Adapting a Sexual Health Intervention for Adolescents Exposed to Adversity: Feasibility Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although sexual exploration is normative during adolescence, sexual activities that are unprotected and occur under the influence of substances can pose significant risks to young people. Youth exposed to adversity are among the groups most vulnerable to sexual risk-taking in adolescence. Selective interventions that consider lived experiences and the local context may help reduce sexual risk-taking among this population. OBJECTIVE: This pilot study assessed the feasibility of participant recruitment and retention as well as participant engagement with an adapted version of Focus on Youth with Informed Parents and Children Together for Black youth exposed to household challenges. METHODS: Participants were recruited using school and community presentations, digital flyers, and referrals. A total of 121 youth from 3 sites in Baltimore, Maryland, were screened. Participants completed 3 assessments: baseline, posttest, and 3-month follow-up. Participant enrollment, session attendance, and assessment completion were used to determine feasibility and engagement. Sexual health knowledge, pregnancy intentions, partner communication, and sexual behaviors were explored as secondary outcomes. RESULTS: Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the data for this study were collected between January 2022 and April 2023. A total of 61 youth (aged 13-16 years) were recruited and randomized to either the intervention or the control condition (n=33 and n=28, respectively). In total, 87% (53/61) of the participants completed all 3 assessments. There was high engagement: 80% (48/61) of participants attended at least 3 sessions, and 75.2% (115/153) of after-session responses revealed they would recommend a session to a friend. Among the 18 participants who reported having any sex, all 18 (100%) abstained from alcohol use and 12 (67%) abstained from drug use before sex. The intervention group showed a significant increase in sexual health knowledge. No changes in sexual health behaviors or partner communication were observed. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that recruiting, retaining, and engaging participants in the adapted Focus on Youth with Informed Parents and Children Together intervention is feasible. Additional research is needed to determine the extent to which this intervention can mitigate sexual risk-taking among youth exposed to adversity. The findings will inform the redesign of our assessments to capture additional factors that may affect sexual health behaviors. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05033821; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05033821.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".