Conceptual and Methodological Issues

Chapter 1 covers conceptual and methodological issues foundational to persuasive message design. It offers a working definition of the term message and presents a table listing and defining an initial working list of elements that constitute persuasive messages. It describes how message elements can be defined by their attribute versus variable status and their ontological status (intrinsic features versus perceived effects) and how message elements are organized into groups and subgroups. In addition, the chapter addresses several ongoing challenges in message design research (infinite instantiations, message variation reconstructability, perceived versus objective message characteristics, and relative versus absolute persuasive message effects), and it demonstrates those challenges by describing how they come into play in a published message design study.