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Lessons Learned from Diverse Efforts to Change Social Norms and Opportunities and Strategies to Promote Behavior Change in Behavioral Health Proceedings of Two Workshops (2017) / Chapter Skim
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9 A Cultural Cognitive Approach to Communicating About Child Mental Health
Pages 89-94

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From page 89...
... His presentation focused on the rationale and methods used by the Frameworks Institute to improve communications for public understanding and policy change. He spoke about work done over the past 5 years with the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child and the Harvard Center on the Developing Child that examines how the public understands child mental health.
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From page 90...
... To summarize, Kendall-Taylor said that effective communication comes, first, from knowing those cultural models that become active when one engages people's thinking about the topic of interest, and, second, from having proven strategies for communicating one's messages. He then described the research process carried out by the Frameworks Institute to discover the cultural models that shape people's thinking about children's mental health.
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From page 91...
... According to Kendall-Taylor, the street interviews also revealed that people do not acknowledge that children can even have states of mental health. They also believe that children are little adults, which obscures a developmental perspective on child mental health.
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From page 92...
... Values Kendall-Taylor explained that values provide orientating perspectives available to members of a culture that help answer the question of why an issue matters. On child mental health, he said, values will serve the function of helping people formulate a perspective, or an orientation, that helps them see why this is an important issue.
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From page 93...
... For example, a complex topic such as brain development might be compared with building architecture using such concepts as "what happens early matters," "materials that are used matter," and "form dictates function." The communication goals on the child mental health project were to make people understand that children can indeed have states of mental health; understand that mental health is the result of the interplay of genes, biology, and environments; and understand that these positive states can be protected and promoted; as well as to inoculate against the idea that the child is responsible for or tasked with addressing these states. The researchers developed and tested several metaphors using on-the-street ­ interviews, quantitative experiments, and tests to determine how certain metaphors would either hold up or degrade to become unrecognizable when passed on to different people.
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  • changing attitudes
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  • values provide
  • architecture using

  • change public
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  • particular conceptual
  • framing experiment
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  • public understands
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  • little adults


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