Parent-Teen Communication to Resist Unhealthy Media Messages

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Abstract The rates of early and risky sexual behaviors of adolescents indicate the need for evidence-based comprehensive sex education for adolescents. Parents serve as a major socialization agent for adolescents and can help to improve adolescents’ outcomes by communicating about sexual health topics. Unfortunately, many parents do not feel efficacious in talking about sex with their children, especially discussing difficult topics such as contraception. In addition, consumption of unhealthy media messages that normalize or glorify risky sex is related to early and risky sexual behaviors in adolescents. Critical analysis of these media messages promote healthy perspective taking about relationships and sexual behaviors. The first aim of this project is to create a prototype of Media Aware Parent (MAP), a self-paced program designed to provide parents with media mediation skills, sexual health knowledge, and practice in parent-adolescent communication through a highly interactive web application. It is hypothesized that this program will enhance parents’ feelings of efficacy for and frequency in participating in open, responsive, comprehensive, and medically-accurate parent-adolescent communication about sexual health topics especially when exposed to sexualized media messages, and in turn, positively impact their children’s media literacy and sexual health outcomes. The proposed program will utilize a media literacy framework (e.g., Message Interpretation Process model) found to be effective in reducing risk behaviors (substance use and early/risky sexual behaviors). The program is innovative because it is focused on engaging parents in sexual health communication with their children, expands upon a successful theoretical framework for risk prevention, would be the first evidence-based web-based media literacy education program for parents, and utilizes Web 2.0 and emerging technology. Focus groups with parents and adolescents and one-to-one evaluations with parent users will be used to develop and revise the web-based program. The second aim of this project is to conduct a feasibility study of the MAP program prototype in which parents (N=64) are randomly assigned to an intervention group (receive the MAP program) or an active control group (e.g., review medically-accurate web content on adolescent sexual health). All parents will complete pre-post assessments, which will provide a preliminary test of program effectiveness for positively affecting outcomes (e.g., media mediation skills, sexual health knowledge, and parent-adolescent sexual health communication efficacy and behaviors). Consumer satisfaction ratings from the intervention group will also be used to evaluate program feasibility. Plans for Phase II would involve creating additional modules about specific sexual health topics that are rated as highly desired by Phase I parent participants and conducting an RCT to examine the program’s impact on adolescent media literacy and sexual health outcomes.