Rebekah Perkins Crawford, Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor of Community Health
Areas of Expertise
- Public health communications
- Motivational interviewing for vaccine hesitancy
- Mental health in faith-based organizations
- Sexual violence in faith-based organizations
Expert Bio
As a health communication scholar, Rebekah Perkins Crawford uses feminist, narrative, gender, and queer theories to focus on building equity, inclusion, and engagement for health at the community level. Her early work illuminated the role faith-based organizations play in providing alternate, community contexts of mental health care.
Her more recent work focuses on utilizing social media to address mis- and disinformation, understanding the role trust and coalition building play in public health, addressing vaccine hesitancy, and utilizing risk and crisis information to support community level holistic wellness.
Dr. Crawford utilizes ethnographic, mixed-methods, and community engaged research epistemologies to understand the relationships minority populations have developed with science and medicine, and to inform culturally competent outreach messages that engage and develop trust with historically overlooked communities.