Sixty-eight young people contributed to a Design Thinking Challenge created to elicit a better understanding of their electronic image-sharing experiences, the helpful and harmful consequences of image-sharing to adolescent mental health and safety, and promising interventions that allow young people to make more positive decisions and minimize their risks when sharing images through electronic devices. Through this collaborative group-based process, each co-design group engaged in a four-phase process to discover, define, develop, and deliver an intervention that took the form of a paper-based mobile app prototype. Young people reported that they need information and advice to support their and others’ online decision making, help making situational decision-making skills for managing online interactions, and means to control information and images that can be accessed and distributed. Detailed app features that they required to address their decision-making needs are also discussed. These app intervention features highlight what young people need to make better-informed decisions when communicating through images electronically.
School-based health services (SBHS) including pastoral care can play a pivotal role in addressing adolescent health and wellbeing; including their tobacco and other drug use. To maximise the benefits of these services, they need to be accessible, useful for, and acceptable to students. This formative, qualitative study involved 12 focus groups within nine lower socio-economic Western Australian Government secondary schools. The purpose was to identify student (n = 59) perceptions of the availability and usefulness of SBHS (and other identified caring staff) to reduce students’ harm associated with tobacco and other drug use. The findings suggest students were aware of the SBHS available to them, but considered them less useful if staff were regularly unavailable; presented a ‘don't care’ attitude; held solely disciplinary roles; and were based in an area of the school unfamiliar to the student. Services were considered useful when staff members built rapport with students; took time to listen; followed-up with students and displayed a general concern for the student's wellbeing. Interestingly, students acknowledged trusting health teachers more than SBHS staff for tobacco information and support. These findings have important implications for school counsellors and other school health/pastoral care staff who want to increase the likelihood of students approaching and using school support services to reduce harm associated with tobacco and other harmful drug (OHD) use.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.