Word of mouth

Hey All...its that time again where we start blogging about class and the reading woot. So we had three shorter articles which grazed the topics of health literacy and word of mouth communication. I felt that both the articles and class were straight forward and easy to understand. I think that is because we all use word of mouth in our daily lives. We praise or complain about instructors, we talk about where we buy things, we talk. So when the article talked about being word of mouth being able to essentially help or hurt...that made sense. As for the health literacy, again, I think it is something that we all have to work on. We use certain words as a part of our everyday jargon not thinking about the literacy of those around us. So straight forward...something that we need to be more cognizant of. I actually had to use the SMOG readability test when I wrote an article last summer for the San Diego Prevention Research Center, for their paper La Prensa in the south bay. And it took quite a bit of effort to get things to reach the appropriate reading level. As for the hard to reach group, I thought it was interesting the way the article demonstrated how people are typically classified as hard to reach. It could be looked at in multiple ways, but it was interesting that they looked at it as we recruit certain people from certain areas therefore causing bias on the representation of the SES and ethnicity. I really liked the quote in the article that described the cartoon of a hard to reach poor person "I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as need, I was deprived. Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was overused, I was disadvantaged. .... I still don't have a dime" I think that is very telling of the way we tend to label people, and it made me wonder how our labels may or may not affect our different subgroups...and whether these "hard to reach" groups are in actuality hard to reach or if we haven't "labeled" them or approached them appropriately...or for that matter if our labels haven't skewed our perceptions of certain populations. Just food for thought :)