Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Dec 5, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 5, 2022 - Dec 20, 2022
Date Accepted: Dec 31, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Examination of web-based single-session growth mindset interventions for reducing adolescent anxiety: A study protocol of a three-arm cluster randomised controlled trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorders worldwide. In Hong Kong, 7% of adolescents are diagnosed with anxiety disorders, and one in every four secondary school students reports clinical-level anxiety symptoms. However, 65% of them do not access services. Long waitlists in public services, the high cost of private services, or the fear of being stigmatised can hinder service access. The high prevalence of anxiety and low intervention uptake indicate a pressing need to develop timely, scalable, and potent interventions suitable for adolescents. Single-session interventions (SSIs) have the potential to be scalable interventions for diagnosable or subclinical psychopathology in adolescents. Providing precise and context-adapted intervention is the key to achieving intervention efficacy.
Objective:
This study aims to compare the effectiveness of three SSIs: Single-session Intervention of Growth Mindset for Anxiety (SIGMA), SSI of Growth mindset of Personality (SSI-GP) and an active control, in reducing adolescent anxiety.
Methods:
Adolescents (N=549, ages 12-16) from secondary schools will be randomised to one of three intervention conditions: the SIGMA, SSI-GP, or active control. The implementation of each intervention is approximately 45 minutes in length. Adolescent participants will report anxiety symptoms (primary outcome), perceived control, hopelessness, attitude toward help-seeking and psychological well-being at pre-intervention, the 2-week and 8-week follow-up. A pilot test has confirmed the feasibility and acceptability of SIGMA among adolescents. We hypothesised that SIGMA and SSI-GP will result in a larger reduction in anxiety symptoms than the control intervention at the post-test and follow-up period. We also predict SIGMA will have a more significant effect than SSI-GP. We will use the intention-to-treat principle and linear regression-based maximum likelihood multilevel models for data analysis.
Results:
This study will be conducted from December 2022 to December 2023, with results expected to be available in January 2024.
Conclusions:
This protocol introduces the implementation content and strategies of growth mindset SSIs among school students. The study will provide evidence on the efficacy of different growth mindset SSIs for adolescent anxiety. It will also establish implementation strategies for self-administrative single-session interventions among school students, which can serve as a pioneer implementation of a scalable and self-accessible brief intervention to improve the well-being of young people. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05027880; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05027880
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.