Annual data on the proportion of adults in England who use e-cigarettes, by different characteristics such as age, sex and cigarette smoking status.

This repository contains 523 human feedback messages sent to daily smokers and vapers who were preparing to quit smoking/vaping with a virtual coach.

Study

Daily smokers and vapers recruited through the online crowdsourcing platform Prolific interacted with the text-based virtual coach Kai in up to five sessions between 1 February and 19 March 2024. The sessions were 3-5 days apart. In each session, participants were assigned a new preparatory activity for quitting smoking (e.g., listing reasons for quitting smoking, envisioning one's desired future self after quitting smoking, doing a breathing exercise). Between sessions, participants had a 20% chance of receiving a feedback message from one of two human coaches. More information on the study can be found in the Open Science Framework (OSF) pre-registration: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/78CNR. The implementation of the virtual coach Kai can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11102861.

Feedback messages

All feedback messages were written by one of two Master's students in psychology. The two human coaches were directed to craft messages incorporating feedback, argument, and either a suggestion or reinforcement. They were also instructed to connect with individuals by referencing aspects of their lives, express empathy toward those with low confidence, and provide reinforcement when people were motivated.

When writing the feedback, the human coaches had access to data on people's baseline smoking and physical activity behavior (i.e., smoking/vaping frequency, weekly exercise amount, existence of previous quit attempts of at least 24 hours, and the number of such quit attempts in the last year), introduction texts from the first session with the virtual coach, previous preparatory activity (i.e., activity formulation, effort spent on the activity and experience with it, return likelihood), current state (i.e., self-efficacy, perceived importance of preparing for quitting, human feedback appreciation), and new activity formulation. Notably, the human coaches only had access to anonymized versions of the introduction texts and activity experience responses (e.g., names were removed). Except for the free-text responses describing participants' experiences with their previous activity and their introduction texts, all of this information is provided together with the feedback messages. For the previous and new activities, we just provide the titles and not also the entire formulations that the human coaches had access to.

Before sending the messages to participants on Prolific, we added a greeting (i.e., "Best wishes, Karina & Goda on behalf of the Perfect Fit Smoking Cessation Team"), a disclaimer that the messages were not medical advice, and a link to confirm having read the message at the end. We also added "This is your feedback message from your human coaches Karina and Goda for preparing to quit [smoking/vaping]:" at the start of the message.

The human coaches approved publishing these feedback messages.

Additional data from the study

Additional data from the study such as participants' free-text descriptions of their experiences with their activities and their introductions from the first session with the virtual coach will also be published and linked to the OSF pre-registration of the study.

In the case of questions, please contact Nele Albers (n.albers@tudelft.nl) or Willem-Paul Brinkman (w.p.brinkman@tudelft.nl).