UNSTRUCTURED
Nowadays, adolescents have more access to electronic devices and the internet than ever before. The fast adoption of social networking for everyday life purposes has made it difficult for them to refrain from being in a perpetual state of connectivity. In parallel with that, a mental-health epidemic affecting this same generation has emerged, linking the excessive use of technology to the development of mood-related disorders like depression and anxiety. That being said, efforts are being made, by researchers and clinicians, in developing online tools, like chatbots, to provide a much-needed support to younger individuals in their mental health struggles. The purpose of this research is to help improve the efficacy of online mental-health interventions by exploring how variations of question formats lead to greater levels of self-disclosure, which, in turn, improve the efficacy of the mental health intervention.
This study explores how different question formats affect adolescents’ likelihood to self-disclose when answering health-related questions. For that, we evaluated the effect of variations in context, language and emojis on the likelihood to provide answers. In order to verify our hypotheses, we conducted a within-subject online survey with teenagers (N=125). Results showed that there is a significant correlation between the three independent variables (i) context, (ii) emojis and (iii) language, and adolescents’ self-disclosure for health-related questions. Several theoretical and managerial implications of this study are outlined in this paper.