Combining face-to-face sessions with ICTs for health promotion: Evidence from a field experiment with undergraduate students

Abstract

This paper presents a field experiment in which students received intensive and high quality face-to-face sessions combined with Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) that sought to foster healthy behavior. Students who were subject to the treatment (informative on-site sessions by experts and frequent reminders by several channels of social media) improved their knowledge on healthy habits relative to the control group. However, they were not able to translate it into healthier behavior, neither self-reported nor objectively measured by a physician. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which students have present-bias, lack of knowledge about the health production function, or are coping with complementary inputs, though it is possible to find other explanations.