Investigating the Role of Context in the Delivery of Text Messages for Supporting Psychological Wellbeing

Ananya Bhattacharjee, Joseph Jay Williams, Jonah Meyerhoff, Harsh Kumar, Alex Mariakakis, Rachel Kornfield

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Without a nuanced understanding of users' perspectives and contexts, text messaging tools for supporting psychological wellbeing risk delivering interventions that are mismatched to users' dynamic needs. We investigated the contextual factors that influence young adults' day-to-day experiences when interacting with such tools. Through interviews and focus group discussions with 36 participants, we identified that people's daily schedules and affective states were dominant factors that shape their messaging preferences. We developed two messaging dialogues centered around these factors, which we deployed to 42 participants to test and extend our initial understanding of users' needs. Across both studies, participants provided diverse opinions of how they could be best supported by messages, particularly around when to engage users in more passive versus active ways. They also proposed ways of adjusting message length and content during periods of low mood. Our findings provide design implications and opportunities for context-aware mental health management systems.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCHI 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450394215
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 19 2023
Event2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2023 - Hamburg, Germany
Duration: Apr 23 2023Apr 28 2023

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2023
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityHamburg
Period4/23/234/28/23

Funding

We are grateful to the young adults who participated in this work, and to Theresa Nguyen and Kevin Rushton at Mental Health America. We also thank Bei Pang, Jehan Vakharia, and Alvina Lai for their help in collecting these data, and Zichen Gong for help in drawing figures and proofreading the manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (K01MH125172, R34MH124960), the Office of Naval Research (N00014-18-1-2755, N00014-21-1-2576), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2019-06968). In addition, we acknowledge a gift from the Microsoft AI for Accessibility program to the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies that, in part, supported this work (http://aka.ms/ai4a).

Keywords

  • JITAI
  • contextual factors
  • daily schedule
  • energy
  • mental wellbeing
  • mood
  • text messages

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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