Nutrition related illnesses remain a challenge for healthcare providers. Unhealthy eating habits have been cited to be one of the leading causes of noncommunicable diseases globally, with reports indicating that noncommunicable diseases are one of the ten threats to global health in 2019. This study investigated participants’ ratings and responses to designed nutritional messages. The instrument contained nutritional messages and participants had to read the messages and rate them on the basis of 6 items: ability, usefulness, open-minded, accuracy, convincingness, and research. Ratings for the three sects of messages (emotive, logic and combination of emotive and logic) were averagely rated as good. Results were presented as descriptive statistics as well as a six-stage thematic content analysis was used to analyze participants’ comments. Themes developed from the responses indicated that education, socioeconomic status, and credible messages were vital in making informed nutritional choices. This study concludes that message elaboration is an important component of nutritional message designs and it is vital for health practitioners and nutrition counsellors to understand their clients’ ability and levels of understanding when designing nutritional messages. This could enable clients to attend to the appeal and subsequently develop an overall appraisal of the design message content for them to make informed diet and nutrition decisions.

Keywords: Nutrition; Message Design; Elaboration Likelihood Model; Tools Of Persuasion; Noncommunicable Diseases

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Citation

Citation: Abednego Kofi Bansah. “Designed Emotive and Logic Messages in Minimising the Challenges Associated with Healthful Eating: Perspectives of Nursing Students". Acta Scientific Nutritional Health 4.5 (2020): 34-46.

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Copyright: © 2020 Abednego Kofi Bansah. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.