Poirier Josée, Cobb Nathan K
MeYou Health, LLC, Boston, MA, USA.
J Med Internet Res. 2012 Feb 22;14(1):e36. doi: 10.2196/jmir.1957.
Web-based health interventions can drive behavior change, but their effectiveness depends on participants' usage. A well-recognized challenge with these interventions is nonusage attrition or weak engagement that results in participants receiving low doses of the intervention, negatively affecting outcomes. We present an approach based on the theoretical concepts of social influence and complex contagion in an effort to address the engagement problem in a specific, commercial, online behavior change intervention.
To examine the relation between social ties and engagement within a specific online intervention. The aims were (1) to determine whether experiencing the intervention socially influences engagement, such that individuals with social ties show higher engagement than those without ties, and (2) to evaluate whether complex contagion increases engagement-that is, whether engagement increases as the number of ties an individual has in the intervention increases.
We analyzed observational data from 84,828 subscribed members of a specific Web-based intervention, Daily Challenge. We compiled three measures of engagement for every member: email opens, site visits, and challenge completions (response to action prompts). We compared members with and without social ties within the intervention on each measure separately using 2-tailed independent-sample t tests. Finally, we performed linear regressions with each simple engagement measure as the dependent variable and number of social ties as the independent variable.
Compared with those without social ties, participants with social ties opened more emails (33.0% vs 27.2%, P < .001), visited the website more often (12.6 vs 6.7 visits, P < .001), and reported completing more of the actions they were prompted to perform (11.0 vs 6.1 actions, P < .001). Social ties were significant predictors of email opens (beta = 0.68, P < .001), site visits (beta = 1.52, P < .001), and reported action completions (beta = 1.32, P < .001).
Our initial findings are higher engagement in participants with social ties in the program and are consistent with the view that social influence can drive engagement in a Web-based health intervention.
基于网络的健康干预措施能够推动行为改变，但其效果取决于参与者的使用情况。这类干预措施面临的一个公认挑战是不使用损耗或参与度低，这会导致参与者接受的干预剂量不足，对结果产生负面影响。我们提出一种基于社会影响和复杂传播理论概念的方法，旨在解决特定商业在线行为改变干预中的参与度问题。
研究特定在线干预中社会关系与参与度之间的关系。目标如下：（1）确定体验干预是否会对参与度产生社会影响，即有社会关系的个体是否比没有关系的个体表现出更高的参与度；（2）评估复杂传播是否会提高参与度，也就是说，参与度是否会随着个体在干预中的关系数量增加而提高。
我们分析了来自特定基于网络的干预“每日挑战”的84828名订阅成员的观察数据。我们为每个成员编制了三种参与度衡量指标：电子邮件打开次数、网站访问次数和挑战完成情况（对行动提示的响应）。我们分别使用双尾独立样本t检验，对干预中有社会关系和没有社会关系的成员在每个指标上进行比较。最后，我们以每个简单参与度衡量指标为因变量，以社会关系数量为自变量进行线性回归。
与没有社会关系的参与者相比，有社会关系的参与者打开的电子邮件更多（33.0%对27.2%，P <.001），更频繁地访问网站（12.6次对6.7次访问，P <.001），并且报告完成了更多他们被提示执行的行动（11.0次对6.1次行动，P <.001）。社会关系是电子邮件打开次数（β = 0.68，P <.001）、网站访问次数（β = 1.52，P <.001）和报告的行动完成情况（β = 1.32，P <.001）的显著预测因素。
我们的初步研究结果表明，该项目中有社会关系的参与者参与度更高，这与社会影响可以推动基于网络的健康干预中的参与度这一观点一致。
