Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jun 17, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 30, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Cardiovascular Health and Wellness Mobile Health Intervention Among Church-going African-Americans: Formative Evaluation of the FAITH! App
ABSTRACT
Background:
In light of the scarcity of culturally-tailored mHealth lifestyle interventions for African-Americans, we designed and pilot tested the Fostering African-American Improvement in Total Health (FAITH!) App in a community-based participatory research partnership with African-American churches to promote cardiovascular health and wellness in this population.
Objective:
The current report presents results of a formative evaluation of the Fostering African-American Improvement in Total Health (FAITH!) App from participants in an intervention pilot study.
Objective:
The current report presents results of a formative evaluation of the Fostering African-American Improvement in Total Health (FAITH!) App from participants in an intervention pilot study.
Methods:
We conducted two semi-structured focus groups (n=4 and n=5 respectively) to explore participants’ views on the app functionality, utility and satisfaction as well as its impact on healthy lifestyle change. Sessions were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and qualitative data were analyzed by general inductive analysis to generate themes.
Results:
Six overarching themes among the 9 participants emerged: (1) overall impression, (2) content usefulness (3) formatting, (4) implementation, (5) impact and (6) suggestions for improvement. Underpinning the themes was a high level of agreement that the intervention facilitated healthy behavioral change through cultural tailoring, multimedia education modules and social networking. Suggestions for improvement were streamlining the app self-monitoring features, prompts to encourage app use, and personalization based on individual’s cardiovascular risk.
Conclusions:
This formative evaluation found that the FAITH! App had high reported satisfaction and impact on the health-promoting behaviors of African-Americans, thereby improving their overall cardiovascular health. Further development and testing of the App among African-Americans is warranted.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.