Effect of a smartphone-based educational toolkit on behavioural outcomes in personal care product use: a randomized controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aim: In 2023, the average woman used 13 different personal care products (PCPs) daily, exposing them to 114 different chemical toxins, including carcinogens, synthetic preservatives, and fragrances. Parabens, commonly used as preservatives and fragrance ingredients, are found in household and PCPs, such as cosmetics and hair products. Exposure to parabens has been associated with an increased risk of breast cancer and endocrine disorders. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the “Paraben-Free & Me” educational toolkit (OSF Registration DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/WXU34) by exploring whether it influences changes of 3.5 points (10%) in paraben-free behaviour in women aged 18–35 years old when compared to the control group. Methods: This study consists of a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of the educational toolkit among 101 female students aged 18 to 35 years old following a four-week intervention period. Baseline and follow-up questionnaires were used to assess participants’ knowledge and access to information, risk perception, health beliefs, and paraben-free behaviour by providing composite scores for each construct. Results: The change in the knowledge and access to information score was significantly greater in the intervention group compared to the control group (+3.96, 95% CI [1.95, 5.96]). There were slight differences between groups in relation to health beliefs (+0.63, 95% CI [–1.02, 2.27]), risk perception (+0.96, 95% CI [–0.61, 2.54]), and paraben-free behaviour (–0.16, 95% CI [–2.88, 2.57]); however, these were not statistically significant. Conclusions: This study suggests that while the “Paraben-Free & Me” educational toolkit was unsuccessful in promoting greater paraben-free behaviour in the intervention group, it can increase women’s knowledge and access to information related to parabens in their PCPs. Future studies can focus on evaluating paraben-free behaviour and the effectiveness of the educational toolkit by exploring biological measures, such as urinary concentrations of parabens, and air pollutant concentrations.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".