Kate Magsamen-Conrad, Ph.D.

Profile:


Dr. Kate Magsamen-Conrad studies health and interpersonal communication. She is especially interested in applied projects partnering with community groups to augment the potential for grant funding. Her program of research draws on traditions of research in interpersonal and health/risk communication, relationships, psychology, and persuasion. Her relational research broadly concentrates on how interpersonal communication affects personal, relational, and health outcomes. Her applied work focuses on the development and implementation of interpersonal and persuasion theory-based health interventions, for example a Brief Disclosure Intervention (BDI) for HIV+ individuals that comes out of her dissertation research. Within her information management research, she focuses on health related disclosure decision-making and the mechanisms through which researchers can apply theory in order to improve health.  Dr. MC (as she is known to her students) tends to work in interdisciplinary research teams and utilizes both interpersonal (e.g., the BDI), persuasion (e.g., the National Institute of Drug Abuse, NIDA funded Youth Message Development project, YMD, working with high school students), and combination approaches (e.g., the Intergenerational Communication Intervention, ICI, working with college students and older adults). Dr. MC has numerous conference papers including several top paper awards, several refereed publications, and several manuscripts currently in revise and resubmit, review, or preparation. She is the PI on a grant under review at the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Aging), and another under review at the Department of Education; she is a Co-I on a grant under review at NIDA.

Education:

Ph.D. Health and Interpersonal Communication, Rutgers University
M.A. Interpersonal Communication, Illinois State University

Courses Taught:

Small Group Communication
Communication Research Methods

Organizational Communication

Relational Communication

Health Communication
Descriptive and Inferential Methods (SPSS) – Data Analysis

Vitae in PDF

Select Representative Works:

Magsamen-Conrad, K., Venetis, M., Checton, M. G., & Greene, K. (2018). The role of response perceptions in couples' ongoing cancer-related disclosure. Health Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2018.1452091

Magsamen-Conrad, K., Dillon, J. M., Billotte Verhoff, C., & Faulkner, S. (2018). Online health-information seeking among older populations: Family influences and the role of the medical professional. Health Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2018.1439265