JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Text messages have been used as part of health intervention research for over a quarter of a century. Given the ease of reaching people via text messages, text message interventions are important for all groups, including the Hispanic population. Text message interventions continue to show promise for improving health in the Hispanic population. Several reviews have addressed aspects of designing Hispanic-focused digital health interventions. Emphasis has been placed on the linguistic and cultural relevance of text messages in these studies. However, a gap exists in the literature on how text messages are developed and adapted for use in health interventions with Hispanic communities across the lifespan.

Objective:

The objective of this scoping review is to answer: How are bilingual text message databases developed and/or adapted for use in health interventions for the Hispanic population in the United States?

Methods:

In this scoping review, the Arksey and O’Malley framework and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping review are used. The review is conducted in five stages: 1) identifying the research question, 2) identifying relevant studies, and 3) study selection. 4) charting the data, and 5) collating, summarizing, and reporting the results. For the inclusion criteria, the population, concept, and context framework is used. The population is Hispanic individuals across the lifespan. The concept is the development and/or adaptation of bilingual text-message databases for health interventions. The context is the United States. There is no age or time limit on studies. In May 2025, we searched four databases: PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and CINAHL. Covidence is being used to collect studies. There are two phases, each with two independent reviewers. First is the title and abstract phase, followed by the full-text review phase. An author of this submission developed a data extraction tool with four sections to be used to extract data. These sections include general study information, foundational text messaging database information, elements of how the development and adaptation of the text message database were informed, and data on cultural and linguistic elements of the database. Each section will be presented in tabular format, with descriptive and numerical summaries. The fourth section will use inductive thematic analysis.

Results:

This scoping review commenced in May 2025, and titles and abstracts are being reviewed to assess further eligibility. After the full-text review, a determination will be made on which studies to include, and data extraction and results will be documented. We anticipate that this review will be completed by December, 2026.

Conclusions:

This scoping review of the cultural and linguistic elements of those databases will potentially contribute to more meaningful, concordant, and effective text messaging databases for use in health interventions in the Hispanic population. Clinical Trial: (Review, not a trial)