Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols

Date Submitted: Sep 5, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 11, 2018 - Oct 14, 2018
Date Accepted: Oct 24, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Investigating Health Risk Environments in Housing Programs for Young Adults: Protocol for a Geographically Explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment Study

Henwood BF, Redline B, Dzubur E, Madden DR, Rhoades H, Dunton GF, Rice E, Semborski S, Tang Q, Intille SS

Investigating Health Risk Environments in Housing Programs for Young Adults: Protocol for a Geographically Explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment Study

JMIR Res Protoc 2019;8(1):e12112

DOI: 10.2196/12112

PMID: 30632969

PMCID: 6329898

Investigating Health Risk Environments in Housing Programs for Transition-Aged Youth: Geographically Explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment Study

  • Benjamin F Henwood; 
  • Brian Redline; 
  • Eldin Dzubur; 
  • Danielle R Madden; 
  • Harmony Rhoades; 
  • Genevieve F Dunton; 
  • Eric Rice; 
  • Sara Semborski; 
  • Qu Tang; 
  • Stephen S Intille

ABSTRACT

Background:

Transition-aged youth (TAY) who experience homelessness are exposed to environments that contribute to risk behavior. However, few studies have examined how access to housing may affect the health risk behaviors of TAY experiencing homelessness.

Objective:

This paper describes the Log My Life study that uses an innovative, mixed-methods approach based on geographically explicit ecological momentary assessment (EMA) through cell phone technology to understand the risk environment of TAY who have either enrolled in housing programs or are currently homeless.

Methods:

For the quantitative arm, TAY respond to momentary surveys via a smartphone app that collects geospatial information repeatedly during a 1-week period. Both EMAs (up to 8 per day) and daily diaries are prompted to explore within-day and daily variations in emotional affect, context, and health risk behavior, while also capturing infrequent risk behaviors such as sex in exchange for goods or services. For the qualitative arm, a purposive subsample of participants who indicated engaging in risky behaviors are asked to complete an in-depth qualitative interview using an interactive, personalized geospatial map rendering of EMA responses.

Results:

To date, 160 participants completed the full 7 days of the study protocol. Compliance with EMA and daily diary surveys was generally high (between 76.6% and 87.2%).

Conclusions:

Mixing the quantitative and qualitative arms in this study will provide a more complete understanding of differences in risk environments between homeless and housed TAY. Furthermore, this approach can improve recall bias and enhance ecological validity.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Henwood BF, Redline B, Dzubur E, Madden DR, Rhoades H, Dunton GF, Rice E, Semborski S, Tang Q, Intille SS

Investigating Health Risk Environments in Housing Programs for Young Adults: Protocol for a Geographically Explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment Study

JMIR Res Protoc 2019;8(1):e12112

DOI: 10.2196/12112

PMID: 30632969

PMCID: 6329898

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© 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.