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House_tent_box report

Health & Hope is a newsletter designed to educate and inspire Western Montanans on life-saving procedures, community events and services to keep you and your family healthy.

Issue link: https://blog.providence.org/i/1267568

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• Connections between homes and health. #is reframe helped people more clearly connect homes and health. For example, many participants talked about contaminants, structural problems, and safety issues as important for a large percentage of the population. People also talked about speci"c housing features, from carbon monoxide detectors to water faucet "lters, as important improvements that could promote health. • Affordability. Analysis showed that talking very speci"cally about the idea of "nancial tradeoffs can help people understand how affordability affects health outcomes without falling back on the unproductive Rising Costs and Consumerism models. Directions for Future Research While cultural models "ndings have generated a set of general recommendations and On-the-Street Interviews have yielded speci"c tested strategies for communicating about health and housing, further research is needed to identify a comprehensive strategy for communicating about housing generally and healthy housing in particular. Below, we outline several key tasks to be explored in future research: 1. Overcome individualistic and consumerist thinking. Empirical research is needed to identify the best ways of muting these dominant ways of thinking, which pervade public thinking and discourse around housing and block many of the key messages that experts and advocates wish to communicate to the public. 12 2. Expand the application of productive models such as the Open Children and Government Responsibility models. Many of the public's productive cultural models have a relatively narrow scope of application. Figuring out how to expand this scope requires further frame development and testing. 3. Identify effective ways of talking about assisted housing and health. Because thinking about public or subsidized housing is likely to bring with it unproductive models, we have recommended steering clear of associations with assisted housing when not directly addressing this issue. At the same time, we recognize that advocates need effective ways of talking about public or subsidized housing. Research is needed to determine how this issue can be most successfully broached. 4. Overcome fatalism. Fatalism is a recurring problem across social issues in the United States. FrameWorks research has shown that on different issues, different strategies are required. Research should explore the potential of different types of tools (e.g., values and explanatory examples) to cultivate a greater sense of efficacy about housing—people need help in seeing that housing issues are solvable and that they require speci"c actions. Empirical reframing research is vital to identify the best tools and strategies for accomplishing these and related tasks. "A House, a Tent, a Box": Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understanding of Healthy Housing 36

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