As the first of its kind, a new research journal will be dedicated to publishing qualitative research in the field of health communication.

Behind the Qualitative Health Communication name are two researchers from Arts and Health who came up with the idea for the publication after themselves experiencing frustration over how the current landscape of journals view and assess health communication as a research field. With the Aarhus University Research Foundation supporting a joint research project, this became the springboard to turn their idea into reality.

"Even though many journals state that they publish both quantitative and qualitative research, in our experience our qualitative research has been assessed on the basis of quantitative criteria," explains Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger, who is associate professor at the Department of English at the Faculty of Arts, about the background for the publication.

"Communication is central to all aspects of the healthcare system. From diagnosis to treatment, from the degree programme in medicine to patient education, from social media to patient narratives, from GP consultations to the public and digital space. Understanding the complexities of all this requires qualitative approaches. We felt that what was missing was a journal for this qualitative research," explains Jane Ege Møller, who is associate professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Health.

Contributions from many subjects

In practice, the journal will be a peer-reviewed, open access journal without author payment, and Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger and Jane Ege Møller hope that the contributors to the journal will come from the research community’s in both medicine and the humanities.

"Qualitative Health Communication is aimed at all researchers who work with health communication in a qualitative way. Health communication is in its very core an interdisciplinary field, and we therefore wish to see contributions from researchers in many different disciplines – for example communication, media studies, nursing, linguistics, medicine, public health, ethics, philosophy and anthropology. All qualitative methods are welcome – from interviews and focus groups to discourse analyses, textual analyses and conversation analyses," says Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger.

A home for health communication

The journal will be the first of its kind to solely focus on publishing qualitative research in the field of health communication, and according to the two researchers, this has several advantages:

"Bringing this type of research together in a single journal will make it possible for the large number of researchers in the field to find a previously non-existent 'home' in terms of journal, since other journals are typically broader in their scope. This will allow for more in-depth methodological discussion and further development, among other things in relation to new communication technologies," says Jane Ege Møller.

The first issue of Qualitative Health Communication has just been published and can be read here: https://tidsskrift.dk/qhc/issue/view/6971

Further information

Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger, associate professor
Department of English
School of Communication and Culture, Arts
Email: matnj@cc.au.dk
Tel.: (+45) 8716 5456

Jane Ege Møller, associate professor
The professional track
Department of Clinical Medicine, Health
Email: jane@clin.au.dk
Tel.: (+45) 2291 2977