What’s the Healthiest Day?

Ayers, John W.; Althouse, Benjamin M.; Johnson, Morgan; Dredze, Mark; Cohen, Joanna E.

doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2014.02.003

Cited by 36 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…GASO is currently celebrated close to the holiday season when the lowest cessation-related help-seeking outcomes were observed. Add to this the recent discoveries about repeating seasonal [ 25 ] and circaseptan (day of the week) [ 26 , 27 ] patterns in cessation contemplations with the greatest interest during late winter and particularly on Monday, an empirically justified date of observing GASO, for example, would be the last Monday in February. With more smokers primed to consider cessation already, the GASO may very well realize larger increases apart from any specific change to its implementation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These models are robust to the most well-known biases. For instance, the models are adjusted for seasonal [ 25 ] and circaseptan (day of the week) [ 26 , 27 ] periodicities, and trending in the data, such as declines in smoking-cessation Internet search queries as a proportion of all queries due to shrinking smoking populations or how cessation tweets may be growing as Twitter’s user base grows. Confidence bounds (alpha=.05) around these estimates were estimated using 10,000 random draws from the multivariate normal sampling distribution with mean equal to the maximum-likelihood point estimates, and variance equal to the variance-covariance matrix [ 28 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Leveraging Big Data to Improve Health Awareness Campaigns: A Novel Evaluation of the Great American Smokeout

Ayers¹,

Westmaas²,

Leas³

et al. 2016

JMIR Public Health Surveill

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BackgroundAwareness campaigns are ubiquitous, but little is known about their potential effectiveness because traditional evaluations are often unfeasible. For 40 years, the “Great American Smokeout” (GASO) has encouraged media coverage and popular engagement with smoking cessation on the third Thursday of November as the nation’s longest running awareness campaign.ObjectiveWe proposed a novel evaluation framework for assessing awareness campaigns using the GASO as a case study by observing cessation-related news reports and Twitter postings, and cessation-related help seeking via Google, Wikipedia, and government-sponsored quitlines.MethodsTime trends (2009-2014) were analyzed using a quasi-experimental design to isolate spikes during the GASO by comparing observed outcomes on the GASO day with the simulated counterfactual had the GASO not occurred.ResultsCessation-related news typically increased by 61% (95% CI 35-87) and tweets by 13% (95% CI −21 to 48) during the GASO compared with what was expected had the GASO not occurred. Cessation-related Google searches increased by 25% (95% CI 10-40), Wikipedia page visits by 22% (95% CI −26 to 67), and quitline calls by 42% (95% CI 19-64). Cessation-related news media positively coincided with cessation tweets, Internet searches, and Wikipedia visits; for example, a 50% increase in news for any year predicted a 28% (95% CI −2 to 59) increase in tweets for the same year. Increases on the day of the GASO rivaled about two-thirds of a typical New Year’s Day—the day that is assumed to see the greatest increases in cessation-related activity. In practical terms, there were about 61,000 more instances of help seeking on Google, Wikipedia, or quitlines on GASO each year than would normally be expected.ConclusionsThese findings provide actionable intelligence to improve the GASO and model how to rapidly, cost-effectively, and efficiently evaluate hundreds of awareness campaigns, nearly all for the first time.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging Big Data to Improve Health Awareness Campaigns: A Novel Evaluation of the Great American Smokeout

Ayers¹,

Westmaas²,

Leas³

et al. 2016

JMIR Public Health Surveill

Self Cite

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“…In the case of online searches related to health, one could speculate that the searches are performed mostly by adults with a specific interest in the topics, maybe because they or a loved one have been diagnosed with a condition or because they think they might have a health-related problem [ 31 - 33 ]. Some previous studies have reported weekly patterns of health information-seeking behavior; these findings have been interpreted by some as reflecting people regretting their unhealthy weekend behaviors [ 14 - 16 ] and also as a kind of “healthy new start” or “fresh start” [ 6 , 17 , 18 ]. Interestingly, in our results, the nonhealth-related queries also followed the same weekly pattern and this implies that the pattern is not unique to health-related searching and there is a need to further examine if online early week information-seeking behavior could represent a more general information-seeking behavior pattern.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sexual risk behaviors, which typically are related to drugs or alcohol consumption, have been reported to be more frequent during the weekends [ 13 , 14 ], whereas online health information-seeking behaviors seem to be more common at the beginning of the workweek [ 14 - 16 ]. Interestingly, the increased rates in online health information-seeking behavior at the beginning of the week have been interpreted as regrets or attempts to compensate for unhealthy behavior or poor choices made during the weekend [ 14 - 16 ] and also as a kind of “healthy new start” [ 17 , 18 ] in agreement with the “fresh start effect” hypotheses [ 6 ]. These hypotheses explain the increased information-seeking activity at the beginning of the week as an “aspirational behavior.” This implies that these days (ie, at the beginning of the workweek) would be when people are most motivated to pursue their aspirations or most likely to think about their health [ 6 , 17 , 18 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this sense, a Spanish website on sexual health found peaks in the number of consultations received by phone and email on Mondays and Tuesdays [ 15 ] and a Dutch website on sexual health reported peaks in their visitor rates every Monday [ 16 ]. The searches performed on Google seem to follow the same weekly pattern; analyses of the number of US searches including the term “healthy” or “diet” as well as smoking cessation queries showed peaks at the beginning of the week [ 6 , 17 , 18 ]. The analyses of the number of postings on online smoking cessation support networks also have weekly patterns, with highest activity during the workweek and lower numbers of postings on Saturdays [ 19 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Is There a Weekly Pattern for Health Searches on Wikipedia and Is the Pattern Unique to Health Topics?

Gabarrón¹,

Lau²,

Wynn³

2015

J Med Internet Res

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BackgroundOnline health information–seeking behaviors have been reported to be more common at the beginning of the workweek. This behavior pattern has been interpreted as a kind of “healthy new start” or “fresh start” due to regrets or attempts to compensate for unhealthy behavior or poor choices made during the weekend. However, the observations regarding the most common health information–seeking day were based only on the analyses of users’ behaviors with websites on health or on online health-related searches. We wanted to confirm if this pattern could be found in searches of Wikipedia on health-related topics and also if this search pattern was unique to health-related topics or if it could represent a more general pattern of online information searching—which could be of relevance even beyond the health sector.ObjectiveThe aim was to examine the degree to which the search pattern described previously was specific to health-related information seeking or whether similar patterns could be found in other types of information-seeking behavior.MethodsWe extracted the number of searches performed on Wikipedia in the Norwegian language for 911 days for the most common sexually transmitted diseases (chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes, human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], and acquired immune deficiency syndrome [AIDS]), other health-related topics (influenza, diabetes, and menopause), and 2 nonhealth-related topics (footballer Lionel Messi and pop singer Justin Bieber). The search dates were classified according to the day of the week and ANOVA tests were used to compare the average number of hits per day of the week.ResultsThe ANOVA tests showed that the sexually transmitted disease queries had their highest peaks on Tuesdays (P<.001) and the fewest searches on Saturdays. The other health topics also showed a weekly pattern, with the highest peaks early in the week and lower numbers on Saturdays (P<.001). Footballer Lionel Messi had the highest mean number of hits on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, whereas pop singer Justin Bieber had the most hits on Tuesdays. Both these tracked search queries also showed significantly lower numbers on Saturdays (P<.001).ConclusionsOur study supports prior studies finding an increase in health information searching at the beginning of the workweek. However, we also found a similar pattern for 2 randomly chosen nonhealth-related terms, which may suggest that the search pattern is not unique to health-related searches. The results are potentially relevant beyond the field of health and our preliminary findings need to be further explored in future studies involving a broader range of nonhealth-related searches.

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Natural vs. Artificially Sweet Tweets: Characterizing Discussions of Non-nutritive Sweeteners on Twitter

Batan

Radpour

Kehlbacher

et al. 2020

Explainable AI in Healthcare and Medicine

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What’s the Healthiest Day?

Cited by 36 publications

References 20 publications

Leveraging Big Data to Improve Health Awareness Campaigns: A Novel Evaluation of the Great American Smokeout

Leveraging Big Data to Improve Health Awareness Campaigns: A Novel Evaluation of the Great American Smokeout

Is There a Weekly Pattern for Health Searches on Wikipedia and Is the Pattern Unique to Health Topics?

Natural vs. Artificially Sweet Tweets: Characterizing Discussions of Non-nutritive Sweeteners on Twitter

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