After a bit of hard work over the weekend, and half a dozen interviews, things seem to be back on track.
The regular meeting today seemed to go well. Main points to come out of the meeting:
- I need to think about whether my three proposed characteristics of technologies for smoking cessation – persistent, interruptive and responsive, should be collapsed down to two dimensions. Steve suggested persistent-transient and responsive-unresponsive. I’m not so sure about this … needs a bit more thought
- It probably is worthwhile interviewing the long-time quitters in the jaiku quit group
- I don’t need to be so concerned about the research question at this stage. My earlier efforts have focused the research somewhat, which has been useful. At the moment, it’s best to focus on the data and re-build the research question around that
- I need to get my literature review re-written, and my methodology written before next week. Procrastination be gone!
February 6, 2008 at 4:59 am
Matt,
Lys Severtson at QuitNet send me your thesis. Congratulations! Nice piece of work. I found it to quite insightful.
I am one of the co-founders of the company, QuitNet.com, Inc, which commercialized the original QuitNet site first developed by Nathan Cobb, MD. I forwarded your paper onto Nate this morning as I think he’ll find it interesting. He is doing research on QuitNet’s social graph. You can find some early findings here: http://drcobb.com/QuitNet_Animated_Network_Graph.html
There is undoubtedly much to learn at the intersection of your work and Nate’s.
I’ve always felt that the context – in part set by both the personalized display of evidence based content and a strong culture of quitting (Quitticisms, Nicodemon character etc) — in which QuitNet’s social support features exist are important factors in driving utilization of the service, not to mention efficacy. We also learned early on through observation and research that the dynamics of quitting were more complex than the TTM would suggest. Some of the other models that you mention in your paper provide important insights into the quitting process which we tried to operationalize in the service itself.
It is a big challenge to think about how to evolve such models for behavior change interventions in the far more interconnected, decentralized world of today. With opportunities for social support spanning the traditional web, social network “utilities” such as Facebook, micro blogging and mobile devices, we really need a more complex understanding of the nuances of each modaility and an approach for linking them together in a seamless user experience that is useful and delivers results. To make such a distributed architecture work will require delivering content and communications in more elemental forms. If we lose the context though, we may lose it all.
Anyway, it was great to see the end result of your work. Keep in touch.
Chris Cartter