Study Design
MAY, RECRUITMENT, RECRUITMENT
We conducted an RCT in Israel that lasted for 6 weeks, from December 23, 2020, to February 3, 2021, during the third wave of COVID-19. The intervention started just before the Israeli government instructed citizens to stay home for partial lockdown (on December 27, 2020), which later turned into full lockdown (on January 8, 2021). Educational institutions were closed throughout the full lockdown period.Participant inclusion criteria were Israeli mothers who were aged ≥18 years, had children aged ≤10 years, were literate in Hebrew, used Facebook, and were willing to participate in a Facebook group and answer questionnaires. We targeted mothers as, in Israel, they are often responsible for household management and raising the family [Recruitment was mostly carried out through Facebook and WhatsApp groups (Meta Platforms) and via word of mouth in a voluntary response sample. We advertised our study in a variety of groups with the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of women to maximize the probability of recruiting a diverse population of participants. We added a Google Forms link to the advertisement inviting the mothers who wanted to participate to answer our study’s questionnaire. We told them that they would be asked to answer a second questionnaire again in approximately 6 weeks and that we would add them to the Facebook group sometime in the next 2 months. After recruitment was over, we closed the Google Forms questionnaire and randomized all the participants at once to the intervention and control groups. We used a Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corp) formula ([=CHOOSE(ROUNDUP(RANK(A2,$A$2:$A$643) /321,0),“intervention,”“control”)]) to randomly assign the participants to the 2 study groups. The participants in the intervention group received a link to the Facebook group. They joined the group in the next day or 2, and afterward, no one could join the group until the intervention was over. The control group participants did not receive anything from us during the time of the intervention. They were not monitored, and we did not have any contact with them until we reached out to them to fill out their second questionnaire at the end of the study. As the Facebook group was closed only to the intervention group, the control group participants could not enter the Facebook group or see any content until the intervention was over. At the end of the intervention, we asked all the participants to fill out the second Google Forms questionnaire. Only after we closed the questionnaire did we open the Facebook group to all Israeli mothers who wanted to join and specifically invited the waitlist control group to join.As this was an online trial, all the assessments in this study were self-reported. The PhD student carrying out the study managed the Facebook group and performed the outcome assessments, sending the link to the questionnaires to be filled out by the participants and performing the statistical analyses. Thus, blinding was not possible in this study. However, the control group participants were blinded to their allocation. They did not know that we opened the Facebook group or that they were randomized to be the control group.This RCT was conducted after a pilot study to test our content and experience in managing a Facebook group. The pilot study had a before-and-after design. It was conducted in Israel and lasted for 7.5 weeks, from March 11, 2020, to May 2, 2020, during the first COVID-19 full or partial lockdown. A total of 36 mothers participated in the pilot. They answered online Google Forms questionnaires at the beginning and end of the pilot, and afterward, 11 semistructured telephone interviews were conducted with some of the participants. DWELL was found to be a promising intervention for improving perceptions regarding designing home environments for wellness. These results justified the continuation of the program toward the next phase, the RCT. On the basis of the implications of the pilot study, we made some changes to the methods, which deviated from the clinical trial registration (