Using social marketing for the promotion of cognitive health: a scoping review protocol

The use of social marketing strategies to induce the promotion of cognitive health has received little attention in research. The objective of this scoping review is twofold: (i) to identify the social marketing strategies that have been used in recent years to initiate and maintain health-promoting behaviour; (ii) to advance research in this area to inform policy and practice on how to best make use of these strategies to promote cognitive health.

We will use the five-stage methodological framework of Arksey and O'Malley. Articles in English published since 2010 will be searched in electronic databases (the Cochrane Library, DoPHER, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, PsycInfo, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus). Quantitative and qualitative study designs as well as reviews will be considered. We will include those articles that report the design, implementation, outcomes and evaluation of programmes and interventions concerning social marketing and/or health promotion and/or promotion of cognitive health. Grey literature will not be searched. Two independent reviewers will assess in detail the abstracts and full text of selected citations against the inclusion criteria. A Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses flowchart for Scoping Reviews will be used to illustrate the process of article selection. We will use a data extraction form, present the results through narrative synthesis and discuss them in relation to the scoping review research questions.

Ethics approval is not required for conducting this scoping review. The results of the review will be the first step to advance a conceptual framework, which contributes to the development of interventions targeting the promotion of cognitive health. The results will be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. They will also be disseminated to key stakeholders in the field of the promotion of cognitive health.