Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 26, 2019
Date Accepted: Jul 26, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Effectiveness of Peer-led, Web-based Intervention to Promote Safe Use of Dating Applications: Randomised Control Trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Online dating applications are now popular platforms for seeking romance and sexual relationships. Young adults have been identified as the largest population group to engage in online dating. They can easily make new friends or gain access to a pool of strangers at any time and place, leading to heightened sexual health risks and privacy concerns. Yet, limited research is conducted to investigate how to promote safe dating app use among students.
Objective:
We used an Information, Motivation and Behavioral Skills approach to design the evaluation. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a peer-led, web-based intervention of online dating applications as a way to promote its safe usage amongst the ethnic Chinese college students.
Methods:
A classroom-based clustered randomised controlled trial (RCT) was conducted among three tertiary Hong Kong institutions students. Students aged 17-27 years old attending common core curriculum between September 2018 and May 2019 were randomised into the intervention or control group. The intervention materials were developed with high peer engagement and included 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. Questionnaires covering the participants’ social demographic factors and dating apps characteristics as well as general self-efficacy scale (the primary outcome) and risk propensity scale as the secondary outcome were administered before, immediately after and at one month after the intervention. Intention-to-treat 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 general self-efficacy.
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. Over half of the participants (286/542, 52.77%) disclosed having visited the dating websites citing the reasons as: being curious (170/286, 59.4%), trying to make new friends (158/286, 55.2%) and able to find friends with similar interests (121/286, 42.3%). Participants in the intervention group reported higher satisfaction as compared to the control group. There was a significant difference in general self-efficacy (P <.001) between the intervention (290) and control groups (288). There was no difference in risk propensity between the two groups (P = 0.12). Subgroup analysis suggested that sexual relationship e.g. physical intimacy (r= 3.36, P = .02) and the information gained from family (r= 7.05, P= .01) were associated with improved general self-efficacy.
Conclusions:
The online intervention was effective in improving general self-efficacy among young students. Future work is needed to determine if this is cost-effective and the behavioral change is sustainable. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03685643
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