Advancing Research on Engagement in Internet Interventions: a Comment on Owen et al.

Excerpt

The issue of engagement, also discussed as exposure, to internet-based interventions and content has increased dramatically over the last decade. Any enthusiasm about the possible public health benefits of online interventions with varied populations to achieve outcomes such as smoking cessation, weight loss, skills acquisition, or address mental health disorders or distress is tempered by robust findings of widespread non-engagement with such interventions. Users are not logging in, log-in only once, view a webpage for short periods of time (i.e., seconds), or quickly taper off in their participation, a phenomenon described as “nonusage attrition” [1]. Efficacy is clearly hard to determine with such behavior. The result has been a resounding call for the development of a “science of user engagement” [2]. …