You said: We did
You said: You would like a Q&A section on our website where you could find details about our study including; why we wanted to run this project, what the main aims are, and who will be taking part.
We did: Our website contains a ‘young people’s’ area with information relevant to young people. This includes a Q&A about all the parts of our study we think you might find interesting. If there’s anything else you’d like to know, please submit a question and we’ll put the answer into our Q&A.
We held co-production workshops with young people in 6 th forms to ask for their advice on some aspects of our project including how to explain the links between social relationships, emotion processing and wellbeing for young people aged 13/14. We provided minimal information about how this visualisation/description should look.
You said: A cyclical diagram best-showed the links between the three main elements of our training programme.
We did: we were very impressed with the ideas generated from this session and we are going to use an adapted version of this imagery in our training programme.
We have also used this diagram in a follow-up workshop with young people to develop more details about the links between these elements and examples from real-life, as seen in our miro board below. The narrative created from these workshops will be used in our training programme to explain to 13/14 year olds why it’s important to think about the links between social relationships, emotions and wellbeing.
We asked young people to test out and give feedback on some of the tasks that will be used in our training programme.
You said: that young people would enjoy the tasks more if they were more alike to a video-game. E.g. having in-app achievement as an incentive to beat their previous score such as a digital certificate or ‘level-up’ notification when you are doing well!
We did: we think this is a great idea and we will be working with our task-developers to add some of these elements into our training tasks! Keep your eyes peeled for further updates…
One of our tasks known as our interoception task, asks young people to tune into their heart-rate and recognise when it’s beating faster or slower. For this task, young people are asked to perform an exercise before starting the task to increase their heart rate.
You said: young people might prefer a simple exercise that everyone can do like star-jumps. Others suggested that something a bit more fun like dancing to a TikTok video might be better.
We did: we tried to gauge which of these options would be preferred with no clear winner. In the end we agreed that we will let the young people in each group decide which exercise they prefer as it might depend on who is in each group!
The ReSET Programme was developed in collaboration with young people through a Pilot and Feasibility Study. These small-scale tests of the new mental health programme allowed us to learn a lot about what did and didn't work for young people
You said: you didn't enjoy the heartbeat task, finding it tricky to focus on and complete in a group setting - with lots of distractions around you
We did: we removed the heartbeat task from the ReSET programme and instead developed some learning materials about how we can tune into different signals our bodies might give us when we are feeling different emotions
The ReSET programme runs for 8 weeks and each session lasts 1.5-2 hours
You said: Sometimes it was tricky to sit still and focus for up to 2 hours
We did: we introduced movement breaks and created activities that involved moving around the room to bring more energy to the groups. We also provided each group with fidget toys - available for any students who found these helpful for concentration