Music Celebrities, Multimedia, and Health Education for Adolescents

Medical and public health students at Emory and the University of Virginia recently founded a new national health education program called Music Inspires Health Initiative, Inc. We are teaming up music celebrities with medical students, public health students, physicians, and public health experts in a collaborative effort to teach adolescents about HIV/STI prevention, smoking prevention, obesity, depression, alcohol abuse, and eating disorders. We will present our plans for a 2007-08 national health education concert tour stopping at middle schools, high schools, and colleges around the country. National data from our 2005-2007 focus groups and surveys with high school and college students will be presented. We are launching a multimedia based health education website this June for high school students (featuring health education messages, quotes from music celebrities, streaming audio, flash animation, and health education videos); a national health education concert tour at high schools during Spring 2008; a music celebrity health education poster campaign; and a partnership with teachers from Teach for America to target inner-city classrooms. We would like to present our health education programs at the APHA conference to help promote and publicize our innovative adolescent health education campaign. We would also like to present the research findings from our surveys and focus groups at high schools so that health professionals will better understand which health education messages adolescents want to receive. Finally, we will present several entertaining viral multimedia strategies that can more easily capture the attention of adolescents than traditional health education messages.