NCT04171206

Free From Abuse: The Booster Project

A Brief Internet-delivered Intervention to Promote Healthy Relationships Among Young Adults: A Randomised Placebo-controlled Pilot Study

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 148 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Sheffield · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 24 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This project is designed to develop and test a brief internet-delivered intervention to promote healthy relationships among young adults.

Detailed description

In spite of the fact that young adults are at an increased risk of experiencing and perpetrating intimate partner violence (IPV), there is a lack of universal and widely accessible prevention programmes targeted at this age group. One of the reasons for this may be that it is difficult to deliver a universal prevention to individuals who are not formally grouped through one organisation, such as employed young adults. Those who are formally grouped, such as university students, are unlikely to take part in a lengthy prevention programme which is not a part of an official curriculum. Therefore, there is a need for widely available, accessible, and efficacious IPV prevention programmes that could be appropriate for all young adults regardless of gender. Since many young adults in contemporary Western societies were exposed to some kind of relationship education in schools, it may be that a brief programme will suffice to further boost their awareness of IPV and reduce IPV perpetration and victimisation risk. Therefore, we propose a brief internet-based intervention, Free From Abuse - The Booster Project, to achieve these objectives. Primary objectives: 1. To investigate the acceptability and feasibility of the internet-delivered intervention to university students (determined using the 1 and 4-week follow-up rates, % of participants who correctly answered control questions assessing compliance); 2. To assess the acceptability and feasibility of the outcome measures as methods to measure effectiveness of the intervention within a definitive trial (determined using % of missing data); 3. To estimate the standard deviation (SD) for the continuous outcomes to inform sample size calculations for a definitive trial. Secondary objective: 1\. To evaluate the potential effectiveness of the brief internet-delivered intervention, Free From Abuse - The Booster Project, in increasing recognition of abusive behaviour, as well as reducing acceptance of myths about domestic violence, abuse perpetration, and abuse victimisation among young university students compared with placebo.

Conditions

• Violence, Gender-Based
• Violence, Domestic

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Free From Abuse	Participants in the treatment arm will watch a 15-minute talk given by an adult female survivor of IPV who tells the story of her abusive relationship. After watching the video, participants will read information on 10 signs of an unhealthy relationship. The intervention will take approximately 25 minutes to complete.
OTHER	Technology and crime	Participants in the placebo control arm will watch a 19-minute talk on technology development and crime. After watching the video, participants will read 10 facts about cyber security. The intervention will take approximately 25 minutes to complete.

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-12-01
• Primary completion: 2020-03-15
• Completion: 2020-07-15
• First posted: 2019-11-20
• Last updated: 2020-11-06

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United Kingdom