Leveraging Self-Affirmation to Improve Behavior Change: A Mobile Health App Experiment
| Autor: | Michael Silva, Aaron Springer, Lester D. Nelson, Anusha Venkatakrishnan, Shiwali Mohan, Peter Pirolli |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
attrition
behavior change 020205 medical informatics Applied psychology education Psychological intervention Health Informatics Context (language use) 02 engineering and technology Information technology Affect (psychology) 03 medical and health sciences health behavior Intervention (counseling) 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering medicine Attrition adherence mHealth Original Paper 030505 public health Self-affirmation Behavior change medicine.disease T58.5-58.64 humanities 3. Good health self-affirmation treatment adherence and compliance telemedicine Public aspects of medicine RA1-1270 0305 other medical science Psychology |
| Zdroj: | JMIR mHealth and uHealth, Vol 6, Iss 7, p e157 (2018) JMIR mHealth and uHealth |
| ISSN: | 2291-5222 |
| Popis: | BackgroundmHealth interventions can help to improve the physical well-being of participants. Unfortunately, mHealth interventions often have low adherence and high attrition. One possible way to increase adherence is instructing participants to complete self-affirmation exercises. Self-affirmation exercises have been effective in increasing many types of positive behaviors. However, self-affirmation exercises often involve extensive essay writing, a task that is not easy to complete on mobile platforms. ObjectiveThis study aimed to adapt a self-affirmation exercise to a form better suited for delivery through a mobile app targeting healthy eating behaviors, and to test the effect of differing self-affirmation doses on adherence to behavior change goals over time. MethodsWe examined how varied self-affirmation doses affected behavior change in an mHealth app targeting healthy eating that participants used for 28 days. We divided participants into the 4 total conditions using a 2×2 factorial design. The first independent variable was whether the participant received an initial self-affirmation exercise. The second independent variable was whether the participant received ongoing booster self-affirmations throughout the 28-day study. To examine possible mechanisms through which self-affirmation may cause positive behavior change, we analyzed three aspects of self-affirmation effects in our research. First, we analyzed how adherence was affected by self-affirmation exercises. Second, we analyzed whether self-affirmation exercises reduced attrition rates from the app. Third, we examined a model for self-affirmation behavior change. ResultsAnalysis of 3556 observations from 127 participants indicated that higher doses of self-affirmation resulted in improved adherence to mHealth intervention goals (coefficient 1.42, SE 0.71, P=.04). This increased adherence did not seem to translate to a decrease in participant attrition (P value range .61-.96), although our definition of attrition was conservative. Finally, we examined the mechanisms by which self-affirmation may have affected intentions of behavior change; we built a model of intention (R2=.39, P |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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