Impact of an Interactive Film on Resilience, Wellbeing, and Help-Seeking in School-Aged Youth

Study Objectives:

• To conduct a three-arm feasibility trial to assess the feasibility of a brief interactive film intervention in school settings with randomisation at school level.
• To explore suitability of parameters of the trial, such as school recruitment, school randomisation, participant recruitment and retention, consent taking, data collection tools, feasibility and acceptability of the intervention, with a view of developing a large-scale trial, as primary outcome.
• To explore views and experiences of young people on acceptability and implementation of the trial and the film intervention through using a qualitative design.
• To gather preliminary data on the effectiveness of a brief interactive film intervention in school settings to enhance resilience, help-seeking attitudes and mental wellbeing in young people, as a secondary outcome.

Design Mixed-methods three arm feasibility cluster randomised controlled trial to assess the feasibility and acceptability of intervention delivery and study procedures, including the following key parameters: school recruitment and randomisation, sample size and participant recruitment and retention, consent taking, data collection tools, data analysis, intervention acceptability and delivery.

Setting Three schools across North East England and North Cumbria will be recruited, matched on size and socio-economic status, measured by percentage of children entitled to free meal.

School recruitment Schools will be recruited by telephoning and emailing head teachers at appropriate points of contact.

Randomisation Each of the three schools will be allocated at random (i.e. computer generated stratified randomisation), to one of the three intervention conditions: control condition, interactive film and interactive film plus support, matched according to the size of the school, socio-economic level, estimated by proportion of students receiving free school meals, and urban or rural location.

Participants Participants will be aged 14-18, years 10-12, at participating schools. Years 11 and 13 will not be targeted because of exam preparation, particularly in the light of COVID-19 disruption. Participants who receive parental consent as appropriate and who provide written informed consent/assent to taking part will be invited to complete baseline measures.

Study Intervention Interactive film

Follow-up Participants will be followed up at 3-months and 6-months.

Qualitative evaluation After the intervention participants will be invited to take part in a focus group (n=6, per school). Focus groups tend to be more comfortable for young people (29). The invitation will be on a separate form accompanying their survey documents. If participants are interested they will provide their contact details, which will be retained separately from the research data. The focus groups will explore young people's views on the trial procedures and the intervention. Interviews (n=6) will be conducted with head teachers and youth workers on acceptability of the trial and intervention.

Analysis Descriptive statistics will be used to provide estimations regarding recruitment, retention, intervention delivery and inform power-calculations for a large-scale trial.

Descriptive statistics will be used to report participants' scores on scales. Two-way ANOVA will be used for preliminary analysis to explore differences between groups, however instead of doing a formal hypothesis testing to prove effectiveness, a 95 % confidence interval will be presented to describe the range of effect.

Thematic content analysis will be used to capture recurring themes, commonalities and patterns in people's perspectives explored in focus groups and interviews.

Inclusion criteria

• In selected Y10 or Y12 class (at start of study) at participating school

Exclusion criteria

• Lack of parental consent for Y10 students