On the way to a healthier lifestyle. The development of narrative health interventions for truck drivers

Compared to other professional groups, truck drivers are a low SES group with a relatively unhealthy lifestyle and relatively poor health outcomes. From an analysis of current health interventions aimed at truck drivers, it appears that designers assume that their unhealthy behavior is caused by a lack of motivation to change their unhealthy lifestyle, and that the most effective strategy is to underscore the undesirable consequences of the current behavior as well as the desirable ones of the recommended behavior. This leads to persuasive messages that pose relatively high demands on the target group’s cognitive capabilities: hidden premises must be inferred, and the applied argumentation scheme must be identified in order to estimate the arguments’ strength. For members of the target group, such argumentative interventions may be too complex. Moreover, many of the target group are already motivated. Many truck drivers wish to live a healthier life, but do not know how to overcome obstacles in their work and private contexts, thus lacking a bridge between intending and acting. We conducted an experiment to investigate the possibilities of narrative health interventions for this target group. The results of this experiment suggest that narrative health interventions may be an effective communication strategy for lower SES target groups