An injection of humour can help stimulate interest and engagement with taboo women’s health topics, a new study suggests.
Over a three-month period, researchers tracked engagement of a social media campaign which used humorous nudges to encourage women to carry out pelvic floor training exercises in the lead up to Christmas.
The Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) study was led by Rosie Harper, a PhD researcher at Bournemouth University and pelvic health physiotherapist at University Hospitals Dorset; the social media content was created by comedian and women’s health physiotherapist, Elaine Miller.
The results have been published in the journal Health Expectations.
“Lots of women forget to complete prescribed pelvic floor exercises,” Rosie said. “Adopting and adhering to new exercises is very hard to do and requires behaviour change.” she added.
This led to Rosie and the research team to explore the potential of popular social media platforms to carry public health messages in a more light-hearted way.
The study focussed on an Instagram campaign run by co-author Elaine Miller called ‘#DryByChristmas’. Elaine posted humorous visual content daily for three months for the campaign, which aimed to help women improve their continence levels through pelvic floor muscle training. She tailored style of the content based on feedback from her clinics and from her comedy shows.
Analysis of how well the posts performed showed that engagement with the account the nudges were posted from – @gusset_grippers – increased by twelve percent over the campaign. The posts were seen by over 22 thousand users, received 9700 likes and nearly 900 comments.
96 percent of those who engaged with the post were women, the highest proportion of whom were aged between 35 and 44 which is one of the key groups targeted by the campaign.
The most popular nudges were based on social norms to encourage or discourage particular behaviours.
“Posts that speak to the shared female experience promoted engagement. These posts highlighted that symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction, such as urinary incontinence, are common and that people shouldn’t feel alone with the condition,” Rosie explained.
“Humour is a persuasive behavioural technique. Elaine’s work suggests if you can make someone laugh, they are more likely to listen,” she added.
The insights generated from this study have been used to co-design a digital intervention in on ongoing clinical trial at Poole Hospital. The trial will explore whether digital pelvic floor muscle training nudges from a mobile app can be used in maternity pathways to support women with pelvic floor muscle training.
“Some of the nudges build on an in-joke that no-one can see when you’re doing your pelvic floor exercises so you can do them at the bus stop or hospital waiting area.
“If used appropriate humour could be used to reframe how people experience their condition and how they can help themselves,” Rosie concluded.
