Comms Message Testing

The FSA's communication strategy aims to motivate positive behaviour change and help the public understand risk and best practice. Several pieces of work have been carried out over the last few years to test and develop effective approaches to comms messaging (See: 2014 Messaging Report, 2020 risk communication toolkit and supporting research)

Earlier this year, Social Science published the paper 'Qualitative consumer research to explore communications on food safety messaging (2021)'. This work aimed to enhance the FSA's understanding of current behavioural drivers and attitudes towards communicating food safety messages and how these may vary by audiences.

Four over-arching communication approaches were tested via 30 two-hour long video-enabled focus group and 20 one-hour long telephone depth interviews.

Participants from the general population were stratified by age and life-stage across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Participants from Chinese, Black African, Black Caribbean, Pakistani and Indian minority communities were specifically represented to explore cultural differences in message reception.

Participants were shown and asked to respond to up to six pieces of stimulus materials - short food safety messages accompanied by stock images, designed to test theoretical approaches to communicating food safety.

Qualitative findings were analysed using the COM-B framework and used to develop a Food Safety Communications Toolkit which provides a framework for communicating food safety to consumers.