Recipient Organization
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
ITHACA,NY 14853
Performing Department
Communication
Non Technical Summary
People are more successful at weight loss when they lose weight with friends or family. Our ties have a powerful influence on health, but few studies show how networks contribute to changes in health behavior. Social media websites provide new opportunities for people to communicate about health and allow scholars to understand social influence in ways that were formerly unthinkable. The proposed project will use a mobile social media app, VERA, developed at Cornell's Interaction Design Lab to study social influence of health for college students, who are transitioning to adulthood and beginning to develop a personal repertoire of health behavior. A series of experiments will show how social influence of healthy and unhealthy behaviors occurs in social networks and how stress and emotions affect this process. Understanding this process is important for public health programs and healthcare professionals dedicated to helping people adopt a lasting healthy lifestyle by providing insights about leveraging social relationships to help people make healthy behavior changes.
Animal Health Component
80%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
20%
Applied
80%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
Exploring social influence processes behind health behavior change and adoption is important to understanding how people develop patterns of healthy and unhealthy behavior and how social networks contribute to the adoption of these behaviors. The objectives of this proposal are to: Use social media as a platform for studying how social influence affects health behaviors developed by college students (e.g., diet, exercise). In particular, this research seeks to better understand how peers' healthy and unhealthy behaviors influence the health behaviors that people report using the VERA social mobile phone application developed in our lab at Cornell University. Understand how emotions and stress affect social influence processes for health behavior. This research will be important for designing interventions that incorporate people's social relationships to encourage healthy behaviors while finding ways to minimize the negative impact that peers' unhealthy habits have on behavior.
Project Methods
To study social influence of health behaviors we developed a mobile health application called VERA+, which integrates EMA methods with a social networking tool to understand how health behaviors spread in networks. VERA+ allows for tracking of health behaviors while integrating this data across users in a network, illuminating patterns of behavior between users. VERA+ users photograph, comment and rate healthiness of daily health behaviors (e.g., food choices, exercise) and share this information with peers. Importantly, given the sensitive nature of health behaviors, VERA+ allows users to share as anonymous users. Two field experiments were conducted to answer our hypothesis and research question. The first explored social influence of healthy behaviors and the second explored social influence of unhealthy behaviors. The experimental design, procedure and measures were identical for both studies. Differences in the experimental treatment conditions used for each study are described below. Experimental design Participants in both studies will be placed in a series of small, anonymous social networks (between 10 and 12 users), which included 4 to 6 fellow participants and 5 confederate participants. Participants will be told that all other users were fellow undergraduate participants from their university and confederate users appeared to be fellow participants. In actuality, confederate users will be created using a simulated profile and posts from a corpus of VERA+ posts created by participants in previous, exploratory studies. Posts will be cleaned and sent at the appropriate time of day to ensure that the health behaviors that confederates posted were realistic given time of day, year and their status as undergraduate students. Experimental treatment conditions In Study 1, participants will be randomly assigned to one of two experimental treatment conditions: 1) healthy confederates (n= 50), or 2) control confederates (n= 50). In the healthy confederates' condition, confederate participants will share posts conveying mostly healthy behaviors. Confederate posts will be pulled from previous studies and reviewed for each confederate user to ensure that they appeared to come from the same individual. Confederate users will post healthy behaviors 75 percent of the time, with healthy posts defined as those rated by former users as 2 to 3 on a -3 to 3 scale of healthiness where -3 was very unhealthy and 3 was very healthy. The remaining 25 percent of posts will be mildly unhealthy to healthy posts (rated between -1 and 1). These mild posts were included to ensure that confederate users appeared to be actual users. In the control condition, confederates will post mildly unhealthy to healthy posts from former users (rated between -1 and 1) 100 percent of the time. In Study 2, networks will mirror those used in the Study 1 with one important difference. Confederate users will share posts that conveyed unhealthy, rather than healthy, behaviors (n= 33). Confederates will post unhealthy behaviors (rated -2 or -3) 75 percent of the time and mildly unhealthy to healthy behaviors (rated -1 to 1) 25 percent of the time. Control networks (n=28) will mirror those in Study 1. In both experiments, participants will download VERA and be added to one of a series of anonymous social networks, which consist of 50% confederates (i.e., computer-generated users who appear to be participants) and 50% participants. Participants will post about health behaviors for 3 weeks. They will: photograph a behavior, rate its healthiness, rate stress level and emotion (Pollak, Adams & Gay, 2011), and share behavior with the network. Participants can interact with network members by viewing photos, commenting on and "liking" behaviors.