What is known?
Evidence suggests that using text messages as a platform to promote public health campaigns can be effective in promoting better sun protection behaviours. However, it is still unclear how to best design the campaign in order to increase user engagement. This study tested a number of personalised and two-way interactive text messages to measure how the texting engaged the participants.
What is new?
The Queensland study was conducted 2019 and involved nearly 400 participants aged between 18 and 40. Four different text message schedules were assessed.
Nearly three quarters of participants ‘engaged’ with the campaign, although the levels of engagement decreased over time from 82% to 61%. The overall intervention engagement rate was 71% and decreased from the beginning to the end of the study (82.2%-61.4%).
The intervention where participants received interactive messages three times a week for four weeks achieved the highest engagement rate. Increasing the frequency of text messages tended to result in lower engagement.
What does this mean?
This study has shown that for skin cancer prevention campaigns, interactive two-way text-messaging can have high engagement with young adults. Therefore, this supports the effectiveness of text messaging/mobile phone based health interventions for skin cancer prevention and addressing other health behaviours.
Contact: Peter Baade
Reference: Silva CV, Horsham C, Kou K, Baade P, Soyer HP, Janda M. Factors influencing participants’ engagement with an interactive text-message intervention to improve sun protection behaviors: “SunText” randomized controlled trial. Translational Behavioral Medicine. 2021. doi: 10.1093/tbm/ibab135.