Improving parent-adolescent communication about sexual and reproductive health

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PROJECT SUMMARY Early adolescence, between the ages of 10-13, is a critical time for sexuality development. It is a period when most young people enter puberty and have new questions about bodies, relationships, and sexual activity. However, the majority of US adolescents enter this early adolescent period without access to the kind of inclusive, comprehensive sex education that could help them develop the confidence and skills they need to safely negotiate new sexual experiences. Comprehensive sex education is a well-established holistic intervention that can help prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unintended pregnancies and promote sexual wellbeing; a key component of this education is the role of parents. Parents can provide adolescents with guidance and support on sexual and relationship health issues, yet many parents and adolescents never have meaningful conversations about sex. These conversations can be anxiety-inducing, and current solutions, such as books, websites, and training workshops, are failing to fill this gap. Many of these solutions are difficult to implement and, more importantly, often fail to help both parents and their children to build their communication skills. In order to make parent-adolescent conversations about sex more approachable, Teen Health Research, Inc., is building TheTalk: a comprehensive, personalized, culturally-sensitive platform to modernize parent-adolescent communication about sex. TheTalk will be a customizable and adaptive conversation coach that can guide parents and their young adolescent children (ages 10-13) through difficult conversations regarding sexual health and wellness. This is an ideal stage to educate adolescents as they are starting puberty and becoming more curious about sexuality. Unlike most current solutions, TheTalk will use an online, multimedia approach that is engaging to a generation of teens who are accustomed to connecting and learning online. TheTalk will also deliver customized multimedia resources to both parents and adolescents based on the adolescent’s age and gender and the parent’s values and biggest barriers to communication. In this Phase I STTR project, we will build TheTalk into a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) and collect end-user feedback on usability, communication features, and perceived value. Aim 1: We will form advisory boards of adolescents and parents to select content for the initial platform that is inclusive, medically accurate, age- appropriate, culturally relevant, and highly engaging. We will work with Oak City Labs to create a test-ready version of our app that is customizable by user preference and functional across multiple web browsers. Aim 2: We will then perform a usability and acceptability study regarding webapp UI/UX on 30 parent-adolescent dyads and iteratively update design and content. Completion of this study will result in generation of our MVP and provide initial feedback on design and content to de-risk future efficacy studies in a wider population. Successful development of TheTalk has the potential to help parents and teens overcome their fears of talking about sex, improve adolescent relationship skills, and ultimately reduce STIs and unintended pregnancy.