A Local Community-Based Social Network for Mental Health and Well-being (Quokka): Exploratory Feasibility Study

BACKGROUND: Developing healthy habits and maintaining prolonged behavior changes are often difficult tasks. Mental health is one of the largest health concerns globally, including for college students. OBJECTIVE: Our aim was to conduct an exploratory feasibility study of local community-based interventions by developing Quokka, a web platform promoting well-being activity on university campuses. We evaluated the intervention’s potential for promotion of local, social, and unfamiliar activities pertaining to healthy habits. METHODS: To evaluate this framework’s potential for increased participation in healthy habits, we conducted a 6-to-8-week feasibility study via a “challenge” across 4 university campuses with a total of 277 participants. We chose a different well-being theme each week, and we conducted weekly surveys to (1) gauge factors that motivated users to complete or not complete the weekly challenge, (2) identify participation trends, and (3) evaluate the feasibility of the intervention to promote local, social, and novel well-being activities. We tested the hypotheses that Quokka participants would self-report participation in more local activities than remote activities for all challenges (Hypothesis H1), more social activities than individual activities (Hypothesis H2), and new rather than familiar activities (Hypothesis H3). RESULTS: After Bonferroni correction using a Clopper-Pearson binomial proportion confidence interval for one test, we found that there was a strong preference for local activities for all challenge themes. Similarly, users significantly preferred group activities over individual activities (P<.001 for most challenge themes). For most challenge themes, there were not enough data to significantly distinguish a preference toward familiar or new activities (P<.001 for a subset of challenge themes in some schools). CONCLUSIONS: We find that local community-based well-being interventions such as Quokka can facilitate positive behaviors. We discuss these findings and their implications for the research and design of location-based digital communities for well-being promotion.