ArticleBJPsych open2025
Incentivising participation in mental health app research: lessons learned from a mixed methods randomised controlled trial.
Article in BJPsych open, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundUser engagement is recognised as a critical and pervasive challenge that has limited the potential evidence base being developed for mental health apps.
aimTo understand young people's motivations for participating in a randomised controlled trial for a mental health app and the role of intrinsic (e.g. improving well-being) and extrinsic (e.g. financial incentives) drivers in engagement.
methodEmotional Competence for Well-Being (ECoWeB) was a superiority parallel three-arm randomised cohort trial recruiting a cohort of 16-22 year-olds across the UK, Germany, Spain and Belgium, who, depending on risk, were allocated respectively to the PREVENT (
resultsAcross arms, 21% of participants never set up an account to access the app and approximately 50% did not complete the 3-month follow-up assessment. Engagement was not significantly higher in the intervention arm compared to the control arms across metrics. Qualitative findings demonstrated that although extrinsic factors alone may be enough to prompt someone to sign up to research, intrinsic drivers (e.g. finding the app useful) are needed to ensure longer-term engagement.
conclusionsIncentivising participation in clinical trials needs to be consistent with incentives that might be utilised at the point of dissemination and implementation to ensure that findings are replicated if that intervention is adopted at scale.
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