Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Building Meaning And Purpose Using A Mobile Phone App: Impact And Implications.  (#629)

Lisa Kemp 1
  1. City of Adelaide, Adelaide, SOUTH AUSTRALIA, Australia

Meaning and purpose is essential for peoples’ mental health and wellbeing. It is widely regarded as a cornerstone of flourishing and is suggested to be a central route to building lasting wellbeing. Evidenced-based meaning and purpose interventions delivered using technology are sparse, despite the potential benefits for scalability, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness. This presentation describes a collaborative project between the City of Adelaide (Australia) and the SAHMRI Wellbeing and Resilience Centre investigating the ability of a low-impact intervention to improve levels of meaning, purpose, wellbeing, optimism, resilience, and psychological distress, and comparing outcomes with a waitlist control group using a randomised controlled design. The intervention was delivered via a mobile phone application (app) consisting of seven 10-minute activities delivered to participants once a day for seven days. Pre and post assessment data and ecological momentary assessment were used to investigate change in outcomes over the seven day intervention. This collaborative study is one of the first to assess the efficacy of a low-impact technology-based meaning and purpose intervention, paving the way for future work to explore the use of meaning and purpose apps to build and sustain mental health and wellbeing. Design-principles, implementation strategy, results, and implications are discussed.