Team 13 Baseline Study Protocol

For our baseline study, we selected college students and new graduates in their early 20’s. This was an easy group for us to target and immediately begin the baseline study with because we had the greatest number of connections for this audience. We also focused on this group because it’s important to develop sunscreen-wearing habits early, since the process of protecting skin should be done over time.

We sent out an initial screener and got a total of 20 responses–out of the 20, there were 12 people who wore sunscreen regularly and 8 who sometimes or never wore sunscreen. We proceeded with 10 people for pre-study interviews: we selected the 8 people who either sometimes or never wore sunscreen, as they have the behaviors that we’d like to change, and 2 people who always wore sunscreen to understand how they developed the habit. The two main pieces of information we were looking to extract were:

• People’s habits and consistencies around wearing sunscreen
• People’s routines before leaving the house

We collected the following data from the pre-interview (full script):

• A person’s typical day and routine
• How important sunscreen is to them
• Past attempts they had at trying to change their sunscreen wearing frequency

Our baseline study lasted five days (Wednesday-Sunday). Each day, they were emailed a Google Form asking about whether or not they wore sunscreen that day and why.

The participants only needed to fill out the form once per day, but we sent out two emails with the form per day, once during the day and once during the evening to serve as a reminder. 

From the baseline study, we collected the following information:

• Logistical data:
  • When people apply sunscreen (time of day) 
  • How long do people spend outside each day? 
  • How many times they apply sunscreen a day
  • What does their morning routine look like?
• Content Data

• • How often people wear sunscreen (if any at all) each day
    • If they wear sunscreen
      • In what context are they applying sunscreen
      • What prompted them to put sunscreen on
    • If they don’t wear sunscreen
      • Why?