Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Nov 7, 2019
Date Accepted: Mar 1, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 11, 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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Developing a text-messaging intervention to reduce deliberate self-harm in Chinese adolescents: a qualitative study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Deliberate self-harm (DSH) is common during adolescence and can have detrimental consequences for adolescents’ well-being. While it is sometimes difficult to engage adolescents in traditional psychotherapies for DSH, text messaging has shown to be promising for a cost-effective and low-intensity intervention.
Objective:
To investigate the views of Chinese adolescents with DSH regarding text-messaging intervention in order to develop an acceptable and culturally competent intervention for adolescents with DSH.
Methods:
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 adolescents who had experience of DSH. The transcripts of the interviews were analysed using thematic analysis.
Results:
Four themes were identified: ‘Beneficial perception of receiving messages’, ‘Short frequency and duration of messages’, ‘Caring content in messages’, and ‘Specific times for sending messages’. Most of the participants perceived text-messaging interventions to be beneficial. Four key factors emerged for the content of the intervention including encouragement and accompany, feeling like a virtual friend, providing coping strategies, and individualized messages. In addition, the preferred frequency and duration of the text-messaging intervention were identified.
Conclusions:
Our study will help the development of a culturally appropriate text-messaging interventions for adolescents with DSH. It has the potential to improve DSH by providing acceptable support for adolescents with DSH who may be reluctant to seek face-to-face psychotherapies. Furthermore, it is a cost-effective and low intensity approach, which is relevant in the Chinese context due to the shortage of mental health workers and services.
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