Free From Abuse: The Booster Project
Condition: Violence, Gender-Based; Violence, Domestic
Study type: Interventional

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

Detailed 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.
    

Intervention name(s): Free From Abuse; Technology and crime
Intervention type(s): Other; Other
Intervention description(s): Participants in the treatment arm will watch a 15-minute talk given by an adult female survivor of IPV who tells the story of her abusive relationship. After watching the video, participants will read information on 10 signs of an unhealthy relationship. The intervention will take approximately 25 minutes to complete.; Participants in the placebo control arm will watch a 19-minute talk on technology development and crime. After watching the video, participants will read 10 facts about cyber security. The intervention will take approximately 25 minutes to complete.
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Double (Participant, Investigator)
Primary purpose: Prevention
Keywords: Interpersonal partner violence; Dating violence; Internet-delivered intervention