Unpacking the Black Box: A Formative Research Approach to the Development of Theory-Driven, Evidence-Based, and Culturally Safe Text Messages in Mobile Health Interventions.

The quality of text messages impacts significantly on the effectiveness of a mobile health intervention. Our research underscores the urgent need for interventions to incorporate and evaluate the quality of SMS messages and to examine the mediators of meaning within each targeted cultural and demographic group. Reporting on this aspect of mobile health intervention research will allow researchers to move away from the current black box of SMS text message development, thus improving the transparency of the process as well as the quality of the outcomes.