Penn Annenberg School PhD Student & Fontaine Fellow Jazmyne Sutton Discusses Her Research Interests

Jazmyne Sutton: My name is Jazmyne Sutton and I'm at Annenberg School For Communication and I'm a first year student here. My interests are mostly in health communication and the ways that people find health information and how that information influences their health behavior. Right now, I'm interested in questions of uncertainty, so when you're unsure of what the medical advice is saying, and the information you're getting is two sided, what decisions do you make and what kind of information influences your decision.

I started in my Master's program just interested in questions in communication generally, and health communications seemed like a very practical way to get those answers and really help people along the way to give them solid answers, so when people ask me, "What are you doing, what do you study?", I can tell them, "This is actually what I know and you can actually go and do this today.", whereas with other forms of communication, it seems more distant from individuals a lot of the time, so it's no large, big pieces of information that take place on the [inaudible 00:00:59] level a lot of the time, but with health communications at least the questions that I'm interested in is a lot of the things that individuals do and that happens in their environment.

My goal right now is to work more in a foundation setting, so it would be more research based. The work I wanna do in the long run, as so it'd be working with a foundation on a higher levels of research planning and evaluation of their health communication campaigns and endeavors.

I would have to say the two things that are most appealing about Annenberg are the research supports, and support in genera, and as well as the faculty. From the moment I came to campus, met with people, I just knew that this was a place where I would have the support I needed to answer any question I wanted, scholarly, academically, in those senses and then the faculty as well are just stellar. They're there to give you all the support and all the guidance you need, whether it's writing a letter of support, whether it's just answering a question for you, even though they have tremendous lives of their own, they're not too busy to answer what seem like stupid questions to me. It's great.