Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: May 18, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: May 18, 2022 - Jun 1, 2022
Date Accepted: Feb 26, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Feb 27, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Eliciting Opinions on Health Messaging During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Qualitative Survey Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Effective public health messaging has been necessary throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, but stakeholders have struggled to communicate critical information to the public, especially in different types of locations like urban and rural areas.
Objective:
To identify opportunities to improve COVID-19 messages for community distribution in rural and urban settings and summarize findings to inform future messaging.
Methods:
We purposively sampled by region (urban or rural) and participant type (general public or healthcare professional) to survey participants about their opinions on four COVID-19 health messages. We designed the survey and analyzed data following pragmatic health equity implementation approaches. Following qualitative analysis of surveys, we designed new COVID-19 messages incorporating participant feedback and redistributed the messages via short survey.
Results:
Sixty-seven participants enrolled: 31 from the rural Southeast Missouri “Bootheel,” 27 from urban St. Louis, and 9 St. Louis healthcare professionals. Overall, we found no qualitative differences between the responses of our urban and rural samples to the open-ended questions. Participants across groups wanted familiar COVID-19 protocols, personal choice in COVID-19 preventive behaviors, and clear source information. Healthcare professionals contextualized their suggestions within the specific needs of their patients. All groups suggested practices consistent with health literate communications. We reached 83.1% of participants for message redistribution, and most had overwhelmingly positive responses to the new messages.
Conclusions:
We suggest new methods for community involvement in the creation of health messaging through the use of short online survey. We identify areas of improvement for future health messaging like re-affirming the preventive practices advertised early in a crisis, framing messages to allow for personal choice of preventive behavior, highlighting well-known source information, using plain language, and crafting messages for readers that are applicable to their circumstances.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.