Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Dec 29, 2025
Date Accepted: Jun 11, 2026
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Development and Implementation of a Digital Media Literacy Group for Adolescents in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry: Results of a Feasibility Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Digital media literacy is increasingly recognized as a key protective factor for adolescent mental health to reduce risks associated with problematic internet use. However, structured, theory-driven interventions for adolescents in child and adolescent psychiatry (CAP), particularly in inpatient and day-treatment settings, remain scarce.
Objective:
This study evaluated the feasibility, acceptability, and perceived usefulness of a newly developed, manualized digital media literacy group for adolescents in CAP and explored preliminary changes in digital self-efficacy and critical digital media literacy.
Methods:
A prospective single-arm feasibility study with an embedded pretest–posttest and session-level process evaluation was conducted across three CAP clinics in Germany (Bielefeld, Lüneburg, Schleswig). The intervention comprised six weekly modules covering data protection, social media use, and digital violence. Outcomes included session-level acceptability from adolescents and facilitators, retrospective satisfaction, perceived learning, and didactic method ratings. Exploratory pre–post analyses assessed changes in digital self-efficacy and critical digital media literacy.
Results:
Across the three CAP clinics, 121 adolescents in inpatient and day-treatment care took part in at least one group session, and about one quarter (n = 28) attended three or more sessions. Ratings indicated that both adolescents and facilitators generally experienced the group as understandable, relevant, and helpful. Facilitators showed good manual fidelity. At post-intervention, adolescents reported that they had especially learned where to seek help with online problems, how social media can affect their mental health, and how to better protect their personal data. In a smaller subgroup with pre-post data, adolescents described feeling more confident in recognizing misleading online information, and a significant increase in critical digital media literacy.
Conclusions:
Our manualized digital media literacy group proved feasible to deliver and acceptable in routine CAP. All patients derived benefit from all modules.
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.