History. The University of Michigan Center for Health Communications Research (CHCR), is a National Cancer Institute Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research. Together with Dr. Strecher's previous Health Media Research Laboratory (University of Michigan) and its former embodiment, the Health Communications Research Laboratory (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), these three groups have conducted research in tailored health communications since 1985.

Purpose. The purpose of the Center is to develop an efficient, theory-driven model for generating tailored health behavior interventions that can be used across health behaviors and sociodemographic populations. The research conducted by the Center aims to advance the evidence base, methodologies, technologies, and conceptual frameworks relevant to developing and implementing tailored health communication interventions.

Goal. The overall goal of the CHCR is to develop and employ a systematic, iterative process to discovering optimal population-based health communications strategies tailored to specific characteristics of the individual. This process focuses on potentially active psychosocial and communication factors of health behavior interventions and their interactions with individual characteristics.

Motivation. Our motivation is the concern that new communications technologies are moving well beyond public health's understanding of even basic message content, presentation, and delivery principles. We believe that a form of systematic, groundbreaking communication research exemplified by Hovland and his colleagues (1953) must be re-established: research that takes advantage of our newfound ability to tailor mass communications to specific characteristics of the individual.

Hovland, C.I., Janis, I.L., and Kelley, H.H., Communication and Persuasion. 1953, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.