Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jun 1, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 8, 2018 - Jul 10, 2018
Date Accepted: Jun 20, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Young peoples’ attitudes and motivations towards social media and mobile apps for weight-control: A mixed methods study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Effective prevention is critical to halt the obesity epidemic. Mobile-health applications would potentially reach large numbers at low-cost, but there is already a profusion of lifestyle apps, which are mostly non-evidence-based and evidently ineffective against rising obesity prevalence.
Objective:
This study explores preferences and usage of lifestyle apps among young people in six countries.
Methods:
A mixed-study was conducted among young people aged 13-24-years residing in the UK, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Singapore and New Zealand. Participants were recruited by an online advertisement on Facebook, asking for volunteers interested in mobile apps in general, and not specific to lifestyle or health, to complete a short survey comprised of 18 questions on demographics, weight-gain and mobile app preferences and then to join online asynchronous English-language Focus Groups. Focus groups were held during 2017, in password-protected web-rooms, moderated by an experienced researcher. Descriptive statistics were carried out for the survey and thematic analysis was applied to transcripts.
Results:
A total of 2,285 young people (610 ‘adolescents’ aged 13-17 and 1,675 ‘young adults’ aged 18-24) responded to the advertisement and completed the survey with 72.0%, n=1,645 reported being concerned about weight-gain for themselves or friends. Then, 807 young people (376 adolescents and 431 young adults) were selected on the basis of age and country to participate in twelve online focus groups, with 719 young people completing. Thematic analysis of transcripts revealed three main common themes; a) Feelings on weight-changes and weight-gain prevention apps; b) Social media apps, lifestyle apps and motivation for downloading and retaining; c) Confidentiality, data safety and data usage.
Conclusions:
Participating young people are commonly, consistently across 6 countries, concerned about weight-gain and obesity. Evidence-based mHealth IT programmes for preventing weight-gain would be well received, provided the views of young people themselves are incorporated in programme content and app design. Clinical Trial: N/A
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.