During this past summer, I joined the Behavior Change For Good (BCFG) team to work on a wide range of research projects. In my first project, I helped prepare BCFG’s first mega-study for publication. This study involved different behavior change interventions to increase gym attendance among its participants. I compiled and reviewed supplementary materials that depicted the 53 conditions that participants were placed in, such as the condition descriptions and photos of the platform that provided their unique instructions. These materials would help readers understand the differences between conditions and their rank in terms of the effectiveness of increasing gym participation. 

My second project involved working on the design of BCFG’s second mega-study, which tested how to boost flu shot adoption using customized text messages that are based on different theories on behavior change. I worked alongside the team to prepare the text messages and other supporting materials that were based on the team scientists’ submissions. Through these different tasks, I was able to learn about numerous psychological, economic, and social theories that these scientists thought would help in increasing flu shot adherence. I was also fascinated by how these theories were applied to a relevant platform, text messages, as opposed to simply having participants go into a laboratory or classroom. 

Lastly, I conducted literature searches that looked at interventions increasing exercise through step count and reduced stress. Our main focus was looking at studies that used wearable technology as that was the main aspect of another project that was in the works. For example, we looked at interventions that used pedometers and Fitbits as a means to track the change in mean daily step count for the exercise literature. In terms of stress, we looked at stress reduction studies that measured objective measures of stress such as heart rate variability (HRV) and cortisol levels. Through the literature search, we were able to pinpoint main studies to use and wrote summaries of these. We then looked at trends present in our chosen studies such as common interventions, populations, dependent variables, and findings.