Scaling a Brief Digital Well-Being Intervention (the Big Joy Project) and Sociodemographic Moderators: Single-Group...

Area of Science:

• Digital health interventions
• Mental health research
• Public health

Background:

• Emotional well-being interventions improve mental and physical health.
• Existing interventions often use homogeneous samples and have high participant burden.
• A brief, low-burden digital intervention was developed to address these limitations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess a brief digital well-being intervention's effectiveness across diverse global populations.
• To investigate how sociodemographic factors moderate intervention outcomes.
• To identify groups benefiting most from digital well-being tools.

Main Methods:

• A single-group pre-post study of the Big Joy Project (a week-long, low-intensity digital intervention).
• Global recruitment via open web enrollment (N=17,598) from 169 countries.
• Mixed-effects linear models analyzed pre-post changes and sociodemographic moderators.

Main Results:

• Significant improvements in emotional well-being, positive emotions, happiness agency, perceived stress, self-reported health, and sleep quality.
• Greater benefits observed in participants with higher engagement (dose-response).
• Socially disadvantaged groups (lower education, financial strain, minority race/ethnicity, younger age) showed larger improvements.

Conclusions:

• Brief, low-intensity digital interventions can yield significant well-being improvements.
• The intervention demonstrated greater benefits for high-risk, socially disadvantaged populations.
• These findings support the potential for scalable public health impact via digital mental health tools.