{"doi":"10.2196/39697","title":"Eliciting Opinions on Health Messaging During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Qualitative Survey Study","abstract":"BACKGROUND: Effective public health messaging has been necessary throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, but stakeholders have struggled to communicate critical information to the public, especially in different types of locations such as urban and rural areas. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to identify opportunities to improve COVID-19 messages for community distribution in rural and urban settings and to summarize the findings to inform future messaging. METHODS: We purposively sampled by region (urban or rural) and participant type (general public or health care professional) to survey participants about their opinions on 4 COVID-19 health messages. We designed open-ended survey questions and analyzed the data using pragmatic health equity implementation science approaches. Following the qualitative analysis of the survey responses, we designed refined COVID-19 messages incorporating participant feedback and redistributed them via a short survey. RESULTS: In total, 67 participants consented and enrolled: 31 (46%) community participants from the rural Southeast Missouri Bootheel, 27 (40%) community participants from urban St Louis, and 9 (13%) health care professionals from St Louis. Overall, we found no qualitative differences between the responses of our urban and rural samples to the open-ended questions. Participants across groups wanted familiar COVID-19 protocols, personal choice in COVID-19 preventive behaviors, and clear source information. Health care professionals contextualized their suggestions within the specific needs of their patients. All groups suggested practices consistent with health-literate communications. We reached 83% (54/65) of the participants for message redistribution, and most had overwhelmingly positive responses to the refined messages. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest convenient methods for community involvement in the creation of health messages by using a brief web-based survey. We identified areas of improvement for future health messaging, such as reaffirming the preventive practices advertised early in a crisis, framing messages such that they allow for personal choice of preventive behavior, highlighting well-known source information, using plain language, and crafting messages that are applicable to the readers' circumstances.","journal":"JMIR Human Factors","year":2023,"id":383067,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9531,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":962581,"name":"Uzoma Charles Okere","orcid":"0000-0002-7841-4903","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1149953,"name":"Michelle Eggers","orcid":"0009-0006-1194-0032","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1149954,"name":"Catina O'Leary","orcid":"0009-0000-4779-1610","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":278525,"name":"Mary C. Politi","orcid":"0000-0001-9103-6495","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":502908,"name":"Fei Wan","orcid":"0000-0002-8311-5553","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":288244,"name":"Ashley J. Housten","orcid":"0000-0002-7379-0678","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":376567,"name":"Sienna Ruiz","orcid":"0000-0002-5206-962X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":54,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:17:25.158896Z","pmid":"36848256","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}