MediclResearch.com Interview with:
John W. Ayers, PhD, MA
Graduate School of Public Health
San Diego State University, San Diego, California
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Ayers: Our study, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Internal Medicine was the first to describe daily rhythms in health behaviors.
Because trends in quitting contemplations are usually described annually using telephone surveys, we had to use a novel data source that could capture daily patterns. By monitoring aggregate Internet search queries we can see precisely what the population is thinking about by the content of their queries and that the population is engaged in the issue by searching. We therefore analyzed daily search volumes for smoking cessation queries (e.g., "quit smoking") in six languages across the entire globe.
We found that people search about quitting smoking more often early in the week, with the highest query volumes on Mondays, using a daily measure representing the proportion of quit smoking searches to all searches. This pattern was consistent across all six languages, suggesting a global predisposition to thinking about quitting smoking early in the week, particularly on Mondays.
English searches, for example, showed Monday query volumes were 11 percent greater than on Wednesdays, 67 percent greater than on Fridays, and 145 percent greater than on Saturdays. In total for all six languages, Monday query volumes were 25 percent higher than the combined mean number of searches for Tuesday through Sunday.
Practically these findings are very meaningful. For example, in English alone there are about 150,000 more quit smoking queries on Monday than on a typical day; about 8,000,000 over an entire year.
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