Web-based tailored intervention programs show considerable promise in effecting health-promoting behaviors and improving health outcomes across a variety of medical conditions and patient populations. This meta-analysis compares the effects of tailored versus nontailored web-based interventions on health behaviors and explores the influence of key moderators on treatment outcomes. Forty experimental and quasi-experimental studies (N =20,180) met criteria for inclusion and were analyzed using meta-analytic procedures. The findings indicated that web-based tailored interventions effected significantly greater improvement in health outcomes as compared with control conditions both at posttesting, d =.139 (95% CI = .111, .166, p <.001, k =40) and at follow-up, d =.158 (95% CI = .124, .192, p <.001, k =21). The authors found no evidence of publication bias. These results provided further support for the differential benefits of tailored web-based interventions over nontailored approaches. Analysis of participant/descriptive, intervention, and methodological moderators shed some light on factors that may be important to the success of tailored interventions. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

No abstract

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a progressively debilitating neuro-degenerative condition that occurs in adulthood and targets the motor neurons. Social support is crucial to the well-being and quality of life of people with unpredictable and incurable diseases such as ALS.Members of the PatientsLikeMe (PLM) ALS online support community share social support but 2 also exchange and build distributed knowledge within their discussion forum. This qualitative analysis of 1000 posts from the PLM ALS online discussion examines the social support within the PLM ALS online community, and explores ways community members share and build knowledge.The analysis responds to three research questions: RQ1: How and why is knowledge shared among the distributed participants in the PLM-ALS threaded discussion forum?; RQ2: How do the participants in the PLM ALS threaded discussion forum work together to discover knowledge about treatments and to keep knowledge discovered over time?; and RQ3: How do participants in the PLM-ALS forum co-create and treat authoritative knowledge from multiple sources including the medical literature, health care professionals, lived experiences of patients and "other" sources of information such as lay literature and alternative health providers? The findings have implications for supporting knowledge sharing and discovery in addition to social support for patients.

Findings provide insight into the mechanisms of tailoring with important implications for optimizing message design. (PsycINFO Database Record

Past research has demonstrated that nonlinear Web presentations (i.e., those that allow viewing in multiple orders) may lead to decreased free recall and learning of factual information compared to traditional, print-like linear Web designs. Recent evidence suggests, however, that nonlinear designs may facilitate learning of the interconnectedness of the presented information. This article presents experimental data from a combined sample of college students and adults (N = 172) manipulating site design and motivation designed to test for these various learning effects and to examine the potential influence of two mediating variables: selective scanning and elaboration. The central finding is that linear site designs encourage factual learning, whereas nonlinear designs increase knowledge structure density (KSD). The effects of elaboration and selective scanning, however, are mixed.