A Guided Internet-Based Problem-Solving Intervention Delivered Through Smartphones for Secondary School Pupils During the COVID-19 Pandemic in India: Protocol for a Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: "POD Adventures" is a gamified mental health intervention delivered via a smartphone app and supported by counsellors for a target population of secondary school students in India. This paper describes the protocol for a pilot randomized controlled trial of a remotely delivered version of the intervention in the context of COVID-19 restrictions. OBJECTIVE: Our objectives are to assess the feasibility of research procedures and intervention delivery and to generate preliminary estimates of the effectiveness of the intervention to inform the sample size calculation of a full-scale trial. METHODS: We will conduct a parallel, 2-arm, individually randomized pilot controlled trial in 11 secondary schools in Goa, India. This pilot trial aims to recruit 70 participants with a felt need for psychological support. Participants will receive either the POD Adventures intervention delivered over 4 weeks or usual care comprising information about local mental health services and national helplines. Outcomes will be assessed at two timepoints: baseline and 6 weeks post randomization. RESULTS: The first participant was enrolled on January 28, 2021, and 6-week assessment completed on April 4, 2021. Owing to a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, schools in Goa were closed on April 22, 2021. Trial participants are currently receiving the intervention or completing follow-up assessments. CONCLUSIONS: This pilot trial will help understand the feasibility of implementing and evaluating a remotely delivered digital mental health intervention in a low-resource setting. Our findings will be used to design future trials that can address difficulties of accessing psychosocial support in-person and support wider efforts to scale up evidence-based mental health interventions for young people. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04672486; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04672486. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/30339.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.058 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".