Measurement: Message Quality

A critical part of the field of health communication uses messages as a strategic tool to inform or persuade a particular audience concerning their or their dependents' health, with the ultimate objective to move people to sustained healthy behavior. Whether such outcomes can be obtained depends on the quality of health messages. Thus, the most appropriate measures of message quality assess changes in the variables that the message was designed to affect. However, even if such changes can be reliably assessed, interventionists rely on preimplementation measures of message quality to avoid spending valuable resources on ineffective messages. These measures should determine the likelihood that a particular message will produce the effects that it was designed to have, and are commonly referred to as perceived message ...