Free From Abuse: The Booster Project

University of Sheffield

Status: Completed

Conditions: Violence, Domestic; Violence, Gender-Based

Treatments: Other: Free From Abuse; Other: Technology and crime

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04171206

031298

Details and patient eligibility

About

This project is designed to develop and test a brief internet-delivered intervention to promote healthy relationships among young adults.

Full description

In spite of the fact that young adults are at an increased risk of experiencing and perpetrating intimate partner violence (IPV), there is a lack of universal and widely accessible prevention programmes targeted at this age group. One of the reasons for this may be that it is difficult to deliver a universal prevention to individuals who are not formally grouped through one organisation, such as employed young adults. Those who are formally grouped, such as university students, are unlikely to take part in a lengthy prevention programme which is not a part of an official curriculum. Therefore, there is a need for widely available, accessible, and efficacious IPV prevention programmes that could be appropriate for all young adults regardless of gender. Since many young adults in contemporary Western societies were exposed to some kind of relationship education in schools, it may be that a brief programme will suffice to further boost their awareness of IPV and reduce IPV perpetration and victimisation risk. Therefore, we propose a brief internet-based intervention, Free From Abuse - The Booster Project, to achieve these objectives.

Primary objectives:

1. To investigate the acceptability and feasibility of the internet-delivered intervention to university students (determined using the 1 and 4-week follow-up rates, % of participants who correctly answered control questions assessing compliance);
2. To assess the acceptability and feasibility of the outcome measures as methods to measure effectiveness of the intervention within a definitive trial (determined using % of missing data);
3. To estimate the standard deviation (SD) for the continuous outcomes to inform sample size calculations for a definitive trial.

Secondary objective:

1. To evaluate the potential effectiveness of the brief internet-delivered intervention, Free From Abuse - The Booster Project, in increasing recognition of abusive behaviour, as well as reducing acceptance of myths about domestic violence, abuse perpetration, and abuse victimisation among young university students compared with placebo.

Enrollment: 148 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 24 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Participants must be university students aged between 18-24 years, reside in the UK, have access to a computer and internet connection, and be fluent in English.

Exclusion criteria

• Participants will not be eligible to enrol in the trial if they have visual and/or auditory deficits with regards to watching video clips.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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148 participants in 2 patient groups, including a placebo group

Free From Abuse

Experimental group

Description:

This is a brief internet-delivered intervention designed to boost participants' ability to recognise abusive behaviour, reduce acceptance of myths related to domestic violence and IPV, as well as decrease abuse perpetration and victimisation.

Treatment:

Other: Free From Abuse

Technology and crime

Placebo Comparator group

Description:

This is a brief internet-delivered placebo intervention designed to inform participants about how the development of technology could affect crime.

Treatment:

Other: Technology and crime