Amy E. Chadwick, Ph.D.
Amy E. Chadwick (Ph.D., Penn State University) is the Barbara Geralds Schoonover Professor of Health Communication in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the Communication and Development Studies Program, Center for International Studies at Ohio University. Dr. Chadwick is also a faculty member in the Translational Biomedical Sciences program and an affiliated member of the Diabetes Institute at Ohio University.
Dr. Chadwick’s research is in the areas of persuasion, message design, health communication, and environmental communication. Much of her research examines how communication messages can affect attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to health and environmental issues, such as climate change, vaccination, advance care planning, and obesity. Dr. Chadwick is particularly interested in identifying intrinsic message features that create the discrete emotion hope and exploring how these messages and feelings of hope can promote pro-social change. She has developed and is continuously refining a theory of persuasive hope that identifies the causes and persuasive consequences of hope. In addition, she is examining the effects of hope on psychophysiological markers of stress. Dr. Chadwick is also an expert in climate change communication and also studies environmental and health disparities in rural Appalachia.
Beyond academics, Dr. Chadwick has more than 13 years of experience conducting quantitative and qualitative research to inform communication strategies. Dr. Chadwick is the principle investigator on a UNICEF grant to guide the development of a national communication strategy for disaster response and recovery in Vietnam. She is also working on a communication for development (C4D) capacity-building workshop for university faculty in Bangladesh. Recently, she delivered online and face-to-face-training for the UNICEF global C4D training course in South Africa and India. In addition, she has managed, designed, conducted, and analyzed quantitative and qualitative research for U.S. federal government agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration on topics including fluoridation, food safety, teen pregnancy prevention, child sexual abuse prevention, epilepsy, and waterborne diseases among others.
Dr. Chadwick has published in journal such as, Health Communication, Health Promotion and Practice, Journal of Adolescent Health, Journal of Communication in Health Care and the Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice. She regularly presents her research at scholarly conferences, including the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association at which she’s earned top paper awards.
Dr. Chadwick teaches graduate classes about health campaigns, quantitative research methods, persuasion, and measurement. She also teaches undergraduate courses in health communication, persuasion, climate change communication, environmental communication, campaigns, and quantitative research methods.