A Conversational Approach to Well-being Awareness Creation and Behavioural Intention

TL;DR

The paper addresses how to foster well-being awareness and drive behavioural intention through a scripted digital conversational agent. It models intrinsic motivation using the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory within Self-Determination Theory and tests three conversational styles via a GROW-based coaching flow. Key findings show intrinsic motivation factors strongly predict awareness creation and behavioural intention, while conversational style shows no significant short-term effect; topic choices reveal preferred domains for discussion. The work demonstrates feasibility of a digitally mediated wellbeing coaching tool and suggests that longitudinal, personalized designs are needed to realize longer-term behavioral change.

Abstract

The promotion of a healthy lifestyle is one of the main drivers of an individual's overall physical and psycho-emotional well-being. Digital technologies are more and more adopted as ''facilitators'' for this goal, to raise awareness and solicit healthy lifestyle habits. This study aims to experiment the effects of the adoption of a digital conversational tool to influence awareness creation and behavioural change in the context of a well-being lifestyle. Our aim is to collect evidence of the aspects that must be taken into account when designing and implementing such tools in well-being promotion campaigns. To this end, we created a conversational application for promoting well-being and healthy lifestyles, which presents relevant information and asks specific questions to its intended users within an interaction happening through a chat interface; the conversational tool presents itself as a well-being counsellor named Allegra and follows a coaching approach to structure the interaction with the user. In our user study, participants were asked to first interact with Allegra in one of three experimental conditions, corresponding to different conversational styles; then, they answered a questionnaire about their experience. The questionnaire items were related to intrinsic motivation factors as well as awareness creation and behavioural change. The collected data allowed us to assess the hypotheses of our model that put in connection those variables. Our results confirm the positive effect of intrinsic motivation factors on both awareness creation and behavioural intention in the context of well-being and healthy lifestyle; on the other hand, we did not record any statistically significant effect of different language and communication styles on the outcomes.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Representative schema of the defined model
• Figure 2: Example of the screenshots extracted from the implemented conversations
• Figure 3: Boxplot of Awareness Creation and Behavioral Intention of the participants
• Figure 4: Word cloud of the most frequent answers from free-text comments of participants about the conversational counsellor
• Figure 5: Model regression values and significance level (*** means $\alpha < 0.001$).