Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 26, 2019
Date Accepted: Jul 26, 2020
Effectiveness of Peer-led, Web-based Intervention to Improve General Self-Efficacy Amongst Young Adults: Randomized Clustered Trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Online dating applications are popular platforms for seeking romance and sexual relationships among young adults. As they can easily gain access to a pool of strangers (“new friends”) at any time and place, it leads to heightened sexual health risks and privacy concerns.
Objective:
This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a peer-led, web-based intervention of online dating applications as a way to prepare the Chinese college students so that they would feel more efficacious when using dating apps.
Methods:
An open, clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted among students from three colleges in Hong Kong. Classes of students aged 17-27 years attended common core curriculum or general education were randomized into the intervention or control groups. The intervention materials, developed with high peer engagement, were comprised of four short videos, an interactive scenario game and a risk assessment tool. An existing website promoting physical activities and healthy living was used as the control. Using Information, Motivation and Behavioral Skills (IMB) approach to design the evaluation, questionnaires covering the participants’ social demographics and dating apps characteristics as well as general self-efficacy scale (GSE) as the primary outcome and risk propensity scale (RPS) as the secondary outcome were administered before, immediately after and at one month after the intervention. Intention-to-treat analysis was adopted, and between-group differences were assessed using a Mann-Whitney U-test. Post-hoc multiple linear regression model was used to examine correlates of GSE and RPS.
Results:
A total of 578 eligible participants (290 in the intervention and 288 in the control) participated in the study with 36 lost to follow-up. There were more females (318/542, 58.67%) than males in the sample reflecting the distribution of college students. Over half of the responses by the participants (286/542, 52.77%) disclosed having visited the dating websites citing the reasons as: being curious (170/498, 34.14%), trying to make new friends (158/498, 31.72%) and able to find friends with similar interests (121/498, 24.30%). Overall, the participants in the intervention group reported a favorable experience when compared to the control. There was significant improvement in GSE and reduction in RPS (p< .001) in the intervention group, the University of Hong Kong students were more susceptible to risk reduction after the intervention when compared to the other two institutions.
Conclusions:
The online intervention was effective in improving general self-efficacy and reducing risk tendency among young students. Future work is needed to determine if this is cost-effective and such behavioral change is sustainable. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03685643
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