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The purpose of this research is to identify audience segments of Medicare beneficiaries, for the development of targeted and tailored communication activities to promote informed health care decision making.

Secondary analysis was conducted on data from the 2001 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. The 9,520 Medicare beneficiaries who had complete data on key variables constituted the analytic sample.

Cluster analysis identified four audience segments that varied separately with regard to health care decision‐making skills and motivation. Those in the active segment are skilled and motivated. Those in the passive segment are unskilled and unmotivated. Those in the high effort segment are motivated, but unskilled. And those in the complacent segment are skilled, but unmotivated. Additional analyses showed that the segments also varied on several additional variables of interest, such as knowledge, income, education, health behavior, health status, and preferred information sources. And finally, the segmentation screening tool was developed and shown to function adequately as a simple method to conduct segmentation in the field.

Future research should further examine the reliability and validity of the segmentation scheme.

This research identified four segments of Medicare beneficiaries that vary with regard to health care decision‐making skills and motivation, and developed a simple tool to conduct segmentation.

The purpose of this study is to use multiple consumer research methods to examine perceptions of theme lines for media campaigns to promote awareness of Medicare information sources.

Participants were senior Medicare beneficiaries, their informal family caregivers, and coming‐of‐agers who will shortly be eligible for Medicare. To permit comparisons among methods, both qualitative focus groups data and quantitative Q‐sort data were collected, and the Q‐sort data were analyzed using both a tailored software package and a major software package.

The two most preferred lines were “answers to your health care questions” and “helping you help yourself”. Relative preference for those two lines varied across five identified information audience groups with different age and income profiles.

Future investigations to identify theme lines for various communication information audiences within this population should also examine disabled non‐senior Medicare beneficiaries, that is, those eligible due to disability rather than age. More broadly, future research should explore the use of Q‐sort data to conduct similar analyses with other populations and for other sorts of marketing communication campaigns.

The major practical implication is the demonstration of the collection and analysis of Q‐sort data, using a major software package, to identify theme lines to target different information audiences for advertising and marketing communication campaigns.

This study demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of using Q‐sort methodology to identify theme lines and of analyzing the data using a major software package.