Instructional Messages During Health-Related Crises: Essential Content for Self-Protection

Mediated instructional messages have the potential to enhance individuals' knowledge and self-efficacy to take self-protective actions during a food-related health crisis. This two-phased study used content analysis to examine the presence of instructions during an actual egg recall crisis (n = 566 television broadcasts). Next, these messages were used in a pretest-posttest experiment to explore changes in participants' (n = 651) foodborne illness knowledge and self-efficacy after watching a standard media message or a high instruction media message. In general, actual broadcasts only provided self-protective instructions between 3% and 17% of the time. Standard messages slightly increased viewer knowledge, but decreased viewer efficacy. Conversely, the high instructional message significantly increased both knowledge and efficacy.