The question of how digital technologies can promote health is explored in an editorial by GW faculty Lorien C. Abroms recently published in Health Education and Behavior. Dr. Abroms and her co-authors discuss the dominance of social media in current culture and the challenge of identifying its positive and negative health effects.
Among the possible approaches to harnessing social media to promote health, they identify collaboration and partnerships between government agencies and social media companies; scholarship to identify and assess positive and negative health effects of social media; and, social media public health campaigns which are rigorously assessed and evaluated.
To better understand the issues surrounding social media and health and to discover options for the way forward, read the full-text article from Himmelfarb Library's collection:
Abroms, L. C., Gold, R. S., & Allegrante, J. P. (2019). Promoting Health on Social Media: The Way Forward. Health education & behavior : the official publication of the Society for Public Health Education, 46(2_suppl), 9–11. doi:10.1177/1090198119879096
