Predicting interpersonal cancer talk among Black women in the United States following Aretha Franklin’s death: The role of network-level factors

ABSTRACT

Celebrity announcements of diagnoses or deaths often generate talk. In turn, talk can spur health-related behaviors. Yet, very few studies have examined interpersonal talk about cancer as an outcome of celebrity announcements about health. Furthermore, questions remain about the theoretical predictors of such interpersonal communication. The present study investigated individual and network-level factors associated with interpersonal talk about cancer among Black women following the death of Aretha Franklin. Findings from a cross-sectional survey (N = 239) indicated that more than 40% of women talked about cancer, and more than half expressed intentions to talk about cancer with their family and friends. Network-level factors (health mavenism, network heterogeneity) were significantly associated with actual and intended interpersonal cancer talk. Of the individual-level predictors, emotional reactions were significantly related to actual and intended interpersonal communication. Understanding theoretical predictors of interpersonal cancer talk could lead to better structurally centered capacity-building strategies to mobilize peer-to-peer sharing among network-engaged Black women.

KEYWORDS:

• Health communication
• interpersonal communication
• cancer health disparities
• social networks
• African American

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To us, including size makes sense for both theoretical and practical reasons. First, can we theoretically really say somebody has a heterogenous network if it is small but diverse? For instance, if I only have two friends (one male, one female), according to a measurement that doesn’t take size into account, this would be a perfectly heterogeneous network in terms of gender because of its proportionality (assuming binary gender, of course). The value would be the same as if somebody had five male friends and five female friends. By including size, the latter would indicate a high value than the former because it includes proportion and size. Indeed, Jacob et al. (2017) take this argument further and create a measure of network heterogeneity that focuses on only network size. The current measure uses both (size and proportional attributes).