Formative content development and evaluation of a text message intervention for excessive alcohol consumption among university students.

Background Previous studies have highlighted the magnitude of risky drinking among Swedish students; finding that at least 50% of the students could be classified as risky drinkers [1]. Human resources are not sufficient to offer all risky drinkers face-to-face brief interventions. Text messaging is the least advanced but also the least expensive eHealth technology that virtual works on all mobile phones [2]. Thus text messaging have strong potential as a tool for healthy life style interventions since it is available on all mobile phone, the cost is low and is widely applicable to other health behaviours [3]. The objectives are to develop a new text message based alcohol intervention using a formative qualitative research approach.