Sexual & Gender Minorities Need Social Media-Based Interventions to Improve Mental Health Outcomes, Researchers Find
The prevalence of social media and its built-in engagement tools make it a compelling platform for health interventions. From smoking cessation Facebook groups to sexual health “webisodes” on YouTube, many of these interventions have shown success.
However, a lack of research on the overall engagement of social media-based interventions among sexual and gender minority (SGM) persons led one research team to conduct a systematic review. The team, which included Assistant Professor Daniel Jacobson López of Boston University School of Social Work (BUSSW), concluded that social media-based interventions can work, but the heterogeneity of current research poses an obstacle in understanding the possibilities and the limitations of current methods.
For their evaluation, the researchers compiled all peer-reviewed, English-language studies published since 2003 that assessed engagement with a social media-delivered health intervention – often behavioral – designed to improve health outcomes among SGM individuals. Their findings showed that digital health interventions were not only received positively by their target population, but also held the potential to reduce barriers to healthcare access and improve cost-effectiveness for SGM people.
However, the researchers found significant heterogeneity in defining and assessing engagement, and discovered that the focus of assessment often only measured usage. In addition, the vast majority of research on social media-based interventions has been focused on improving HIV-related health outcomes, and has primarily used samples limited to men who have sex with men (MSM). To address these limitations, they encourage those developing and testing the interventions to implement more purposeful recruitment so that more can be learned about why, how, and how much differently SGM groups engage with social media-interventions. This would expand evaluation criteria for cognitive and emotional aspects of intervention engagement, ultimately allowing for the development of effective, tailored social media-delivered interventions for SGM people.
The study, led by César G. Escobar Viera at the University of Pittsburgh, was co-authored by Assistant Professor Daniel Jacobson López of BUSSW; Rebekah S. Miller, Jacob D. Gordon, Adrian J. Ballard, and Bruce L. Rollman of the University of Pittsburgh; Darren L. Whitfield of University of Maryland Baltimore; and Sherry Pagoto of the University of Connecticut, and was published in the journal Internet Interventions.