An Interactive Narrative Intervention to Increase Adolescents' Knowledge and Self-Efficacy to Reduce Alcohol Use:...

Area of Science:

• Adolescent Health
• Behavioral Science
• Digital Health Interventions

Background:

• Accidents and injuries are leading preventable causes of adolescent death, often linked to substance use.
• Adolescent alcohol use is prevalent, necessitating effective prevention strategies.
• Interactive narrative learning technologies offer promising avenues for personalized health behavior interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of the Interactive Narrative System for Patient-Individualized Reflective Exploration (INSPIRE) on adolescent self-efficacy and knowledge related to alcohol risk.
• To assess INSPIRE as an extension of clinical preventive care for adolescent alcohol misuse.

Main Methods:

• A pre-post study design involving 44 high school adolescents (aged 14-16).
• Participants completed two 20-minute web-based interactive narrative episodes.
• Changes in self-efficacy and knowledge were measured using questionnaires and computer interaction data, analyzed with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests.

Main Results:

• Significant increases in self-efficacy scores (from 7.97 to 8.72, P<.001) and alcohol risk knowledge (from median 5.0 to 7.0, P<.001).
• Effect sizes for self-efficacy (r=0.89) and knowledge (r=0.57) indicate substantial improvements.
• Four distinct behavioral strategy endorsement profiles were identified through reflection tool clustering.

Conclusions:

• INSPIRE is an innovative, theoretically grounded interactive narrative intervention for adolescent health behavior change.
• The study demonstrates the potential of personalized narrative adaptations in reducing risky alcohol use.
• INSPIRE enhances self-efficacy and knowledge, potentially facilitating the generalization of preventive behaviors to real-life situations.