Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) of StriveWeekly for Anxiety and Depression Prevention for College Students During COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019)

Detailed Summary

With the COVID-19 pandemic completely altering the landscape of higher education, students have been experiencing more stress than ever. With Harvard University's plan for students to return to campus for the 2021-2022 academic year, offering an online mental health program such as StriveWeekly could provide students with stress management support as they transition back after 1.5 years of remote learning. This study will use a randomized controlled trial design to test the effectiveness of a waitlist versus StriveWeekly. This study will allow us to test if a program that has previously demonstrated effectiveness with university students in reducing anxiety and depression symptoms will still be effective after the unprecedented amount of stressors during a global pandemic. Primary aim: We aim to evaluate the effectiveness of StriveWeekly in preventing or reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression. The use of a waitlist condition will allow us to experimentally assess if the online intervention is responsible for decreasing / preventing worsened anxiety, depression, and stress symptoms over time. Given the previously established effectiveness of StriveWeekly as an indicated prevention program, we expect students in the intervention condition to experience significantly better symptoms compared to the waitlist from baseline to posttest. Alternatively, if the transition back from remote learning and/or the broad pandemic context interferes with the acceptability or effectiveness of StriveWeekly, then we might expect to see little to no significant differences between the online intervention condition and waitlist condition from baseline to posttest. Secondary aims include: (a) testing moderators of intervention effectiveness and (b) evaluating the intervention in terms of acceptability (e.g., feedback on program name; demographically representativeness of student user sample; satisfactory adherence and satisfaction rates). Exploratory moderation analyses across groups will help determine whether or not the intervention condition produces unique or additive effects for students with certain characteristics over and above changes demonstrated by similar students in the waitlist condition. Acceptability analyses will allow for more nuanced evaluation of StriveWeekly's effectiveness as a program, beyond its ability to facilitate symptom reduction.

Study Details

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Interventions