Can we have a conversation about health if we see it through dramatically different “frames”? How do we arrive at a common frame? Do we need to?

A University of Michigan study found that 32 percent of Democrats believe that social factors — such as socioeconomic status, neighborhood safety and availability of healthy food — play an important role in health, compared to just 16 percent of Republicans. (See coverage by ABC News and Science Blog.) “If you are more liberally minded the ‘neighborhood explanation’ can be motivating, but for people who are more conservative politically, that message can backfire and make them even less interested,” says Peter A. Ubel, M.D., professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan and director of the U-M Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine. “The same information can polarize people.”

In her dissertation,  Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah E. Gollust, Ph.D., notes that the results challenge conventional wisdom that increasing publicity of the social determinants of health will lead to greater public support for health policies. Rather, advocates who want to mobilize the public might consider disseminating information about both social factors and individual behavioral causes to avoid triggering resistance.

And here we are reminded again that it is context, more than content, that makes healthy conversation possible.