Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 6, 2023
Date Accepted: May 16, 2024
Developing an educational resource aimed at improving adolescent digital health literacy: Using co-design as research methodology
ABSTRACT
Background:
Adolescence is a key developmental period that affects lifelong health and is impacted by adolescents regularly engaging with digital health information. Adolescents need digital health literacy (DHL) to effectively evaluate the quality and credibility of such information, and to navigate an increasingly complex digital health environment. Few educational resources exist to improve DHL, and few have involved adolescents during design. The co-design approach may hold utility through developing interventions with participants as design partners.
Objective:
This project aimed to explore the co-design approach in developing an educational resource to improve adolescents’ DHL.
Methods:
Adolescents (12-17 years) attended four interactive co-design workshops (June 2021-April 2022). Participant perspectives were gathered on DHL and the design of educational resources to improve it. Data generated were analysed through content analysis to inform educational resource development.
Results:
Twenty-seven participants from diverse backgrounds attended the workshops. Insight was gained into participants’ relationship with digital health information, including acceptance of its benefits and relevance, coupled with awareness of misinformation issues, revealing areas of DHL need. Participants provided suggestions for educational resource development that incorporated the most useful aspects of digital formats to develop skills across these domains. Four themes were derived from participant perspectives: ease of access to digital health information, personal and social factors that impacted use, impacts of the plethora of digital information, and anonymity offered by digital sources. Initial participant evaluation of the developed educational resource was largely positive, including useful suggestions for improvement.
Conclusions:
Co-design elicited and translated authentic adolescent perspectives and design ideas into a functional educational resource. Insight into adolescents’ DHL needs generated targeted educational resource content, with engaging formats, designs and storylines. Co-design holds promise as an important and empowering tool for developing interventions to improve adolescents’ DHL.
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.