Research

My research applies emerging communication technologies to support mental health in contexts of substance use disorders, depression, and anxiety. I am especially interested in building systems that can allow ongoing access to high quality social support. I believe that feeling supported by others is central to individuals’ abilities to manage challenges that might feel overwhelming, like mental health concerns. However, support can often feel impersonal, controlling, or unhelpful. I am optimistic that purposeful design of digital tools can connect individuals to the right kind of support, at the right time, whether that comes from peers, volunteers, professionals, or automated messaging systems. I examine these issues in several lines of research, listed below with selected publications.

My full publication list is available on Google scholar.

I. Building technologies for ongoing recovery support

One area of my research seeks to improve the efficacy, effectiveness, and scalability of digital mental health interventions that draw upon peer-to-peer support. This involves understanding the mechanisms by which digital mental health interventions work, how they can be tailored to specific groups, and the ways they can be implemented in real-world settings. As a graduate student, my work focused on “A-CHESS,” a smartphone-delivered intervention for alcohol use disorder that reduced risky drinking by 50% over a year among individuals leaving residential treatment. To leverage the efficacious elements of A-CHESS to tackle the broader societal problem of substance abuse, we adapted A-CHESS to the needs of those with opioid use disorder receiving medication-assisted treatment and evaluated implementation of A-CHESS in the primary care system.

  1. Gustafson, D. H. Sr., Landucci, G., McTavish, F., Kornfield, R., Johnson, R. A., Mares, M. L., Westergaard, R., Quanbeck, A., Alagoz, E., Gustafson, D. H. Jr., Pe-Romashko, K. Thomas, C., & Shah, D. V. (2016). The effect of bundling medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction with mHealth: Protocol for a randomized clinical trial. Trials, 17(1), 592.
  2. Glass, J. E., McKay, J. R., Gustafson, D. H., Kornfield, R., Rathouz, P. J., McTavish, F. M., Atwood, A. K., Isham, A., Quanbeck. A., & Shah, D. V. (2017). Treatment seeking as a mechanism of change in a randomized controlled trial of a mobile health intervention to support recovery from alcohol use disorders. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 77, 57-66.
  3. Quanbeck, A., Gustafson, D. H., Marsch, L. A., Chih, M. Y., Kornfield, R., McTavish, F., Johnson, R., Brown, R. T., Mares, M. L., & Shah, D. V. (2018). Implementing a mobile health system to integrate the treatment of addiction into primary care: A hybrid implementation-effectiveness study. JMIR 20(1).

II. Clarifying the role of peer-to-peer communication in recovery

Applying mixed methods, my work has also examined communication dynamics within peer-to-peer groups that can promote recovery. In a face-to-face context, I conducted an ethnography of female members of Alcoholics Anonymous which showed that these women adapted the program to meet their recovery needs, using gender-segregated meetings to engage in candid self-disclosure and to acknowledge and address social determinants of health. In an online context, I showed that individuals’ patterns of communication within peer-to-peer forums can offer insight into mental health states (e.g., negative affect) and recovery-supporting processes (e.g., social support, change talk), and these pattern can, in turn, predict outcomes like relapse. I am excited about the ways that automated content analysis and other computational approaches might allow for timely delivery of feedback and resources.

  1. Kornfield, R. (2014). (Re)Working the program: Gender and openness in Alcoholics Anonymous. Ethos, 42(4): 415-439.
  2. Kornfield, R., Toma, C. L., Moon, T. J., Shah, D. V., & Gustafson, D. H. (2018). What do you say before you relapse? How language use within a peer-to-peer online discussion forum predicts risky drinking among those in recovery. Health Communication. 33(9), 1184-1193.
  3. Liu, Y., Kornfield, R., Shaw, B., Shah, D.V., McTavish, F., & Gustafson, D. H. (2017). When support is needed: Social support solicitation and provision in an online Alcohol Use Disorder forum. Digital Health, 3.
  4. Kornfield, R., Sarma, P., Shah, D. V., McTavish, F., Landucci, G., Pe-Romashko, K., & Gustafson, D. H. (2018). Detecting problems just in time: Application of automated linguistic analysis and supervised machine learning to an online substance abuse forum. JMIR 20(6):e10136.

III. Designing engaging digital tools to manage depression and anxiety

My work at Northwestern considers a broad set of mental health concerns, encompassing very common conditions like depression and anxiety, and integrates a human-computer interaction focus. This work seeks to understand how we can build tools that individuals will engage with outside clinical settings to help them manage their mental health in everyday life. One important avenue to sustaining engagement is providing support that feels relevant to a given individual at a given time. My work in this area seeks to apply tailoring and customization to keep tools relevant across diverse populations and across individuals’ fluctuating needs and preferences. I am also interested in human support as a means to provide structure and accountability, practical guidance, and encouragement as individuals engage with digital mental health tools. My work considers the ways digital tools might connect individuals to a variety of support givers (volunteers, peers, professionals, etc.), and also asks how these tools can best meet the needs of support givers themselves.

  1. Ng, A., Kornfield, R., Schueller, S., Zalta, A., Brennan, M., & Reddy, M. (2019). Provider Perspectives on Integrating Sensor-Captured Patient-Generated Data in Mental Health Care. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
  2. Ringland, K., Nicholas, J., Kornfield, R., Lattie, E., Mohr, D., & Reddy, M. (2019). Understanding Mental Ill-health as Psychosocial Disability: Implications for Assistive Technology. Proceedings of the International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility.
  3. Kornfield, R., Zhang, R., Nicholas, J., Schueller, S., Cambo, S., Mohr, D. & Reddy, M. (2020). “Energy is a Finite Resource”: Designing technology to support individuals across fluctuating symptoms of depression. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).