Parents’ Perceptions of a Serious Game for Educating Families on Prescription Opioid Safety: Qualitative Pilot Study of MedSMARxT: Adventures in PharmaCity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Opioid misuse is a pervasive, worsening problem that affects the health of people throughout the United States, including adolescents. There are few adolescent-focused interventions designed to educate them about opioid medication safety. The MedSMARxT: Adventures in PharmaCity, is a serious educational video game that teaches parents and their youths about safe opioid practices. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to elucidate parent's perceptions of MedSMARxT: Adventures in PharmaCity and its potential use by parents and their adolescents. METHODS: Parents of adolescents aged 12 to 18 years who live in the United States were recruited from April to October 2021 via Qualtrics research panels, social media, email listserves, and snowball sampling. The study participants played MedSMARxT: Adventures in PharmaCity for 30 minutes and then participated in a 30-minute postgame interview via WebEx (Cisco). Questions were developed and piloted to examine adults' perceptions of the game. Participants were asked three sets of open-ended questions: (1) questions about the game and elements of the game, (2) what they learned from the game, and (3) questions about their experience with games. Audio recordings were transcribed verbatim. Interview transcripts were coded using content and thematic analysis by study team members to identify major themes and subthemes from the data. RESULTS: Parent participants (N=67) played MedSMARxT: Adventures in PharmaCity and completed a postgame interview. Analysis extrapolated four primary themes from the data: (1) participant gaming experience, (2) perception of game features, (3) educational purpose of the game, and (4) future use of the game. Most participants (n=56, 84%), had at least some experience with video games. More than half of the participants (n=35, 52%) participants, had positive reactions to the game characters and scenes depicted in MedSMARxT: Adventures in PharmaCity and stated they were realistic for adolescents. Most participants (n=39, 58%), would recommend the game to others. Significant difficulties with gameplay navigation were reported by 38 (57%) participants, as well as a slow game pace. All participants were able to accurately identify the overarching goal of the game: opioid or medication safety. The game reinforced existing knowledge for participants, though many (n=15, 22%), reported a new awareness of the need to store opioid medications in a locked area and the availability of medication disposal drop boxes at pharmacies. Participants stated that they would recommend the game for future use by families and youths in various health care and non-health care settings. CONCLUSIONS: The use of a tailored serious game is a novel, engaging tool to educate adolescents on opioid safety. MedSMARxT: Adventures in PharmaCity can be used as a tool for parents and adolescents to facilitate meaningful dialogue about safe and appropriate opioid use.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".