SAMApp - Haw Study

A pilot study to investigate the effectiveness of mobile app ‘SAM’ as a self-help intervention for anxiety.

Research by Rebecca Haw, Newcastle University

Participants were asked to complete an anxiety rating on the ‘Anxiety Tracker’ section of the app and practice self-help options within the ‘Self-Help Options’ section for a minimum of 10 minutes per day.

They were asked to complete this every day for 3 weeks (21 days) starting from the day of the initial meeting

The GAD-7 was administered at baseline (in the initial session), and at 10 days, post-treatment (21 days) and at a 2-week follow up (35 days).

Removing non-completions, and those who were also getting support. Leaves 27 obs.

Overall changes in Anxiety in GAD-7 data

## Warning: Removed 4 rows containing non-finite values (stat_boxplot).

Within Subjects ANOVA

modelAOV <- aov(value~variable+Error(Participant_Number), data = data_comp)
print(summary(modelAOV))

## 
## Error: Participant_Number
##           Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value Pr(>F)
## variable   1    1.2    1.18   0.017  0.897
## Residuals 25 1737.7   69.51               
## 
## Error: Within
##           Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value   Pr(>F)    
## variable   3  268.6   89.55   8.044 0.000104 ***
## Residuals 74  823.8   11.13                     
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Link between monitoring and anxiety reduction

There was no discernable relationship between the number of anxiety updates and reduction in anxiety - so if there is causation it might be down to self help rather than monitoring?

## Warning: Removed 7 rows containing missing values (geom_point).

## 
##  Pearson's product-moment correlation
## 
## data:  abs(1 - data$Change_Score) and data$AnxietyUpdates
## t = -0.23631, df = 18, p-value = 0.8159
## alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -0.4861689  0.3966702
## sample estimates:
##         cor 
## -0.05561254