25/04/2020

Searching for Mental Health: A Mixed-Methods Study of Young People's Online Help-seeking

Claudette Pretorius, Darragh McCashin, Naoise Kavanagh, David Coyle

Keywords: mental health, help-seeking, search, young people, behaviour, co-design, personas, mixed methods

Abstract: Seeking help is often an important step in addressing mental health difficulties. Evidence suggests that positive help-seeking experiences contribute to an increased likelihood of future help-seeking and achieving improved outcomes. However, help-seeking is a complex process. Alongside traditional sources, digital technologies offer many pathways to help. Using a mixed methods approach across two studies, this paper explores key design factors for online mental health resources that can support young people’s help-seeking. First, a large online survey (n=1308) highlighted challenges and identified common help-seeking scenarios, including information-seeking, person-centred approaches and crisis situations. Using survey data, personas were developed to represent different help-seekers - each characterised by a particular help-seeking scenario. The personas were then used in co-design workshops to facilitate further exploration of help-seeking needs. Four key design considerations were identified: connectedness, accessible information, personalisation, and immediacy. Based on our findings, we provide design recommendations that are grounded in existing theories of help-seeking.

The video of this talk cannot be embedded. You can watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLi3_9PE6Mo
(Link will open in new window)
 0
 0
 0
 0
This is an embedded video. Talk and the respective paper are published at CHI 2020 virtual conference. If you are one of the authors of the paper and want to manage your upload, see the question "My papertalk has been externally embedded..." in the FAQ section.

Comments

Post Comment
no comments yet
code of conduct: tbd Characters remaining: 140

Similar Papers