Healthy Relationships Campaign

The Healthy Relationship Campaign is a partnership between the UTMB Center to Eliminate Health Disparities, Health Policy and Legislative Affairs, Behavioral Health and Research department aimed at promoting healthy relationships among Galveston County middle and high school students.

As part of this partnership, the Healthy Relationship Text Campaign (HRTC) is a school based intervention aimed at reducing teen dating violence. Students participating in the HRTC can sign up for a short messaging service (SMS) campaign that sends them text messages about qualities and characteristics of healthy relationships.

SMS campaigns have been shown to be effective in promoting public health outcomes at low costs (see reviews by Whittaker et al, 2016; Head et al, 2013; Spohr et al, 2015), and have been shown to be more effective when users interact with the service sending the text messages by texting the service back.

For this project, I examined the results from 525 participating students to determine which styles of messages had the highest proportion of users reply back, identifying the most successful formats of text messages that can be used by the program in the future. Results were presented as a poster at the University of Texas Medical Branch 2019 Public Health Symposium in Galveston, TX on 3/27/2019.

Interactive app

Below is an interactive app¹ that I build for this project. I have it embedded on this webpage, but if it gives you trouble you can access the app directly here.