Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jun 15, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 16, 2018 - Jul 19, 2018
Date Accepted: Apr 2, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A Matter of Both Quality and Quantity: A Technical Framework for Health Promotion and Intervention Research in the Social Media Era
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social media (SM) offers promise for communicating the risks and health effects of harmful products and behaviors, and thus for modifying health knowledge, attitudes and behavior. Nearly 70% of U.S. adults use some type of SM, which varies by factors such as age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Rigorous research across different SM types is vital to establish successful, evidence-based health communication strategies that meet the requirements of the evolving SM landscape and the needs of diverse populations.
Objective:
To develop and test the functional correctness of a software tool that automates aspects of production, distribution and assessment of SM messages to assess their influence on user engagement.
Methods:
The software tool enables six functions: (1) data import; (2) message generation deploying randomization techniques; (3) message distribution across SM; (4) import and analysis of message comments; (5) collection and display of message performance data; and (6) reporting based on a predetermined data dictionary. The application was built using three open source software products: PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails, and Semantic UI. To test the tool’s utility and reliability, we developed parameterized message templates (N=102) based upon two government-sponsored online tobacco education campaigns, extracted images from these campaigns and a free stock photo platform (N=315), and topic-related hashtags (N=4) from Twitter. We conducted a functional correctness analysis of the automatically generated SM messages: 100% correctness was defined as use of the message template text and substitution of three message parameters (i.e., image, hashtag, destination URL) without any error. Percent correct was calculated to determine the probability with which the tool generates accurate messages.
Results:
The tool generated, distributed and assessed 1,275 SM messages over the course of 85 days (April 19 to July 12, 2017). It correctly used the message template text and substituted the message parameters 100% of the time as verified by human reviewers and a custom algorithm using text search and attribute matching techniques.
Conclusions:
A software tool can effectively support the production, distribution, and assessment of hundreds of health promotion messages across different SM types with the highest degree of functional correctness and minimal human interaction. The tool has the potential to influence SM-driven health promotion research and practice: first, by enabling the assessment of large numbers of messages to develop evidence-based health communication approaches; and second, by providing public health groups with a technical framework to increase the output of health education messages to potentially counteract the growing prevalence of online marketing featuring products and behaviors harmful to health, e.g., tobacco products. We call on readers to use and further develop the software code and to contribute to evidence-based communication methods in the digital age.
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.