On the inclusion of social media features in digital behaviour change interventions

Abstract

Digital Behaviour Change Interventions are techniques for providing targeted advice and support for enabling sustainable and positive change in people through digital platforms. The possibility for conducting large scale interventions at low cost are becoming a reality while also offering increased flexibility in terms of time and location at which they can be undertaken.
With the ubiquity of social media, there is a growing interest in tapping into the social influence prevalent among potential participants for enhancing the effectiveness of behavioural interventions. However, the lack of a consistent approach to incorporate social media features has resulted in only a limited number of interventions making use of them through non-standardised designs, making it difficult to compare the efficacy of social media features across studies. This thesis sets out the integration of social media features in a generic framework to demonstrate how intervention builders can identify, include and evaluate the most appropriate social media features into their behavioural interventions in a more standardised way. A systematic literature review was conducted to identity social media features that are commonly included in these interventions. This review, coupled with a thematic analysis of a focus group based study composed of experienced intervention builders and a pilot experiment to test for usability and feasibility, led to the development of an annotated taxonomy of social media features for behavioural interventions. An experiment to evaluate the inclusion of generic social media features in a behavioural intervention, facilitated by the taxonomy and though our framework was performed. This research demonstrated the feasibility and potential of using generic social media features in behavioural interventions with standardised designs, which will facilitate future evaluations of the impact of these features within interventions.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Weal: orcid.org/0000-0001-6251-8786

ORCID for Lucy Yardley: orcid.org/0000-0002-3853-883X

ORCID for Leanne Morrison: orcid.org/0000-0002-9961-551X

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