The App Behavior Change Scale: Creation of a Scale to Assess the Potential of Apps to Promote Behavior Change.

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BACKGROUND Using mobile phone apps to promote behavior change is becoming increasingly common However there is no clear way to rate apps against their behavior change potential OBJECTIVE This study aimed to develop a reliable theory based scale that can be used to assess the behavior change potential of smartphone apps METHODS A systematic review of all studies purporting to investigate app s behavior change potential was conducted All scales and measures from the identified studies were collected to create an item pool From this item pool 3 health promotion exerts created the App Behavior Change Scale ABACUS To test the scale 70 physical activity apps were rated to provide information on reliability RESULTS The systematic review returned 593 papers the abstracts and titles of all were reviewed with the full text of 77 papers reviewed 50 papers met the inclusion criteria From these 50 papers 1333 questions were identified Removing duplicates and unnecessary questions left 130 individual questions which were then refined into the 21 item scale The ABACUS demonstrates high percentage agreement among reviewers over 80 with 3 questions scoring a Krippendorff alpha that would indicate agreement and a further 7 came close with alphas 5 The scale overall reported high interrater reliability 2 way mixed interclass coefficient 92 95 CI 0 81 0 97 and high internal consistency Cronbach alpha 93 CONCLUSIONS The ABACUS is a reliable tool that can be used to determine the behavior change potential of apps This instrument fills a gap by allowing the evaluation of a large number of apps to be standardized across a range of health categories
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