advanced theory and practice in public health crisis and risk communication.

Effective communication management in a public health crisis: lessons learned about COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of health communication executives

“…Third, this study was conducted in the US, where the deep dive into healthcare communication professionals' insights was lacking at the time and critically needed for US.-based practitioners. To further bridge the geographical and cultural gaps to enhance diversity and inclusiveness in theory and practice (see Diers-Lawson and Meißner, 2021a, b; Jin et al ., 2021a, b), future studies, guided by the contingency theory and using in-depth interviews with communication executives in non-US countries beyond agencies/consultancies, will need to be conducted.…”

“…Previous research has found that external culture, including political and social environment (i.e. degree of political/social support of business, see Cameron, 1997; Jin et al ., 2021a, b), is the most influential external factor when studying the actions of communicators in a health crisis (Li et al ., 2010). Through a survey, Li et al (2010) were able to understand how Chinese practitioners perceive factors as relative to public relations practice.…”

“…For this study, given the complexity of COVID-19 as a public crisis and the dynamics in the process of managing communication about COVID-19 (Nowak and Greenwell, 2021), the contingency theory of strategic conflict management, a theory specialized in untangling the complexity in organizational communication management decision making (e.g. Jin et al ., 2021a, b) driven by internal and external factors (Cancel et al ., 1997), is applied as the primary framework to guide the questions and deductive analysis. In the health context, the contingency theory has been used to examine health communication coverage (Lumpkins et al ., 2010) and how stakeholders expected and evaluated how organizations responded to a public health crisis (Kim and Jin, 2020).…”

Editor’s Essay: The Multi-Disciplinary and Diverse Field of Crisis and Risk Communication Research

“…The geographic expansion of the field we discussed in the editor's essay from volume 4 issue 1 (Diers-Lawson & Meißner, 2021) and the special issue on COVID-19 (Jin et al, 2021) highlights the growth and expansion of crisis and risk communication research. Therefore, in this issue we highlight the diverse research perspectives and foci in the field of crisis and risk communication with the five articles that have been included in the issue and argue that the field is much more than many assume it to be.…”