Description

Upon enrollment, participants will receive an electronic link to an enrollment survey to assess their baseline perceptions of diabetes and weight-based stigma, attitudes towards and intentions to engage in condition management behaviors, sociodemographic and clinical factors (e.g., gender, age, race, and ethnicity) and potential moderators, including diabetes distress, anxiety, depression, history of weight-based victimization, and stigma consciousness. Participants will then be randomly assigned to either the self-affirmation intervention or a waitlist control condition (participants in the waitlist control will have the option to receive the same intervention as participants in the experimental condition at end of the study period). Participants will be using the randomization module in our online survey vendor, REDCap. This module allows researchers to program REDcap to automatically randomize participants in their study to one of the arms or conditions of their study. Before every 3-month wellness visit with their endocrinologist, participants will receive an electronic prompt to complete a self-affirmation writing induction. To complete the writing induction, participants will review a list of values and are instructed to choose up to two that are important to them. Next, participants are asked to write a few sentences about why their chosen values are important to them and identify times in which these values have helped them navigate challenges. Participants in the waitlist control condition will also complete writing exercises but they will be abbreviated (this in the psychological literature is referred to as a "low affirmation condition"). At the end of the study, waitlist control participants will have access to the full exercise should they like to receive it. After their 3-month wellness visit, participants will be sent an electronic link to the post-intervention survey. This will assess to assess their baseline perceptions of diabetes and weight-based stigma, attitudes towards and intentions to engage in condition management behaviors. In total, participants will complete 4 writing inductions and 4 post-evaluation surveys over the course of a year. In addition to writing inductions and survey data, aggregated data from participants' continuous glucose monitors will be collected throughout the study period to assess time spend in target glucose range. The investigators will also collect participants' most recent pre-and-post intervention Hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c) measurements via EHR data to assess longitudinal changes in glucose control. To evaluate the effectiveness of our intervention, the investigators will test whether mean scores in 1) post-intervention stigma and stigma-induced identity threat scores; 2) average confidence in and intentions to engage in condition management scores; and 3) average time spent in target glycemic target range significantly differ between conditions.