ADDRESSING PROLONGED SEDENTARY BEHAVIORS IN WORKPLACES: EFFECTS OF HUMOR ON BEHAVIORAL INTENTION AND PERCEIVED INTERRUPTION

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ADDRESSING PROLONGED SEDENTARY BEHAVIORS IN WORKPLACES: EFFECTS OF HUMOR ON BEHAVIORAL INTENTION AND PERCEIVED INTERRUPTION

ABSTRACT

Prolonged sedentary behavior is a common issue for the modern population. For office workers, one of the current economic approaches of dealing with prolonged sedentary behavior is to deliver prompts to trigger themselves to take a walk. However, researchers found that more than half of the prompts sent in the workplaces failed to trigger a break, and the two major reasons given were ignorance and refusal. Moreover, successfully functioning to interrupt recipients, the prompts may be too interrupting and annoying to the recipients, leading to future abandonment of the function or app. This study wants to investigate a way to improve user experience while keeping the prompts functional. It proposes to use humor in the content of prompts to investigates how humor can influence behavioral intention and perceived interruption. We conducted an Amazon Mechanical Turk scenario-based survey with 114 participants. This study found the use of humor triggers the behavioral intention of taking a break from prolonged sitting in the workplaces more than the prompts without humor. The findings suggest that a humorous prompt, if appreciated by the recipient, may be an effective method of getting workers to move.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………………………………………………………………………… v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………………………………….. vi

Chapter 1  Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter 2  Related Work ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 4

Prompts for Prolonged Sedentary Behavior …………………………………………………………… 4

Interruption of Notification …………………………………………………………………………………. 6 Humor for Behavioral Intention …………………………………………………………………………… 7

Humor for Perceived Interruption ………………………………………………………………………… 9

Chapter 3  Method …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 11

Participants ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 11

Design and Procedure …………………………………………………………………………………………. 12

Perceived Humor Level of Prompt ………………………………………………………………… 13

Behavioral Intention ……………………………………………………………………………………. 13

Perceived Interruption …………………………………………………………………………………. 13

Data Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 14

Chapter 4  Results …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 15

Manipulation Check …………………………………………………………………………………………… 15

Hypothesis 1 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 16

Hypothesis 2 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 17

Hypothesis 3 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 18

Hypothesis 4 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 20

Perception of Humor, Age, and Gender ………………………………………………………………… 21

Chapter 5  Discussion ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 22

Behavioral Intention ……………………………………………………………………………………. 22

Perceived Interruption …………………………………………………………………………………. 23

Perception of Humor, Age, and Gender …………………………………………………………. 24

Limitations …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 25

Future Directions ………………………………………………………………………………………… 25

Chapter 6  Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 27

References ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 28

Appendix …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 35

 

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 4-1: Ratings of prompt humor level (manipulation check). ………………………………….. 16 Figure 4-2: Behavioral intention across two conditions. ………………………………………………… 17 Figure 4-3: Behavioral intention by perceived humor level ……………………………………………. 18

Figure 4-4: Perceived interruption across two study conditions.. …………………………………….. 19 Figure 4-5: Perceived interruption by perceived humor level. ………………………………………… 20

Figure 4-6: Perceived humor level by gender. ………………………………………………………………. 21             

 

Chapter 1

 

Introduction

Prolonged sedentary behavior is associated with many chronic diseases, such as CVD (cardiovascular disease) and obesity (González, Fuentes, & Márquez, 2017). Prolonged sedentary behavior is currently prevalent in the workplaces. For example, a study among office employees (Kazi, Duncan, Clemes, & Haslam, 2014) found that up to 70% of working hours were spent sedentarily. Likewise, Thorp et al. (Thorp et al., 2012) agreed that the workplace was the key setting for prolonged sedentary time. Moreover, unfortunately, increasing employees’ physical activity or reducing their sedentary time outside work does not compensate for the negative effects of their prolonged sedentary behavior during work time (Clemes, Oêconnell, & Edwardson, 2014). Bergouignan et al. (Bergouignan et al., 2016) revealed that introducing short bouts of activity during the workday routine is a promising approach to improve overall wellbeing at work, without detrimentally impacting worker performance. While there are a number of ways to help trigger the behavior change, one way to increase the frequency of employees taking short breaks during work is delivering prompts.

A prompt, as a strategy of persuasive technology which is usually delivered in the form of a reminder or notification, has been used to reduce prolonged sitting and encourages other healthy behavior changes (Fry & Neff, 2009). However, current prompts still need improvement on two issues. One is how efficiently the prompt triggers behavior changes, since people working may still not take a break when receiving a prompt. Luo et al. (Luo et al., 2018) found that 60% of their 1,599 prompts failed to trigger a break, of which 26% were ignored and 34% were declined. Employees’ prolonged sitting periods will then negatively influence their health.

Therefore, a novel approach to persuade people to take a break is still needed.

Another issue is the perceived interruption that influences user experience (Y. Wang & Reiterer, 2019a). The perceived interruption, which is a part of delivering prompts as reminders or push notifications, needs to be considered. Notifications have been ubiquitous in the present day, through mobile phones, computers, TV, smart-speakers, smart-watches, and so on. Some researchers, such as Matthies et al., claimed that urgent notifications concerning users’ health should be obtrusive and force the user to take action (Matthies, Daza Parra, & Urban, 2018).

However, prompts from commercial mobile health apps, especially those sent during work, should still try to minimize the perceived interruption for user experience (Y. Wang & Reiterer, 2019a). Commercial apps do not want to interrupt the users too much to annoy the users and decrease retention. A novel approach to reduce the perceived interruption is worth exploring.

Furthermore, humor has been found as a viable message strategy for reducing psychological reactance to persuasion (Moyer-Gusé, Robinson, & Mcknight, 2018), so, to help solve the above two issues, this study introduces humor to the content of prompts. More explanations and justifications for choosing humor are in Chapter 2: Related Work. The goal of the study is to investigate the effects of prompts’ humor level on the behavioral intention to take a break and perceived interruption.

Moreover, this study also includes perceived humor as a variable, because the perception of humor is subjective and may have different effects on the behavioral intention and perceived interruption. The effects may be influenced by individuals’ perceived humor level. The secondary goal of the study is to investigate the relationship among perceived humor level, behavioral intention, and perceived interruption.

The purpose of this study is to assess the behavioral intention changes given humor’s success in other health-related contexts. More rationale of choosing humor as the novel approach will be explained more in chapter 2. This study offers new considerations for reducing sedentary prolonged behaviors.

This thesis includes six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the background and motivation  of the study. Chapter 2 introduces related research on prompts for prolonged sedentary behavior, interruption of notifications, humor for behavioral intention, and humor for perceived interruption. Chapter 3 is the method section that introduces the participants, design and procedure, and data analysis. Chapter 4 presents findings from the data analysis for manipulation check, behavioral intention, and perceived interruption. Chapter 5 discusses the results, limitations, and future directions of the study. Chapter 6 presents the conclusion of the study.

 

ADDRESSING PROLONGED SEDENTARY BEHAVIORS IN WORKPLACES: EFFECTS OF HUMOR ON BEHAVIORAL INTENTION AND PERCEIVED INTERRUPTION

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