There is a large body of evidence demonstrating that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can be delivered in a self-guided format to improve mental health among college students. However, previous research indicates there are challenges in engaging students in adhering to these time intensive, multi-session self-guided resources. Brief self-guided single session interventions could provide an accessible and acceptable intervention that is easier to adhere to, given their lower intensity and response effort for participation. This proposed study seeks to evaluate a single session online ACT Guide Lite intervention in a sample (n = 100) of Utah State University (USU) college students 18 years of age or older. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) design will be used in which students are randomized to receive ACT Guide Lite or to a waitlist condition in order to test the following predictions: (1) participants assigned to ACT Guide Lite will improve more on the primary therapeutic process of change, psychological flexibility, relative to those not receiving intervention, (2) participants assigned to ACT Guide Lite will improve more on distress, well-being, and interest in seeking help, relative to those not receiving intervention, (3) ACT Guide Lite will be acceptable to college students as indicated by recruitment rates, rates of completing ACT Guide Lite, and self-reported program satisfaction, and (4) areas for future program revisions will also be identified through participants' written feedback on their experiences using the program. USU students will be recruited to participate in the study through the SONA research platform in the Fall 2023 semester. All study procedures will be completed through the secure Qualtrics online research platform, in addition to email and phone contacts prompting relevant steps for the study. All analyses will be run with multilevel modeling with the full intent-to-treat sample to test time by condition interactions.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
NONE
Enrollment
61
ACT Guide Lite is a single session online mental health program that is designed to take 30-45 minutes to complete. The single session self-guided intervention includes a series of sections that teach key ACT skills.
Utah State University
Logan, Utah, United States
CompACT (to assess psychological flexibility)
This 23-item measure will be used to measure the ACT process of change, psychological flexibility, including subscales for openness to experience, behavioral awareness, and valued action. The CompACT will serve as the primary outcome for this study in order to test whether a single session intervention is sufficient to target the ACT process of change of psychological flexibility.
Time frame: baseline, 1-week follow-up, 1-month follow-up
Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21)
This 21-item measure will be used to assess the subscales of depression, anxiety, and stress, with a total score representing overall psychological distress.
Time frame: baseline, 1-week follow-up, 1-month follow-up
Mental Health Continuum - Short Form (MHC-SF; to assess positive mental health)
This 14-item measure assesses positive mental health, with a total score as well as subscales for emotional, psychological and social wellbeing.
Time frame: baseline, 1-week follow-up, 1-month follow-up
General Help Seeking Questionnaire (GHSQ; to assess intention to seek help for a mental heath concern)
We will use an adapted version of the GHSQ as a measure of intentions to seek help for a mental health concern. This includes rating a variety of formal (e.g., psychologist, PCP) and informal supports (e.g., friends, family) on a 7-point scale from 1 "extremely likely" to 7 "extremely unlikely." We previously adapted the GHSQ for a prior lab study (Levin et al., 2018) by adding options for self-help/online treatment resources and we have found this measure to be sensitive to detecting the effects of online ACT on increasing intentions to seek treatment (Davis, Donahue, et al., under review).
Time frame: baseline, 1-week follow-up, 1-month follow-up
Program satisfaction (Responses to a series of single item Likert-scale items about satisfaction with the intervention)
A series of program satisfaction items will be asked in the ACT condition immediately post-intervention and at 1-week and 1-month follow up based on items used in our previous online ACT trials (Levin et al., 2020). This will include a series of items assessing features of program satisfaction (e.g., overall satisfaction, helpfulness, perceived fit, if the program was too short or long, etc…) on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). In addition, participants will be asked to type responses to open ended questions assessing what they learned from the program and areas needing further revision.
Time frame: 1-week follow-up, 1-month follow-up
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