To spread important messages about teen mental health, make community connections
After creating memes and TikToks with Philly high schoolers, Jeffrey Fishman’s honors thesis explores how those messages can effectively reach their audience.
For a class during his third year, communication major Jeffrey Fishman in the College of Arts and Sciences worked with high school students to identify a health problem faced by their peers and create positive messages that would resonate with today’s teenagers.
Over the course of the semester, Fishman and his classmates used the Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) structure to help the student interns create health messages to reach their peers in the form of meme graphics and TikTok videos.
Fishman noticed that despite their work, every group in the class faced the same sticking point: getting eyes on their messages.
For his thesis, Fishman is using health communication research methods to create a path for students to share messages about one crucial health issue—youth mental health.
Fishman’s thesis is dedicated to finding ways to connect Netter Center YPAR programs focused on mental health with communication infrastructure in West Philadelphia, especially communication “power bases,” namely local news outlets and community organizations.
He has been interviewing representatives from these power bases—reporters and community organizers—as well as high schoolers from the Netter Center’s mental health YPAR program, and youth participants in Philadelphia programs that have had success in connecting with communication infrastructure.
From a TikTok created by the “Vaccine Champions” group in the Youth Driven Health Campaigns class.
(Image: Courtesy of Annenberg School for Communication)
Through his interviews, Fishman identified several facilitators and barriers to sharing the teens’ messages throughout Philadelphia’s communication infrastructure.
One main barrier and a potential facilitator? Social media.
“Despite recommendations from the youth participants, both representatives from community-based organizations and journalists expressed concerns surrounding social media use,” he says. “Representatives from community-based organizations were concerned that intergenerational interactions on social media would feel forced and inauthentic, while journalists worried about invading youth spaces on social media.”
Getting the Philadelphia communication infrastructure on the same page about social media could be key to improving the Netter Center YPAR program, he says. Community power bases should be willing to meet people where they are, and that’s on social media.
Griffin Pitt, right, works with two other student researchers to test the conductivity, total dissolved solids, salinity, and temperature of water below a sand dam in Kenya.
Griffin Pitt’s upbringing made her passionate about water access and pollution, and Penn has given her the opportunity to explore these issues back home in North Carolina and abroad.
Helping robots work together to explore the Moon and Mars
Penn Engineers, NASA, and five other universities tested robotic systems designed to help unmanned explorers cooperate in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, paving the way for Moon and Mars exploration.
From framework to actions: Provost John L. Jackson Jr. talks Penn Forward
In a Q&A, Provost John L. Jackson Jr. explains the relationship between the strategic framework In Principle and Practice and Penn Forward—a new University-wide process and action plan that will advance Penn forward for the next decade and beyond.
