Understanding the Roles and Influences of Mediators from Multiple Social Channels for Health Behavior Change

Abstract

People become increasingly influenced by others in changing and maintaining health behaviors. Along with the advancement of persuasive technology and social networking technologies, the place where social interaction occurs has expanded. As a result, mediators who influence an individual's behavior change can come from diverse social channels. However, little work exists on what roles the mediators have and how differently the mediators motivate and affect the maintenance of health behavior changes of users through various social channels. To investigate this, we conducted interviews with 13 participants who use a running exercise application for maintaining their health behavior changes. This study reveals the roles of mediators from three different social channels, which are the social feature in the application, general social media, and the agent feature in the application. Mediators from the application could influence participants' health behavior change either positively or negatively according to the level of intimacy and the similarity of the physical condition. Social media mediators influence participants' social face and support their health behavior changes by keeping participants in countenance. Lastly, the agent mediator of the application provides continuous reinforcement to participants for maintaining their health behavior changes.

Assessing Behavior Stage Progression From Social Media Data

“…In the future we envision that this approach can be used to create a modular framework that can be applied to a variety of health surveillance topics and inform priority setting by national and state governments, by detecting trends at a timescale and with a scope that are otherwise simply not feasible. In terms of use, this work can also be combined with work that is used to assess triggers and mediators to identify potential change moments [30]. As well, given enough data, mature methods such as probabilistic graphical models can be applied to make more sophisticated predictions from social media data at individual and population-levels.…”

“…Further motivating the need for contextual, dynamic and stratified understanding of behavior, is the development of computerized and mobile health real-time and just-in-time behavior interventions has expanded rapidly in the last decade in the computer-supported cooperative work and social computing (CSCW) community in particular [30, 63]. In the field of social computing, social media data has also been shown to offer precise time information on health outcomes.…”

The Unintended Consequences of Social Media in Healthcare: New Problems and New Solutions

“…It is indeed necessary to establish barriers in order to avoid that people forget for what the system was designed. Otherwise, people may lose track of their initial goal of getting healthier, as was reported by Yeoreum Lee et al [43]. To solve this issue, we should introduce safeguards that stop people from playing the system.…”

Social Media, Youths and Political Participation in Malaysia: A Review of Literature

“…One internet-based communication technology that gains fame around the world is social media. Social media is the most influential communication technology that improves human behaviour in all aspects of life (Lee & Lim, 2015). Social media is considered the most impactful communication technology that changes human behaviour in all aspects of life (Lee & Lim, 2015).…”

“…Social media is the most influential communication technology that improves human behaviour in all aspects of life (Lee & Lim, 2015). Social media is considered the most impactful communication technology that changes human behaviour in all aspects of life (Lee & Lim, 2015). More than 75 percent of internet users utilise social media as a medium to communicate and share information (Smith, 2011).…”