What Is Normative in Health Communication Research on Norms? A Review and Recommendations for Future Scholarship

This journal has played a critical role in promoting normsbased scholarship. Publication of the first issue of Health Communication in 1989 coincided with the publication of the second edition of the popular health communication textbook Public Communication Campaigns (by Ronald E. Rice and Charles K. Atkin). In it, Robert Cialdini mentioned norms for action, a topic that took up fewer than three pages. It warned about the potential negative effects of a public service announcement that depicted the omnipresence of littering. Cialdini's point was to raise awareness about the potential adverse consequences of depicting descriptive norms surrounding a negative behavior. A lot of normsbased communication work has taken place since then, as summarized in a special issue of Communication Theory (Yanovitzky & Rimal, 2006). In this article, we summarize norms-based work published in Health Communication through the perspectives of theory, methods, and applications, and we propose future research directions for normsbased scholarship.