Promoting precautionary behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic: Development and validation of a behavior-change messaging campaign

Abstract

Background Designing a health promotion campaign is never an easy task, especially during a pandemic of a highly infectious disease such as COVID-19. In Saudi Arabia, many attempts have been made to raise public awareness about COVID-19 infection and precautionary health measures. However, most of the health information delivered through the national dashboard and the COVID-19 awareness campaigns are generic and do not necessarily make the impact needed to be seen on individuals’ behavior. Health messages need to be applicable and reverent to the individual in the audience. Objective In light of Fogg-Behavior model, this research aims to build and validate a behavior-change-based messaging campaign to promote precautionary health behavior in individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Intervention messages can then be targeted appropriately during the pandemic. Methods An initial library of 32 text-based and video-based messages were developed and validated based on Fogg behavior model for behavior change. Based on this model, three groups of messages were created to reflect the model’s three theoretical concepts of motivation, ability and triggers. Each group of messages is designed to target different segment of the audience. The content of the messages was developed based on resources from the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia. The validity of this content was evaluated by domain experts through the content validity index. Results Fogg-behavior model was used to segment the audience into three different groups based on their perceived ability and motivation. The three groups of messages designed for those groups were found relevant to Fogg theoretical concepts. Thirteen professional health care workers (n = 13) evaluated the content of the message libraries in Arabic and English. Thirty-two messages were found to have acceptable content validity (I-CVI = 0.87). Conclusions This research introduced Fogg Behavior Model as a behavior change model to develop targeted messages for three groups of the audience based on their motivation and ability level toward maintaining precautionary behavior during the pandemic. This targeted awareness messaging campaign can be utilized by health authorities to raise individuals' awareness about the precautionary measures that should be taken, maintain these measures and hence help in reducing the number of positive cases in the city of Jeddah.

Utilizing geospatial intelligence and user modeling to allow for a customized health awareness campaign during the pandemic: The case of COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia

“…This research provides a proof of concept in terms of how to create a customized awareness health campaign during a pandemic, in this case involving Covid-19 (2020–2022), by creating a map based on the geospatial intelligence technique. The next phase will involve combining the messages created in phase 1 of this project [1] with the visualized map from the second phase (as described in this paper) to send actual messages to users in infected districts and measure the impact of these customized messages. The combination of the two phases can be visualized in Fig.…”

“…The first phase of this study aimed to customize the messaging campaign based on the motivation and ability of individuals [1] . This research paper represents the second phase, which aims to add another layer of customization, which involves situational location-aware segments to separately target the local citizens of each district.…”

Investigating the intention of purchasing private pension scheme based on an integrated FBM-UTAUT model: The case of China

“…This factor has drawn researchers’ attention recently in public health related contexts. Alrige et al (2021) reckoned that anticipation is the most critical motivator in a precautionary health behavior study during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Agha (2022) reported a behavior study on COVID-19 vaccination. The researchers discovered that people with a higher anticipation are more likely to adopt a behavior.…”

A new theoretical engagement framework for citizen science projects: using a multi-temporal approach to address long-term public engagement challenges

“…The FBM proposes that after experiencing the trigger, people with sufficiently high levels of motivation and ability will perform the behaviour. FBM has been widely used in technology design [22,[28][29][30][31][32] and is starting to be applied in social marketing campaigns in public health [33][34][35][36][37][38]. The FBM may be a valuable tool for citizen science projects aiming to change individual behaviour, collecting biodiversity observations in our case [23].…”