This creates an opportunity to have a better understanding about their effectiveness and how this differs for the various targeted behaviors. This review systematically identifies and analyzes peer-reviewed publications of DBCIs that include social media features or OSNs and target tobacco smoking, diet and nutrition, physical activities, or alcohol consumption.
Systematic Review of Social Media Inclusion This makes it hard to facilitate comparison across behaviors. Systematic reviews with regard to the use of social media features in DBCIs that have been published tend to target only 1 or 2 out of the 4 behavioral risk factors published by the World Health Organization (WHO) as leading risk factors for global disease burden, which included tobacco smoking, alcohol use, physical inactivity, and diet.
Two reviews exist that applied different search criteria, which did not seek to capture the full range of social media features included within DBCIs, including online forums, chat rooms, blogs, etc, which are not always defined within OSNs. The use of social media features in DBCIs is an area of research that requires further examination. Ī recent systematic review, which examined the use of online social networks (OSNs) in health BCIs, identified 10 research studies matching their set of criteria. Social media features have been shown to be beneficial within intervention as identified in previous research in terms of increased motivation level and engagement with the interventions, for example. The features can help enhance the overall effectiveness of DBCIs by encouraging social interactions within interventions, promoting social support, and facilitating the adoption of social norm approaches. A few examples of social media features are as follows: user profiles, groups, polls, online forums, etc. These Web-based features enable users of an intervention to communicate or share data in virtual communities.
The use of social media features may provide new mechanisms to better understand individuals’ context and behaviors. However, although many interventions focus on working at the individual participant level, an enormous amount of information that individuals share naturally with one another along with the accompanying peer support exchanged are left untapped. Using technologies such as the Web and sensor-rich phones potentially brings a tremendous leap toward large-scale BCIs. Social Media in Digital Behavior Change Interventions