Feasibility & Acceptability of a Culturally Adapted Socio Emotional Learning Intervention for Pakistani Adolescents

It is 36 items tool designed to measure socioemotional abilities of adolescents. The items are rated on three-point Likert scale, where yes has the highest score (2), No has the score of (1) and maybe has the lowest score of (0) (UNICEF, 2021).Higher scores indicate stronger socio-emotional knowledge, skills, and positive practices, while lower scores indicate poorer socio-emotional competencies and awareness.

It is a well established 35 items scale. It consists of three subscales: internalizing, externalizing and attention problems (Jellinek et al., 1988). The Urdu version has been previously adapted and used in Pakistan, showing satisfactory reliability and validity (Hamdani et al., 2024; 2022). Higher scores reflect greater levels of emotional and behavioral problems (internalizing, externalizing, and attention difficulties), while lower scores indicate fewer psychosocial problems.

RCADS is a 25-item instrument (on a 4-point Likert scale; transformed scores range 0-100) to measure levels of anxiety and low mood. It has two subscales (anxiety & depression). This tool has also been translated into the Urdu language previously and used successfully in Pakistan (Hamdani et al., 2024). Higher scores indicate higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms, whereas lower scores indicate fewer symptoms of anxiety and low mood.

it is a 7-item scale and assesses the mental wellbeing by evaluating the functioning of thoughts and feelings in the past two weeks. Items are rated on Likert scale that ranges from "none of the time" to "all of the time". The total score is calculated by summing the responses on all the items (Tennant et al., 2007). This tool has also been translated into the Urdu language and validated previously (Hamdani et al., 2022). Higher scores indicate better mental wellbeing and more positive functioning of thoughts and feelings, while lower scores indicate poorer mental wellbeing.

Experience of bullying in the past 30 days will be measured through the contextualized version of the Bullying Victimization Questionnaire. The total score can range from 0 to 12. Higher scores indicate more frequent experiences of bullying victimization, while lower scores indicate fewer or no experiences of being bullied by peers.

Quantitatively Feasibility assessment will be done in terms of rate of recruitment, number of sessions delivered to the study participants, number of participants in the sessions who received the intervention, duration of sessions delivered, and retention at follow-up assessment.

Qualitatively feasibility assessment will be done to explore the extent to which it was feasible to train non-specialist facilitators and delivery of the intervention in the school settings.

Acceptability will be assessed through qualitative assessments with the stakeholders in Semi Structured Interviews to assess acceptability, feasibility, facilitators, and barriers of the intervention strategies implemented, and challenges faced by the intervention facilitators during intervention delivery. The Focus Group Discussions with adolescents will explore the intervention strategies applied by the participants in the sessions, challenges faced in the application of the intervention strategies by the participants in real life, perceived usefulness, ease of use, comprehensibility for most/least helpful components, suggestions for improvement, and intent to continue behaviors/engagement with the intervention. The perception of the implementation in school settings will also be explored in terms of non-specialist as delivery agents, their training and supervision, the experience or perception of delivering the intervention.