A Digital Peer Support Platform to Translate Online Peer Support for Emerging Adult Mental Well-being: Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Emerging adulthood (ages 19 to 25 years) is a developmental phase that is marked by increased mental health conditions, especially depression and anxiety. A growing body of work indicates that digital peer emotional support has positive implications for the psychological functioning of emerging adults. There is burgeoning interest among health care professionals, educational stakeholders, and policy makers in understanding the implementation and clinical effectiveness, as well as the associated mechanism of change, of digital peer support as an intervention. Objective This randomized controlled trial (RCT) examined the effectiveness of a digital peer support intervention over a digital platform—Acceset—for emerging adult psychological well-being with 3 primary aims. First, we evaluated the implementation effectiveness of digital peer support training for individuals providing support (befrienders) and of the digital platform for peer support. Second, we assessed the clinical outcomes of digital peer support in terms of the intervening effect on emerging adult psychological well-being. Third, we investigated the mechanism of change linking the digital peer support intervention to emerging adult psychological well-being. Methods This RCT involving 100 emerging adults from the National University of Singapore follows the published protocol for this trial. Results This RCT found effectiveness in digital peer support training—specifically, befrienders’ peer support responses demonstrating significantly higher post- than pretraining scores in selfhood (posttraining score: mean 62.83, SD 10.18, and SE 1.72; pretraining score: mean 54.86, SD 7.32, and SE 1.24; t34=3.88; P<.001). The digital peer support intervention demonstrated clinical effectiveness in enhancing selfhood, compassion, and mindfulness and lowering depressive and anxiety symptoms among seekers in the intervention group after the intervention (mean 7.15, SD 5.14; SE 0.88) than among seekers in the waitlist control group before the intervention (mean 11.75, SD 6.72; SE 0.89; t89=3.44; P<.001). The effect of the intervention on seekers’ psychological well-being was sustained beyond the period of the intervention. The mechanism of change revealed that seekers’ engagement with the intervention had both immediate and prospective implications for their psychological well-being. Conclusions This RCT of a digital peer support intervention for emerging adult psychological well-being harnesses the interventional potential of 4 components of psychological well-being and elucidated a mechanism of change. By incorporating and validating the digital features and process of a peer support platform, our RCT provides the parameters and conditions for deploying an effective and novel digital peer support intervention for emerging adult psychological well-being in real-world settings. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05083676; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05083676
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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 | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.002 |
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".