BACKGROUND: Health messages are crucial to the field of public health in effecting behavior change, but little research is available to assist writers in composing the overall structure of a message. In order to develop software to assist non-expert message writers in constructing effective messages, the structure of existing health messages must be understood, and an appropriate method for analyzing health message structure developed. METHODS: 72 messages from expert sources were used for development of the method, which was then tested for reproducibility using ten randomly selected health messages. Four raters analyzed the messages and inter-coder agreement was calculated. RESULTS: A method for analyzing the structure of the messages was developed using sublanguage analysis and discourse analysis. Overall kappa between four coders was 0.69, demonstrating "substantial agreement." CONCLUSION: A novel framework for characterizing health message structure and a method for analyzing messages appears to be reproducible.
BACKGROUND: Health messages are crucial to the field of public health in effecting behavior change, but little research is available to assist writers in composing the overall structure of a message. In order to develop software to assist non-expert message writers in constructing effective messages, the structure of existing health messages must be understood, and an appropriate method for analyzing health message structure developed. METHODS: 72 messages from expert sources were used for development of the method, which was then tested for reproducibility using ten randomly selected health messages. Four raters analyzed the messages and inter-coder agreement was calculated. RESULTS: A method for analyzing the structure of the messages was developed using sublanguage analysis and discourse analysis. Overall kappa between four coders was 0.69, demonstrating "substantial agreement." CONCLUSION: A novel framework for characterizing health message structure and a method for analyzing messages appears to be reproducible.