Revised Family Communication Patterns Theory for Health Behaviour and Infodemic Management in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Afro-Centric Reconceptualisation

Abstract: Koerner and Fitzpatrick"s Revised Family Communication Patterns (RFCP) addresses the impact of communication within a family setting on individual health behaviours; a critical concept within health communication. Nonetheless, the RFCP is shaped by a Western family normative bias. This limits its applicability to Sub-Saharan African settings, where family structures are anchored to extensive kinship. This paper critically evaluates the applicability of RFCP to African health contexts, reconceptualising conformity and conversation orientations and redefining the concepts of „parents" and „family" within these African settings. The paper proposes a health intervention framework that integrates the reconceptualised RFCP with the Integrative Model of Behavioural Prediction (IMBP). This integration demonstrates how family communication patterns shape attitudes, perceived norms, and self-efficacy in relation to health behaviours. With empirical evidence from Cameroon and Nigeria, establishing family networks as one of the most trusted sources of health information in Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper advances implications for intervention design, engaging with the family as a communicative unit. This approach to community engagement in health communication is informed by the Ubuntu philosophy. The paper also highlights the potential implications for infodemic management. This paper contributes to the decolonisation of health, challenges individual-level approaches to health communication, and positions the extended kinship network as the normative communicative unit for Sub-Saharan African health communication.