CHIBE faculty win Quartet funding
Key Takeaway:
Three CHIBE affiliates Drs. Marissa Sharif, Kimberly Waddell, and Cait Lamberton were awarded funding for projects through the Quartet Pilot Research Project competition.
Context:
Each year, CHIBE, The Pension Research Council (PRC) and Boettner Center, the Population Aging Research Center (PARC), and the Population Studies Center (PSC) come together to support small-scale, innovative, or exploratory projects related to population health, life-course, and healthy aging.
In 2023-2024, three CHIBE faculty were awarded funding for projects related to physical activity goal progress posting on social media, the decision-making process for post-acute stroke rehabilitation among acute therapists, and people’s motivations for saving for financial goals.
Projects:
The Impact of Goal Progress Social Media Posts on Goal Persistence
Principal Investigator: Marissa Sharif
Abstract:
In recent years, a growing number of people have started sharing their goal progress on social media platforms (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, X). For example, since 2019, TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram users have been regularly documenting their progress towards the “75 Hard”, a 75-day goal that promotes a healthier lifestyle.
While some work suggests that there may be benefits (i.e., social support) to sharing goal progress on social media, there is little research, to date, that has identified whether and how posting about goal progress on social media might affect goal persistence.
We propose that people will persist more towards their goals if they post regularly on social media about their goal progress, due to greater accountability and social support.
We plan to conduct a field experiment in collaboration with a large Philly gym, where we will collect the number of minutes/days that people go to the gym. All participants will be given the goal of exercising for 4 days a week over the span of 1 month.
They will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions:
- 1) Control
- 2) Private post
- 3) Public post
In the Control condition, participants will be awarded $40 for their participation in the study. In the Private post condition, participants will be initially awarded $20 for their participation, and will have the opportunity to receive an additional $1.25 every time they upload a picture of themselves at the gym (i.e., showing their goal progress) to a private survey (i.e., only experimenters can see the results). In the Public post condition, participants will be initially awarded $20 for their participation, and will have the opportunity to receive an additional $1.25 every time they post a picture of themselves at the gym (i.e., showing their goal progress) on their personal Instagram account.
To track participants’ social media posts, participants will be required to add us as a follower, and tag us in each post about the gym. We will scrape this data to examine: 1) how often people post, 2) how many people comment/like their posts, and 3) a text analysis of the type of comments people write. We will continue to collect data from the intervention a month after it is over to examine if our intervention leads to persistent behavior change. We will compare the number of minutes and number of days consumers are at the gym across conditions. In addition to examining how these 3 conditions compare in terms of gym attendance, we will also examine how responses to their social media posts affect goal persistence within the public post condition.
This research will provide insights into whether, when, and how social media can serve as a means to keep people accountable and thus motivated towards their goals. In doing so, this research can allow us to discover a low-cost and relatively simple intervention to improve goal persistence.
Quantifying Cognitive Bias in Post-acute Decision Making After Stroke
Principal Investigator: Kimberly Waddell
Abstract:
After a stroke, nearly 80% of individuals live with a degree of chronic functional impairment. Advances in acute stroke treatment have resulted in a significant decline in mortality, with more people requiring post-acute rehabilitation after surviving a stroke. Indeed, individuals with stroke are among some of the highest, most costly users of post-acute care. The incidence of stroke and its associated costs is projected to surge as the population ages, creating an urgent need to maximize care transitions. Rehabilitation is a critical component of post-stroke care and is associated with functional gains, reduced hospital readmission, and decreased long-term morbidity.
The recommendation for post-acute rehabilitation setting is initiated by the physical and occupational therapist during acute hospitalization. This initial recommendation then sets a larger process in motion that includes a Physiatry consultation and insurance approval. Prior research has examined factors associated with discharge to post-acute setting after stroke (e.g., inpatient rehabilitation, skilled nursing).
What is less understood, however, is how the decision for initial post-acute rehabilitation setting is made and to what clinical or sociodemographic factors therapists anchor their decision. There are no standardized criteria to guide this decision, introducing significant noise and potential for decision bias among therapists. Additionally, it is unknown to what extent this subjectivity introduces disparities in access to post-acute rehabilitation post-stroke.
The purpose of this application is to evaluate the decision-making process for post-acute stroke rehabilitation among acute therapists. This retrospective cohort study will include approximately 30,000 individuals, admitted for a stroke at a Penn Medicine hospital (January 1, 2017 – June 1, 2024), who discharged to either an inpatient rehabilitation or a skilled nursing facility. Using electronic health record data, we will evaluate therapist decision making, the potential for cognitive bias in this decision making, and whether or not disparities exists in access to post-acute rehabilitation among clinically similar subgroups. The specific aims are to:
- (1) describe the recommendation for post-acute rehabilitation post-stroke
- (2) quantify the presence of availability and time of day bias in post-acute recommendation post-stroke
- (3) to evaluate disparities in post-acute rehabilitation recommendation.
Our long-term goal is to improve the quality of post-acute care decision making by developing clinical decision support tools that help ensure equitable care for all adults post-stroke. This study will also establish methodology for translating this work to other populations who are high users of post-acute rehabilitation in future grant applications.
The Life you Save (For): Experiences Dominate Goods in Motivating Savings
Principal Investigator: Siyuan Yin
Co-Investigator: Cait Lamberton
Abstract
Prior research suggests that experiences can have stronger appeal to consumers than goods, prompting them to spend more and be more impatient. But does this experiential dominance extend to savings? Using field studies and experiments, we will examine the experiential dominance in savings across contexts, including initiating saving goals, retirement savings, tradeoffs between larger, better and smaller, worse saving goals, protecting savings by drawing less for emergency expenses, as well as real saving behavior at a large central bank in Australia.
We propose that experiential (vs. material) saving goals will be perceived more versatile, satisfying different needs and better accommodating uncertain future preferences, and thus motivate savings. We will examine boundary conditions such as whether consumers can be more motivated to save for material goals when encouraged to engage in thinking about and prioritize the experiential aspects of that goal, or equally likely to save for experiential and material goals when being reminded of the versatility of both goals.