"This book focuses on designing audience-responsive messages for use in developing countries. Author Bella Mody explains an audience research-based methodology to bridge the cultural and informational distance between senders and receivers. The introductory background against which the author reviews the research on media effects is a historical discussion of the origins and nature of media use in national development. Mody then presents audience research as a systematic device for the involvement of message receivers in decisions concerning message design. In short, the audience contributes to and tests what the message needs to say and how it is delivered. This volume, focused on instruction for development and communication planners, as well as media workers, proposes first listening to the audience so as to determine which information the audience needs and in what form they can process it most effectively and, then, pretesting messages before they are produced in their final form." (Website Communication Initiative, 11/2007)