Jenine Harris: Understanding the use of social media in public health

WU-CDTR Featured Investigator -- Jenine Harris

Our center is pleased to introduce Dr. Jenine Harris as our featured investigator. Dr. Harris received her PhD from Saint Louis University and is an Assistant Professor in the Public Health Program at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr. Harris’ work focuses on the use of systems approaches and network methods to understand and strengthen the public health system.  She is interested in how local health departments use new media as a tool to translate and disseminate evidence about public health programs like diabetes. Through her membership in the WU-CDTR, Dr. Harris participates in works-in-progress meetings where investigators workshop current research and ideas with other center members, and she receives WU-CDTR core support for her new project.

In this project, Dr. Harris has examined how local health departments nationwide are using Twitter to communicate with their constituents about diabetes.  Educating and informing the public about diabetes and other public health problems are among the essential services provided by local health departments. Although social media is widely used as a source of health information by the public, and especially those with diabetes, not much is known about how local health departments use social media to disseminate health information. Out of the 217 local health departments across the country using Twitter, 126 were tweeting about diabetes. Health departments tweeting about diabetes were more likely to be in larger jurisdictions with more staff and higher spending than local health departments not tweeting about diabetes. Local health departments tweeting about diabetes were also significantly more likely to employ a public information specialist and were conducting or contracting programs in diabetes or in nutrition and physical activity. While there was no significant difference in diabetes rate in jurisdictions with local health departments tweeting about diabetes compared to those not, there was a significant positive association between diabetes rate and the percent of tweets about diabetes. Local health departments are beginning to use social media to inform the public about health, and about diabetes in particular; public health researchers and practitioners need to better understand the potential of this new tool for educating and informing the public.

Dr. Harris says, “For new researchers interested in diabetes, the CDTR has been an excellent partner, providing the needed human, informational, and financial resources that allowed me and my team to complete our first diabetes-related project.”

Dr. Harris is also active outside of her work at the Brown School. She just started playing tennis and is a part of a tennis team. Their team won the St. Louis area tournament and went to regionals in Des Moines this summer. They didn’t win but had fun visiting the Iowa State Fair and seeing the Butter Cow.