"Letter to my future self" as a device for assessing health education effectiveness

To examine whether a "letter to my future self" analyzed using structural topic modeling (STM) represents a useful technique in revealing how participants integrate educational content into planned future behaviors.

453 club-sports athletes in a concussion-education randomized control study wrote two-paragraph letters describing what they hoped to remember after viewing one of three randomly assigned educational interventions.

A six-topic solution revealed three topics related to the content of the education and three topics related to the participant behavioral takeaways. The content-related topics reflected the educational content viewed. The behavioral takeaway topics indicated that the Consequence-based education was more likely to generate the Concussion Seriousness[CS:23%] topic while Traditional(24%) and Consequence-based(20%) interventions were more likely to generate the Responsibility for Brain Health[BH] topic. Traditional(21%) and Revised-symptom(17%) interventions were more likely to generate the Awareness and Action topics.

Unstructured user-generated data in the form of a "letter to my future self" analyzed using structural topic modeling provides a novel evaluation of the present and likely future impact of educational interventions.

Patient educators can enhance the effectiveness of education through the application of these methods to the evaluation of and innovation in programs.