Text Messaging Interventions for Adolescent and Young Adult Substance Use: a Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Tobacco and alcohol use continues to be associated with negative health outcomes among adolescents and young adults. New technologies such as text messaging can increase access to substance use interventions and have now been established as an evidence-based, recommended approach towards substance use prevention. This review presents results from a meta-analysis examining the effectiveness of text message interventions for tobacco and alcohol cessation within adolescent and young adult populations. Results from 14 studies with effect sizes are ranging from -0.25 to 0.54. Combining the effect sizes across studies yielded a summary effect size of 0.25, indicating that in general, text interventions have a positive effect on reducing substance use behaviors. Results are discussed in the context of prevention opportunities and recommendations for future text messaging intervention research.

A systematic review of smartphone applications for smoking cessation

“…Mobile health interventions delivered via smartphone may help to alleviate this issue. There is a growing body of literature to support text message-based mobile health interventions for tobacco [13][14][15][16][17][18] which have been shown to improve user engagement with cessation programs by expanding communication through asynchronous and real-time messaging with support networks, and by reducing barriers to access such as cost, location, or timing/ schedule conflicts [13][14][15]. However, functionality is limited to simple communication with text-based programs.…”

Effectiveness of a Text Messaging�Based Intervention Targeting Alcohol Consumption Among University Students: Randomized Controlled Trial (Preprint)

“…Previous research suggests that text messaging has a great potential to be a cost-effective mode of delivery of interventions targeting health behaviour change [4][5][6]. Text messagingbased, or text-based, interventions have been shown to be effective in supporting behavior change in various areas such as weight loss, smoking cessation and diabetes management [7].…”

“…Despite the omnipresence of mobile phones with text messaging capacity there is a lack of studies exploring the potential of text messaging in changing risky drinking behaviour [4][5][6]. Thus, in one of the first reviews in 2013 of text-based interventions none out of the 19 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) from 13 countries included alcohol consumption [4].…”

“…Some years later in a review of text-based interventions for young adults three out of fourteen included studies concerning alcohol consumption. All three studies were feasibility trials with few participants [5]. A year later a systematic review on mobile technology-based interventions for adult users of alcohol identified eight studies where five studies were primarily delivered through text messaging [6].…”

“…Still, most studies reported a significant behaviour outcome, although outcome measures varied greatly among interventions [6]. Also, the few studies so far published concerning text-based interventions targeting alcohol mostly lack theory-guided content and mostly included a small number of participants [4][5][6].…”