A quasi-controlled clinical trial included a university-based supervision course for facilitators of an interactive wellness school-based program. The study aimed to investigate how students that facilitate prevention programs are personally affected by delivering content related to self-esteem, body-image, and media literacy. In total, 66 university students who were either facilitators of preventive programs (intervention group) or non-facilitators (comparison group) completed questionnaires before, after, and three months following the program’s termination. All methods were performed following the Declaration of Helsinki regulations and Consort 2010 guidelines. Participants in the facilitator group demonstrated statistically significant superiority, with large effect size, regarding improvement in identifying advertisement strategies. Weight-related body-esteem, and the reduced impact of media messages’ pressure also had statistically significant superiority, with small effect size. The number of participants with pathological EAT-26 scores (>20) decreased from 5 to 2 in the facilitator group compared to an increase from 5 to 6 (no statistical significance) in the comparison group. Both groups demonstrated statistically significant decreases in eating disorder perceptions and behaviors from baseline to 3-month follow-up. Delivering a prevention program proved beneficial to facilitators, in addition to the target school pupils, and thus may be considered as part of the prevention programs’ effectiveness assessment.
Ample literature exists on the impact of prevention programmes on their target audience, while much less is known about how delivering such programmes influences their facilitators. Even less literature exists on the emotional and social processes that form this potential impact on facilitators. The current study analysed qualitative in-depth, non-structured interviews, as well as written essays provided by 33 student-facilitators who delivered the “Favoring Myself” programme in Israel during 2019–2021. This school-based wellness programme comprised 10 weekly, 90 min sessions on self-care behaviours, media literacy, self-esteem, and positive body image, which are well-known protective factors against risky behaviours. A thematic analysis was applied to explore the main themes in the collected data. An interesting affective transformation from self-doubt to pride in themselves emerged as a shared experience of these young facilitators. Facilitators related their ability to facilitate the programme, as well as to undergo an individual maturation and empowerment experience, to certain components of the programme itself, such as the preparatory course, individual supervision, and the peer-group experience. This shift from doubt to pride is discussed using two frameworks—a theoretical discourse of emerging adulthood as a developmental stage, and the self-determination theory.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.