Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: May 24, 2018
Date Accepted: Oct 29, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
App Behaviour Change Scale: Creation of a scale to assess the potential for apps to lead to behaviour change
ABSTRACT
Background:
Using mobile phone apps to promote behaviour change is becoming increasingly common. However, there is no clear way to rate apps against their behaviour change potential.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to develop a reliable, theory-based scale that can be used to assess the behaviour change potential of smartphone apps.
Methods:
A systematic review of all studies purporting to investigate app behaviour change potential was conducted. All scales and measures from the identified studies were collected to create an item pool. From this item pool, three health promotion exerts created the App Behaviour Change Scale (ABACUS). To test the scale, 70 physical activity apps were rated to provide information on reliability.
Results:
The systematic review returned 593 articles, the abstracts and titles of all were reviewed, with the full text of 77 articles reviewed, and 45 articles met the inclusion criteria. From these 45 articles, 1333 questions were identified, removing duplicates and unnecessary questions left 130 individual questions, which were then refined into the 21 item scale. The ABACUS demonstrates high percentage agreement among reviewers (over 80%), with three questions scoring a Krippendorff alpha which would indicate agreement and a further seven came close with alphas >.5. The scale overall reported high interrater reliability (2-way mixed ICC = .915, 95% CI 0.807-0.965), and high internal consistency (Cronbach alpha = .930).
Conclusions:
The ABACUS is a reliable tool that can be used to determine the behaviour change potential of apps. This instrument fills a gap by allowing the evaluation of a large number of apps to be standardized across a range of health categories.
Citation
