Summary
MM, Cancer
CANCER, EMA
EMA has allowed health behavior researchers to collect large amounts of real-time, real-world data with excellent temporal precision, providing insights into the processes that drive health behavior change and maintenance over weeks or even months. The present study provided an initial evaluation of the degree to which compliance, critical for the validity of EMA, is maintained over 9 weeks in the context of a randomized controlled trial for smoking cessation among community adults. Primary findings generally replicated and extended prior work attempting to identify compliance predictors in clinical samples [Together with prior work, these data suggest that, under most circumstances and for most participants, EMA can reasonably be used to monitor health behavior and related processes over periods of at least 2 months. However, the rate of decline was greater among younger people, people employed full-time, and particularly among people who eventually dropped out of the study. The present data call attention to the need to develop targeted strategies for maintaining long-term EMA compliance, including further work on the mechanistic processes that drive compliance; conversely, the data raise the possibility that marked declines in EMA compliance over time may be useful triggers of just-in-time, adaptive interventions for enhancing retention in long-term studies of health behavior.We thank Adam Ferkin, Robert Cooper, Schuyler Lawson, Nicolas Schlienz, and CeCe Duerr for their support with the EMA data collection. Additionally, we appreciate the contribution of Jennifer Betts for her comments and support throughout this project. We would also like to acknowledge the participants who contributed their time and effort to this research.Conflicts of Interest: LWH Jr reported receiving grant funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and nonfinancial support from Pfizer Inc during the conduct of the study. MM reported receiving nonfinancial support from Pfizer Inc during the conduct of the study and serving as former speaker/content expert on smoking cessation for Pfizer Inc outside the submitted work.Supplemental materials.