Know Your Mindsets
An Interactive Guide
Prologue
Welcome to Know Your Mindsets: An Interactive Guide for PH 322 — Communicating Health Information in the Digital Age at Binghamton University. This course is part of the public health minor, which is offered by Decker College’s Division of Public Health.
About the Course
Where did you get that information? Can I trust them? How do I know they’re not lying to me? We navigate questions like these every day — when reading the news, scrolling social media, or deciding whether to follow a doctor’s advice. PH 322 — Communicating Health Information in the Digital Age explores these real-world challenges by introducing the theories, strategies, and tools used to design and evaluate health messages across media platforms. Through hands-on projects and critical analysis, you will learn how to create messages that are accurate, persuasive, culturally relevant, and ethically grounded — while also learning how to recognize misinformation and manipulation.
At its core, health communication is about more than sending messages — it is about achieving shared understanding. Communication is the process through which we exchange information, but shared understanding is the outcome we seek. To achieve shared understanding, we must know ourselves and know others so that we can send and receive health messages effectively. This guide is designed to help you do both: by examining your own mindsets, beliefs, and orientations, you develop the self-awareness needed to connect with diverse audiences and craft messages that truly resonate.
Course Structure
The course consists of five components that build on each other throughout the semester:
| # | Components | What | Where | When | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reading | Brightspace | Weekly | Build foundational knowledge | |
| 2 | Psychographics | Survey and Reflection | Brightspace | Prior to Monday | Build self-awareness through self-assessments and reflections |
| 3 | Health Communication Topics | Slides | Class | Monday Lecture | Theory and concepts |
| 4 | Case Studies | Slides + Worksheets | Class | Wednesday Lecture | Apply theory to real examples |
| 5 | Health Campaign | Worksheets | Class and after | Wed → Sunday | Health communication campaign building |
Each week follows a consistent rhythm: you begin with the reading to build foundational knowledge, then complete a psychographic self-assessment that connects course concepts to your own beliefs and orientations. Monday lectures introduce health communication theory, Wednesday case studies apply those ideas through real-world examples and hands-on activities, and campaign worksheets guide you in building a semester-long health communication campaign from concept to completion. This structure ensures that you are not just learning about health communication — you are actively doing it.
Psychographics and Self-Awareness
A central feature of this course is the emphasis on psychographics — the psychological beliefs, values, motivations, and orientations that shape how people receive, interpret, and respond to health messages. Unlike demographics (age, gender, income), psychographics capture why people think and behave the way they do. In health communication, understanding your audience’s psychographic profile is essential for designing messages that resonate.
At the start of the semester, you completed a comprehensive Anonymous Beliefs Survey measuring key psychographic constructs. This guide presents your individual scores alongside the class distribution so you can reflect on who you are as a health communicator. Effective health communicators are aware of their own knowledge, beliefs, skills, identities, and biases (Eurich, 2017). By examining your own psychographic profile, you will develop the meta-cognitive awareness needed to:
- Understand how your motivational orientation, moral foundations, cultural values, health beliefs, and social locations influence your receptivity to health messages
- Recognize how your beliefs differ from — or align with — those of your peers and the broader public
- Apply self-knowledge to design more effective, audience-centered health communication campaigns
The next chapter explains how this guide is organized and how to find and interpret your scores.