Enhancing mental health and psychosocial support for adolescents and young adults through the Asenze Impilo Project: Protocol for a Human Centred Design Study (Preprint)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Despite increasing recognition of adolescents’ and young adults’ mental health needs, many young people continue to experience barriers in accessing timely, acceptable, and responsive mental health and psychosocial support (PSS) services. There is a need for contextually relevant and youth-responsive approaches that meaningfully engage young people, caregivers, and service providers in implementation strategy development. The Asenze Impilo study aims to co-design a mental health and PSS implementation strategy for adolescents and young adults in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa, using a human-centered design (HCD) approach. Objective This protocol paper describes the methods used to co-design an implementation strategy to enhance existing mental health and PSS services for adolescents and young adults, leveraging resources from the Asenze study, a population-based longitudinal cohort study in KZN, South Africa. The study will use an HCD approach to engage adolescents and young adults, caregivers, and various mental health stakeholders from the Departments of Health, Basic Education, and Social Development, and implementing partner organizations in order to inform how to improve mental health for adolescents and young adults by (1) identifying needs and barriers, (2) developing context-relevant solutions, and (3) refining a co-designed implementation strategy. Methods A 3-phase HCD co-design process will be undertaken, using qualitative multimethods. Participants will include 20 young adults recruited from the Asenze study, 20 caregivers recruited from the Asenze study, and 15 mental health stakeholders from KZN, South Africa. Phase 1, Discover , includes separate HCD workshops with adolescents and young adults, caregivers, and implementation partners to understand existing mental health and PSS services, mental health and PSS needs of adolescents and young adults, and potential evidence-based intervention options and corresponding implementation strategies. Phase 2, Design , includes separate HCD workshops with adolescents and young adults and caregivers to co-design a context-specific mental health and PSS implementation strategy. Phase 3, Build , includes 2 separate HCD workshops with adolescents and young adults and caregivers to refine the co-designed implementation strategy, and a consultation workshop with the mental health stakeholders to review the feasibility and acceptability of the proposed implementation strategy. A qualitative thematic analysis approach will be used, allowing for an inductive and iterative exploration of patterns emerging from the data collected during the HCD workshops. Results The study was funded in 2024, and ethics approval was received in March 2025. Enrollment will be completed in April 2025, and data collection will be conducted between May 2025 and January 2026. Findings are expected to be submitted for publication later in 2026. Conclusions The study aims to produce a co-designed implementation strategy to improve delivery of mental health and PSS for adolescents and young adults that is adapted to the local context.
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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 | 0.050 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.077 | 0.013 |
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".