Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Oct 18, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 19, 2018 - Nov 20, 2018
Date Accepted: Feb 5, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Text Message Responsivity in a Two-Way SMS Pilot Intervention with AYA Survivors of Cancer
ABSTRACT
Background:
Text message interventions hold promise for adolescents and young adults (AYA) with chronic health conditions, including childhood cancer survivors. However, engagement is often suboptimal. Limited research has studied mHealth intervention outcomes beyond efficacy. Understanding responsivity to different types of text messages (i.e., when a participant texts back) can provide practical, actionable information to optimize engagement in future projects.
Objective:
Within a two-way text messaging study in AYA who recently completed treatment for cancer, we sought to evaluate text message responsivity across different types of text messages.
Methods:
AYA who recently completed treatment for cancer (n = 26, M age = 16, 62% female) received two-way text messages about survivorship health topics over a 16-week period. Using participants’ text message log data, we coded responsivity to text messages and evaluated trends in responsivity to unprompted text messages and prompted text messages of varying content (e.g., medication reminders, appointment reminders, texts about personal experiences as a cancer survivor).
Results:
Across prompted and unprompted text messages, responsivity rapidly decreased and plateaued by the third week of the intervention. However, participants were more responsive to prompted text messages than unprompted messages. They also demonstrated stable responsivity to certain prompted content: medication reminders, appointment reminders, goal motivation, goal progress, and patient experience texts.
Conclusions:
Our methodology of evaluating text message responsivity revealed important patterns of engagement in a two-way text message intervention for AYA cancer survivors.
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.