Free From Abuse: The Booster Project

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

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

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Violence, Domestic; Violence, Gender-Based
• Intervention / Treatment: Other: Free From Abuse; Other: Technology and crime

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.

• Study Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Actual): 148
• Phase: Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• United Kingdom
  • Sheffield, United Kingdom
    • The University of Sheffield

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: 18 years to 24 years (Adult)
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: No
• Genders Eligible for Study: All

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

• Participants must be university students aged between 18-24 years, reside in the UK, have access to a computer and internet connection, and be fluent in English.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Participants will not be eligible to enrol in the trial if they have visual and/or auditory deficits with regards to watching video clips.

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Prevention
• Allocation: Randomized
• Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
• Masking: Double

Number of Arms

2

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm	Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Free From Abuse; This is a brief internet-delivered intervention designed to boost participants' ability to recognise abusive behaviour, reduce acceptance of myths related to domestic violence and IPV, as well as decrease abuse perpetration and victimisation.	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.
Placebo Comparator: Technology and crime; This is a brief internet-delivered placebo intervention designed to inform participants about how the development of technology could affect crime.	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.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Change in recognition of abusive behaviour	Recognition of adolescent relationship abuse (ARA) scale (Rothman, Decker, & Silverman, 2006); scores on this 12-item self-report scale range from 12 to 60, with higher scores indicating an increased recognition of abusive behaviour	baseline, immediately post intervention - an average of 1 hour, 1 week, 4 weeks
Change in acceptance of myths about domestic violence	Domestic Violence Myth Acceptance Scale (DVMAS; Peters, 2008); scores on this 18-item self-report scale range from 18 to 108, with higher scores indicating an increased acceptance of myths about domestic violence	baseline, immediately post intervention - an average of 1 hour, 1 week, 4 weeks

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Change in abuse perpetration	Safe Dates - Psychological Abuse Perpetration scale (Foshee et al., 1996, 1998); scores on this 14-item self-report scale range from 14 to 56, with higher scores indicating an increased abuse perpetration	baseline, 4 weeks
Change in abuse victimisation	14-item Safe Dates - Psychological Abuse Victimisation scale (Foshee et al., 1996, 1998); scores on this 14-item self-report scale range from 14 to 56, with higher scores indicating an increased abuse victimisation	baseline, 4 weeks

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: University of Sheffield
• Collaborators: University of Huddersfield
• Investigators: Principal Investigator: Agata Debowska, PhD, University of Sheffield

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Actual): December 1, 2019
• Primary Completion (Actual): March 15, 2020
• Study Completion (Actual): July 15, 2020

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: November 13, 2019
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: November 18, 2019
• First Posted (Actual): November 20, 2019

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): November 6, 2020
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: November 4, 2020
• Last Verified: November 1, 2019

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Keywords: Interpersonal partner violence; Dating violence; Internet-delivered intervention
• Other Study ID Numbers: 031298

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: No

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No