Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Evaluation of Purple Town, a prevention program using a mobile game to address young people’s exposure to alcohol and cannabis marketing: a cluster randomized controlled trial among NEETs
ABSTRACT
Background:
Purple Town is a media literacy-based prevention and harm reduction program that uses a mobile game, with or without accompanying facilitated workshops, to raise young people’s awareness of the risks associated with alcohol and cannabis use. The program aims to develop critical thinking about marketing messages and encourage the adoption of protective behavioral strategies.
Objective:
This study evaluated the effectiveness of the program.
Methods:
A cluster randomized controlled trial (CRCT) was conducted among 352 NEETs (young people not in education, employment, or training) aged 18–25 years, recruited through 41 community-based youth organizations (cluster). Participants were allocated to one of three groups: a control group, a game-only group, or a game + workshops group.
Results:
Compared with the control group, the game + workshops intervention significantly increased participants’ skepticism toward alcohol marketing and strengthened their intentions to adopt protective drinking behaviors in the future. In contrast, the game-only intervention did not produce significant effects.
Conclusions:
The Purple Town program appears to be a promising media literacy intervention for reducing alcohol-related risk among NEETs, provided that it is delivered with structured educational support. Further research is needed to optimize the program's content and implementation, and to investigate its long-term effectiveness.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.