Two presentations about Plan A at the 2018 annual meeting for the American Public Health Association (APHA) in San Diego, CA
November 10, 2018 – Aaron Plant of Sentient Research gave two presentations on Plan A at the 2018 Annual Conference for the American Public Health Association (APHA) in San Diego. The first presentation investigated the acceptability of the Plan A video intervention. Ten-percent of participants in a randomized controlled trial to evaluate Plan A (n=91) were randomly selected for a brief survey after watching the video. Acceptability was assessed by measuring emotional involvement/relevance, attention/recall, perceived understanding, overall quality, and interest in additional episodes. The study found high emotional involvement, relevance, and strong engagement with the video. Young women said Plan A was of excellent quality, and the vast majority felt that it was easy to understand. Most study participants were very interested in more episodes of Plan A. The study demonstrated high acceptability of Plan A among the young women.
The second presentation, “Two Approaches to Engaging Adolescents in the Development of Sexual and Reproductive Health Interventions,” was part of a roundtable discussion in the APHA Sexual & Reproductive Health Section titled “How Might We Design and Test Innovative Interventions to Improve Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health?” This discussion presented the process by which Sentient Research developed two federally-funded, technology-based, teen pregnancy prevention interventions from 2016 to 2018. For the first program, Plan A, both the problem and the solution needed to be defined during the proposal phase. The target audience research included three focus groups (n=41) followed by numerous interactions with a 9-member review panel during script development and video production. For the second program, human-centered design was used, which requires deep collaboration with the target audience at every stage of program development. For this project, Sentient Research, along with collaborators Joann Schladale and Jenna Gaarde, engaged adolescent parents to develop a solution to identified problems, with the goal of creating a program that is as effective, meaningful, and useful as possible. Multiple rounds of interviews with young mothers and fathers were conducted to develop, test and refine program concepts for a holistic support mobile phone application. The roundtable discussion explored the pros and cons of intensive target audience research and iterative approaches for creating effective and feasible interventions.
Citations:
Plant A, Montoya JA, Falk G, Walsh S, Demby H, Rietmeijer C. Poster presented at: 2018 APHA Conference; November 10-14, 2018; San Diego, CA.
Plant A. Roundtable discussion presented at: 2018 APHA Conference; November 10-14, 2018; San Diego, CA.