School of Information professor Mia Lustria has written a chapter titled Message Tailoring in Health and Risk Messaging that has been published in the three-volume Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. This is one of three invited encyclopedia entries on messaging tailoring that Dr. Lustria has written.

Designers of health education materials are always looking for new ways to capture the public’s attention and successfully influence their behavior.  Dr. Lustria has focused on message tailoring, which is a message design strategy, used to influence behavior and explains in-depth in her chapter how it can increase the effectiveness of health messages at an individual level.

Lustria has devoted her research to understanding how web-based tailoring has been applied in behavior change interventions and how the design of such systems can be optimized for health education purposes. One could call her an expert in tailoring. She has published several peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries, systematic reviews and meta-analyses on computer tailoring and has served as an expert consultant on this topic numerous times. Additionally, two of her systematic first-authored reviews received enough citations to place in the top 1% of highly cited papers in Social Sciences in the Web of Science.

Recently, Dr. Lustria has also proposed a Model of Tailoring Effects in a collaborated article A model of tailoring effects: A randomized controlled trial examining the mechanisms of tailoring in a web-based STD screening intervention. As one of the few studies to empirically examine theorized message processing mechanisms of tailoring and persuasion outcomes in a single model, the results of this analysis will provide insight into the mechanisms of tailoring with important implications for optimizing message design.

As the world of data collection changes, privacy and ethical questions continue to arise. Moreover, there are still many unanswered questions that require more careful testing. Dr. Lustria hopes to overcome these challenges as she moves forward in her message tailoring research.

For more about Dr. Lustria and her research, visit https://ischool.cci.fsu.edu.