A review of youth mental health promotion apps towards their fit with youth media preferences

Abstract

INTRODUCTION:Mental health promotion apps can promote youth mental health but fail to engage young people. Fit to young people's media preferences is known to mediate engagement. OBJECTIVES:To explore the fit of existing youth mental health apps with young people's media preferences. METHODS:A workshop with 60 youth psychologists elicits designs of digital mental health interventions. A review of 29 youth mental health apps unpacks their modality strategies. We then compare modality strategies from literature on youth mental health, media preferences and engagement, and from the experts, with strategies in current mental health apps to identify potential fit problems. RESULTS:There is a mismatch between young people's modality preferences and how youth mental health apps deliver their content. CONCLUSION:There is a need to make youth mental health promotion apps more interactive and tailorable, featuring dynamic visuals and social connectivity, to better engage youth.

Young People’s Attitude Toward Positive Psychology Interventions: Thematic Analysis (Preprint)

“…The shortcomings of PPIs with regard to individual preferences and modalities line up with the aforementioned study on PP apps for young people [20], which showed an overreliance on static text and writing and a lack of customization for young people to shape interventions according to their own preferences and strengths, in contrast to what young people expect from digital instantiations [19]. The researchers attributed these issues to technology design, saying that "the design of these technologies needs to be more closely oriented to what young people are actually interested in" [20]. Although we do not disagree with this assessment, our study indicates that the issue is rooted in a deeper level.…”

“…The Person-Activity Fit (PAF) model describes how the overlap between person features, such as preferences and strengths, and intervention features, such as dosage and variety, impact how well a PPI is performed, which in turn impacts the subsequent well-being increase [13]. Both previous research on digital instantiations of PPI principles for young people [20] and our research presented in this paper suggest that PAF between young people and PPI principles may be overall low, at least with regard to how PPI are currently being delivered, in both digital and analog formats.…”

“…Digitally, it is possible to provide a range of options to accommodate differences between young people and allow them to choose. As stipulated by Michel et al [20], there is no technological barrier to replacing writing with audio or video recording and to integrate more interactive modalities into all types of evidence-based PPI. Doing so may help to resolve engagement issues with PP apps for young people.…”

“…A series of focus groups with young people (aged 15-16 years), which explored preferences in relation to mental health promotion apps, highlighted that "content should be made fun and interactive through the use of pictures, music, videos and games" [19]. Subsequently, another group of researchers investigated the degree to which the content of mental health promotion apps aligned with young people's media preferences, discovering an overreliance on static content, that is, written text, and recommended more visual and interactive solutions [20]. Existing research did not investigate the degree to which these issues are a consequence of how PPI principles are translated for digital platforms, as opposed to being rooted in the PPI principles themselves.…”

Unaccompanied Migrant Youth and Mental Health Technologies: A Social-Ecological Approach to Understanding and Designing

“…The lead author, who is well versed in the mental health interventions recommended for UMY, selected the apps by: (1) getting an overview of available mental health apps and the list of apps recommended by Michel et al [56]; (2) generating a list of potential apps that focuses specifcally on sleeping problems and stress [33,46] and promoting techniques that are recommended for UMY (e.g., managing worries, mindfulness exercises and sleep hygiene techniques) [46]; and (3) screening the apps according to interaction criteria recommended for maintaining youth engagement (primarily, ofering multi-model input and output [56]) and their Google Play Store/Apple App Store rating. This resulted in four apps being selected to be used in the workshop as described in Table 2.…”