Understanding the Roles and Influences of Mediators from Multiple Social Channels for Health Behavior Change

Abstract

People become increasingly influenced by others in changing and maintaining health behaviors. Along with the advancement of persuasive technology and social networking technologies, the place where social interaction occurs has expanded. As a result, mediators who influence an individual's behavior change can come from diverse social channels. However, little work exists on what roles the mediators have and how differently the mediators motivate and affect the maintenance of health behavior changes of users through various social channels. To investigate this, we conducted interviews with 13 participants who use a running exercise application for maintaining their health behavior changes. This study reveals the roles of mediators from three different social channels, which are the social feature in the application, general social media, and the agent feature in the application. Mediators from the application could influence participants' health behavior change either positively or negatively according to the level of intimacy and the similarity of the physical condition. Social media mediators influence participants' social face and support their health behavior changes by keeping participants in countenance. Lastly, the agent mediator of the application provides continuous reinforcement to participants for maintaining their health behavior changes.