Background: In light of the scarcity of culturally tailored mobile health (mHealth) lifestyle interventions for African Americans, we designed and pilot tested the Fostering African-American Improvement in Total Health (FAITH!) App in a community-based participatory research partnership with African American churches to promote cardiovascular health and wellness in this population.
Objective: This report presents the results of a formative evaluation of the FAITH! App from participants in an intervention pilot study.
Methods: We included 2 semistructured focus groups (n=4 and n=5) to explore participants' views on app functionality, utility, and satisfaction as well as its impact on healthy lifestyle change. Sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and qualitative data were analyzed by using general inductive analysis to generate themes.
Results: In total, 6 overarching themes emerged among the 9 participants: overall impression, content usefulness, formatting, implementation, impact, and suggestions for improvement. Underpinning the themes was a high level of agreement that the intervention facilitated healthy behavioral change through cultural tailoring, multimedia education modules, and social networking. Suggestions for improvement were streamlining the app self-monitoring features, prompts to encourage app use, and personalization based on individuals' cardiovascular risk.
Conclusions: This formative evaluation found that the FAITH! App had high reported satisfaction and impact on the health-promoting behaviors of African Americans, thereby improving their overall cardiovascular health. Further development and testing of the app among African Americans is warranted.
Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03084822; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03084822.
Keywords: African Americans; community-based participatory research; eHealth; health promotion; mobile health; mobile phone.
©LaPrincess C Brewer, Ashok Kumbamu, Christina Smith, Sarah Jenkins, Clarence Jones, Sharonne N Hayes, Lora Burke, Lisa A Cooper, Christi A Patten. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (http://formative.jmir.org), 17.11.2020.