Fostering Resilience in Adolescents at Risk.

Resilience, Psychological

Adolescent, Population at Risk, Psychological Intervention, Clinical Trials, Randomized

The purpose of this study is to assess the effectiveness of a school-based resilience intervention in adolescents and to understand whether the school training can improve levels of resilience or psychological wellbeing, while reducing depressed mood.

Background Some studies with adolescents reported the impact of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the mental health. In the literature, resilience was related with positive mental health and was defined by some authors as a good mental health and a good psychosocial functioning despite exposure to risk or adversity (Collishaw et al., 2016). Additionally, resilience was also considered important to develop interventions to prevent or treat mental disorders, particularly anxiety, depression, and stress. Schools have been identified as one of the key settings for promoting resilience among children and young populations in this time of COVID-19 pandemic, where social inequalities have become even more evident and depressive symptoms have increased. The purpose of this trial is to assess the effectiveness of a resilience school-based intervention in adolescents and to understand whether the school training can improve levels of resilience or increase psychological wellbeing, while reducing depressed mood. Hypothesis: Adolescents at risk between 12 and 15 years of age who receive a resilience school-based intervention by school nurses, will obtain higher scores on scales of resilience with respect to the control group, just after the intervention and 6-month post-intervention Method: The study is a cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT). Schools that want to participate, will sign an agreement to participate in the project Schools will be randomly allocated in control and intervention groups by external researcher using a computer-generated random numbers. The intervention will be carried out during the school period (January to June 2022), by primary health care nurses who are part of the committee of experts and the research team. Students will follow a specific training consisting of six 55-minute sessions, once a week. The data collection will start in January 2022 and will finish in December 2022. Data will be collected at baseline before the intervention (T1), after 6 weeks post- intervention (T2) and 6 months after intervention as follow-up (T3). The evaluation of the effectiveness of the intervention will be carried out using the psychometric scale CYRM-32 (as the primary outcome) which will allow us to determine changes in resilience. Using SD of the primary outcome CYRM-32 scale, minimum sample size was calculated to be 70 students in each group, using GRANMO (https://www.imim.es/ofertadeserveis/software-public/granmo/). A follow-up loss rate of 10% was estimated.

Spain