Many undergraduate students are cooking for the first time, and they need to learn safe food practices to reduce their risk of foodborne illness. Social media tools are being utilized to disseminate public health messages, but limited research has been conducted to examine the effectiveness of these tools for food safety education. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a social media-based intervention for young adults to improve food safety attitudes, practices, and knowledge. Preliminary surveys were conducted and online focus groups were convened to guide design of this social media intervention. College students (710) were included in treatment and control groups. Results from pretests and posttests indicate that participation in the "Safe Eats" Facebook intervention leads to improvements in food safety attitudes, practices, and knowledge. Although students reported that they learned more from the intervention than from a traditional lecture, the combination of lecture and Facebook resulted in higher knowledge scores than those resulting from the intervention alone. Participants who spent more time on the Facebook page had greater improvements in food safety attitudes and practices.

In the development of an online food safety education intervention for college students, online focus groups were used to determine the appropriate format and messages. Focus groups are often used in qualitative research and formative evaluation of public health programs, yet traditional focus groups can be both difficult and expensive to coordinate. Online focus groups offer an alternative means of discovering the attitudes and opinions of hard-to-reach populations. Online focus groups were facilitated in a university-supported web-based learning environment (E-Learning Commons) with students at the University of Georgia, and students discussed questions related to food safety and Internet-based education. Focus group transcripts were categorized by responses to each of the questions, and results were reported in terms of frequency. Students identified personally relevant food safety messages, preferred delivery tools and strategies for food safety education, and known sources for food safety information. Online focus groups were found to be an effective and inexpensive means of determining students' preferences for learning about food safety using the Internet and social media. Results from the online focus groups were used to design a social media-based food safety education intervention to improve young adults' food safety attitudes, practices and knowledge.