Parents’ Perspectives on the Theoretical Domains Framework Elements Needed in a Pediatric Health Behavior App: A Crowdsourced Social Validity Study

BACKGROUND: Most pediatric studies do not include parent stakeholders in the design of the intervention itself and many pediatric mobile health (mHealth) interventions are not meaningfully disseminated after the trial period ends. Consequently, the consumer desire for mobile apps targeting pediatric health behavior is likely to be met by commercial products that are not based in theory or evidence and may not take stakeholder preferences into account. OBJECTIVE: The aim was to assess parent preference for mobile app features that map onto specific Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) elements. METHODS: This study was a crowdsourced social validity study of 183 parents who were asked to rate their preferences for mobile app features that correspond to elements of the TDF. The TDF organizes a large number of theoretical models and constructs into three components: (1) capability, (2) motivation, and (3) opportunity. Parents of children were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. RESULTS: The majority of participants were Caucasian and mean age was 36.9 (SD 8.0) years. Results revealed broad acceptability of communication, motivation, and opportunity domains. However, the degree to which each domain was valued varied within behavioral category. Parents demonstrated a preference for increasing procedural knowledge for physical activity and diet behaviors over sleep (F(2,545)=5.18, P=.006). Similarly, parents valued self-monitoring as more important for physical activity than sleep (F(2,546)=4.04, P=.02). When asked about the value of features to help children develop skills, parents preferred those features for dietary behavior over sleep (F(2,546)=3.57, P=.03). Parents perceived that goal-setting features would be most useful for physical activity over sleep and diet (F(2,545)=5.30, P=.005). Incentive features within the app were seen as most useful for physical activity over sleep (F(2,546)=4.34, P=.01). CONCLUSIONS: This study presents a low-cost strategy for involving a large number of stakeholders in the discussion of how health behavior theory should be applied in a mHealth intervention. Our approach is innovative in that it took a scientific framework (ie, TDF) and made it digestible to parents so that they could then provide their opinions about features that might appear in a future app. Our survey items discriminated between various health behaviors allowing stakeholders to communicate the different health behaviors that they would like a TDF feature to change. Moreover, we were able to develop a set of consumer opinions about features that were directly linked to elements of the TDF.