1: Introduction
Definition of Intervention
● A combination of program elements or strategies designed to produce behavior changes or
improve situations among individuals, groups or an entire population
● Different disciplines use different strategies, approaches when thinking of an intervention.
Definition of Intervention
● Intervention strategies: Can include educational programs, new or stronger policies,
improvements in the environment, or a health promotion campaign.
● Multiple strategies are typically the most effective in producing desired and lasting change.
● Implemented in different settings including communities, worksites, schools, health care
organizations, faith-based organizations or in the home.
● Multiple settings and using multiple strategies may be the most effective because of the
potential to reach a larger number of people in a variety of ways.
Examples of intervention methods
● Education: give lectures, workshops
● Promotion: advertise a desired behavior
● Community empowerment
● Modeling: give good examples
● Skill development: improve skills necessary of behavior
● Incentives: give rewards for good behavior
● Social support
Definition of Intervention Mapping (Bartholomew, Parcel, Kok, 1998)
● A framework for effective decision making at each step in the intervention development
● Makes planning explicit and transparent
● Facilitates collaborative partners in a multidisciplinary group
Steps and tasks in Intervention Mapping
● Step 1: What is the problem?
○ What do we know about it?
○ Prior research: what did others find about it?
○ Need assessment: what does the target group say about their own experience?
● Step 2: What are the objectives?
○ What is the desired change?
○ What individuals need to learn
○ What must be changed in the community?
○ What are the determinants of the problem?
■ Personal determinants: individual factors, cognitive factors, etc.
■ External determinants: social and structural factors
■ Who is the target population?
● Step 3: Identifying potential intervention methods
○ How can the determinants be influenced in order to elicit a desired change?
, ○ Look into prior research on these methods, where they effective?
○ Translate methods into actual strategies
● Step 4: Design program materials & Pretest material
● Step 5: Implementation of intervention
● Step 6: Monitoring and evaluation & Measuring effects and processes
Definition of Network Interventions, NI (Valente, 2012)
● People can be effectively influenced through their social network to adopt new behavior
● NI is the process of using social networks or social network data to accelerate social change,
generate influence, achieve desirable outcomes
Network Interventions Strategies
● The strategy describes which component(s) of the social network will be targeted
● Decision is based on the available social network data (e.g. sociogram)
○ Individual level: Targeting specific individuals in a social network → nodes,
influencers, opinion leaders
○ Segmentation: Targeting a specific group within a social network
○ Induction: Generating new connections among individuals, e.g. word of mouth. They
persuade others to adopt the new behaviour. Going viral!
○ Alteration: changing the network: removing / adding nodes / connections etc.
Example of MC exam question
● Word of mouth is an example of the following network interventions
○ Individual
○ Segmentation
○ Alteration
○ Induction
Example of MC exam question
● Intervention Mapping (is)
○ A framework that provides a systematic way of designing an intervention
○ Gives an overview of the potential interventions to a problem
○ Makes the designing of an intervention more transparent
○ All of the above
Example of open exam question
● You need to address the wicked problem of integrating different ethnicities in a high school
class. Plan an intervention, and structure your answer according to the Intervention Mapping
technique.
2: What are social media interventions?
Definition of social media interventions
● An internet-based intervention strategy that exploits the affordances (functions) of a social
media platform to produce behavior change or improve a situation.
,Are social media interventions more effective than traditional interventions?
● 85 studies, total sample size of 43,236 participants
● Statistically small but significant effect on health-related behaviour
● Theory-driven interventions were more effective
● Interventions that incorporated more behavior change techniques also tended to have larger
effects compared to interventions that incorporated fewer techniques
● Effectiveness was enhanced by the use of additional methods of communication, e.g. short
message service (SMS), or text messages.
Examples of Social Media Interventions
● Mostly from the field of Health
● Social media interventions in sexual health promotion
○ Wicked problem: low sexual health of young
○ Goal: promoting condom use for STI prevention
○ Method: STI prevention messages delivered via Facebook at 2 and 6 months
○ Population: Denver CO metropolitan area and in a college community in Louisiana,
focusing on African-American and Latino youth
○ Experiment: Intervention or Control group
■ Control group: “18−24 News” intended as a play on the concept of sharing
what was happening between 18:00 and 00:00 and what was interesting in
the news to those aged 18–24 years.
■ Intervention group: “Just/Us” on Facebook
○ Content
■ multiple updates each day to the page in the form of video links, quizzes,
and games
■ threaded discussions relevant to that week's topic
○ Measures
■ 2 months: follow-up behavioral risk assessment
■ 6 months: second follow-up assessment
Social media interventions in vaccination
● Three groups:
○ VSM: Website with vaccine information and interactive social media components
○ VI: a website with vaccine information
○ UC: usual care
, The use of social media for health communication:
● Increased interactions with others
● More available, shared and tailored information
● Increased accessibility and widening access to health info
○ Easy to access
○ Lots of people who can access
● Peer/social/emotional support
● Public health surveillance
● Potential to influence health policy
Limitations of Social Media Interventions (Moorhead et al. 2013)
● Lack of reliability of information
● Lack of confidentiality/privacy
● Quality concerns
● Information overload
● Self-report is the most often used measure
● Self-selection as opposed to randomization
● Losing lots of participants
Target group
● Generational differences in social media use in frequency, preferred platforms
● Gender differences in social media use in type of information searched for
● Sub-target groups may need to be addressed by different methods
Individual identity
● The extent to which the social media intervention requires that users reveal their identity
● High-identity
○ Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram
○ Privacy issues
○ Social comparison
● Low-identity
○ Reddit, Twitter, Blogs
○ Anonymity attracts trolls
Group identity
● The extent to which the SMI enables users to identify themselves with a group and relate to
each other
● What tools do you know for this on different platforms?
Definition of Intervention
● A combination of program elements or strategies designed to produce behavior changes or
improve situations among individuals, groups or an entire population
● Different disciplines use different strategies, approaches when thinking of an intervention.
Definition of Intervention
● Intervention strategies: Can include educational programs, new or stronger policies,
improvements in the environment, or a health promotion campaign.
● Multiple strategies are typically the most effective in producing desired and lasting change.
● Implemented in different settings including communities, worksites, schools, health care
organizations, faith-based organizations or in the home.
● Multiple settings and using multiple strategies may be the most effective because of the
potential to reach a larger number of people in a variety of ways.
Examples of intervention methods
● Education: give lectures, workshops
● Promotion: advertise a desired behavior
● Community empowerment
● Modeling: give good examples
● Skill development: improve skills necessary of behavior
● Incentives: give rewards for good behavior
● Social support
Definition of Intervention Mapping (Bartholomew, Parcel, Kok, 1998)
● A framework for effective decision making at each step in the intervention development
● Makes planning explicit and transparent
● Facilitates collaborative partners in a multidisciplinary group
Steps and tasks in Intervention Mapping
● Step 1: What is the problem?
○ What do we know about it?
○ Prior research: what did others find about it?
○ Need assessment: what does the target group say about their own experience?
● Step 2: What are the objectives?
○ What is the desired change?
○ What individuals need to learn
○ What must be changed in the community?
○ What are the determinants of the problem?
■ Personal determinants: individual factors, cognitive factors, etc.
■ External determinants: social and structural factors
■ Who is the target population?
● Step 3: Identifying potential intervention methods
○ How can the determinants be influenced in order to elicit a desired change?
, ○ Look into prior research on these methods, where they effective?
○ Translate methods into actual strategies
● Step 4: Design program materials & Pretest material
● Step 5: Implementation of intervention
● Step 6: Monitoring and evaluation & Measuring effects and processes
Definition of Network Interventions, NI (Valente, 2012)
● People can be effectively influenced through their social network to adopt new behavior
● NI is the process of using social networks or social network data to accelerate social change,
generate influence, achieve desirable outcomes
Network Interventions Strategies
● The strategy describes which component(s) of the social network will be targeted
● Decision is based on the available social network data (e.g. sociogram)
○ Individual level: Targeting specific individuals in a social network → nodes,
influencers, opinion leaders
○ Segmentation: Targeting a specific group within a social network
○ Induction: Generating new connections among individuals, e.g. word of mouth. They
persuade others to adopt the new behaviour. Going viral!
○ Alteration: changing the network: removing / adding nodes / connections etc.
Example of MC exam question
● Word of mouth is an example of the following network interventions
○ Individual
○ Segmentation
○ Alteration
○ Induction
Example of MC exam question
● Intervention Mapping (is)
○ A framework that provides a systematic way of designing an intervention
○ Gives an overview of the potential interventions to a problem
○ Makes the designing of an intervention more transparent
○ All of the above
Example of open exam question
● You need to address the wicked problem of integrating different ethnicities in a high school
class. Plan an intervention, and structure your answer according to the Intervention Mapping
technique.
2: What are social media interventions?
Definition of social media interventions
● An internet-based intervention strategy that exploits the affordances (functions) of a social
media platform to produce behavior change or improve a situation.
,Are social media interventions more effective than traditional interventions?
● 85 studies, total sample size of 43,236 participants
● Statistically small but significant effect on health-related behaviour
● Theory-driven interventions were more effective
● Interventions that incorporated more behavior change techniques also tended to have larger
effects compared to interventions that incorporated fewer techniques
● Effectiveness was enhanced by the use of additional methods of communication, e.g. short
message service (SMS), or text messages.
Examples of Social Media Interventions
● Mostly from the field of Health
● Social media interventions in sexual health promotion
○ Wicked problem: low sexual health of young
○ Goal: promoting condom use for STI prevention
○ Method: STI prevention messages delivered via Facebook at 2 and 6 months
○ Population: Denver CO metropolitan area and in a college community in Louisiana,
focusing on African-American and Latino youth
○ Experiment: Intervention or Control group
■ Control group: “18−24 News” intended as a play on the concept of sharing
what was happening between 18:00 and 00:00 and what was interesting in
the news to those aged 18–24 years.
■ Intervention group: “Just/Us” on Facebook
○ Content
■ multiple updates each day to the page in the form of video links, quizzes,
and games
■ threaded discussions relevant to that week's topic
○ Measures
■ 2 months: follow-up behavioral risk assessment
■ 6 months: second follow-up assessment
Social media interventions in vaccination
● Three groups:
○ VSM: Website with vaccine information and interactive social media components
○ VI: a website with vaccine information
○ UC: usual care
, The use of social media for health communication:
● Increased interactions with others
● More available, shared and tailored information
● Increased accessibility and widening access to health info
○ Easy to access
○ Lots of people who can access
● Peer/social/emotional support
● Public health surveillance
● Potential to influence health policy
Limitations of Social Media Interventions (Moorhead et al. 2013)
● Lack of reliability of information
● Lack of confidentiality/privacy
● Quality concerns
● Information overload
● Self-report is the most often used measure
● Self-selection as opposed to randomization
● Losing lots of participants
Target group
● Generational differences in social media use in frequency, preferred platforms
● Gender differences in social media use in type of information searched for
● Sub-target groups may need to be addressed by different methods
Individual identity
● The extent to which the social media intervention requires that users reveal their identity
● High-identity
○ Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram
○ Privacy issues
○ Social comparison
● Low-identity
○ Reddit, Twitter, Blogs
○ Anonymity attracts trolls
Group identity
● The extent to which the SMI enables users to identify themselves with a group and relate to
each other
● What tools do you know for this on different platforms?
