The adolescent years for young people is a period of crucial life transitions and is
fraught with a range of internal and external challenges. Young people in low- and
middle-income countries (LMICs) are particularly vulnerable to mental ill health given
the exposure to multiple adverse life experiences. Positive psychological interventions
have been brought into the social-emotional learning curriculum of western countries and
has shown efficacy in supporting the salutary effects of the same in the health and
wellbeing of the young people. In most LMICs, where there is less access to psychologists
and psychiatrists, the models that are used have only a limited amount of application to
the young people who are struggling.
The primary goal of this project is to design and test the effects on mental health and
well-being outcomes of an arts-based train-the-trainer intervention, cultivating
gratitude, kindness, and hope among youth in schools and informal settlements. The
central change theory is that by cultivating these key strengths, youth will experience
empowering mind-set shifts that will prepare them to navigate past, present, and future
life challenges, including mental illness.
In order to create a robustly tested, adaptable, and scalable intervention that speaks
directly to the realities of young people in schools and informal settlements in LMICs,
this project will integrate the research currently available in the fields of character
development, positive psychology, and mental health. This project will support
cross-border collaboration in a number of ways to successfully bridge these rich and
diverse sectors. It will bring together specialists from LMICs and high-income countries
(HICs), mental health and character development professionals, as well as youth and adult
researchers, to produce the fundamental evidence at the nexus of character development
and health outcomes.
This project will use a single-blind cluster randomized controlled trial design with 10
clusters 60 young people within schools and 30 in communities recruited from informal
settlements in Nairobi and India. The evaluation will employ a mixed methods approach to
determine the impact of the intervention on mental wellbeing of young people.
Quantitative data will be collected through a survey at baseline and end-line while focus
group discussions (FGD) will only be conducted at end-line. These will be analyzed using
STATA and NVivo softwares respectively.
This project proposes that, the model and evidence generated will be innovative in a
number of ways: 1) it is designed to scale in low-resource settings and takes
replicability into account from the start. 2) the intervention's accessibility to a
diverse range of youth in LMICs, including the most marginalized, is considered from the
start; 3) it departs from the traditional approach of testing interventions based on
individual character strengths in order to weave gratitude, kindness, and hope together
through an integrated life course (past, present, and future) approach and; 4) the focus
is on young people's leadership and their ability to support themselves and their peers.
Character strengthening is associated with independent critical thinking inherently
required in developing leaders. While this is not an outcome of the study the ability to
lead oneself and others with compassion signifies likelihood of a longer-term impact of
the character strengthening intervention. Findings from the study would contribute
towards improving mental health policies and programs.