Saúde mental na adolescência: construção e validação de um curso mediado por tecnologia digital

Abstract

The health of adolescents and young people demands innovations in health production, considering that this age group is essentially healthy, and its problems are related to certain ways of life. In this sense, mental health problems in children and adolescents represent a major public health challenge worldwide. This research aims to build and validate a digital educational technology for school adolescents, aimed at promoting mental health. It is a mixed study, of methodological and quasi-experimental research of the anterior and posterior type, which developed and validated with the target audience, a distance education course on the Moodle platform, according to the reference of Galvis-Panqueva and David Ausubel's Theory of Meaningful Learning, as well, verified audience learning before and after the course. The study was carried out from March 2018 to November 2019, in Sobral, Ceará, with 21 students from Professor Luís Felipe High School, with the support of the Distance Education Center and Dean of Extension and Culture of Vale do Acaraú State University. A Free and Informed Consent Term (IC) was applied to the adolescents 'guardians, as well as a Free and Informed Consent Term (TALE) to guarantee the adolescents' agreement to participate in the research. The course was validated by the target audience, with a global Content Validity Index (CVI) of 0.9, obtained through students' responses to a software evaluation questionnaire that was adapted for this study. Participating adolescents were between 15 and 18 years old, with a predominance of females (66.6%), most had never participated in a distance education course (85.71%), all had access to the internet at home and they spent an average of 7.57 hours daily online. Regarding the change of opinion analyzed by means of a learning verification test, there were no statistically relevant differences (p <0.05) before and after the course. However, this result does not invalidate the positive impact of the course on the course participants, a fact revealed in their oral speeches and in the spaces where they could express themselves more freely, such as in the open questions of the questionnaires and in the discussion forums, in addition, it was observed slight improvement in the opinion of the adolescents in the points present in the questionnaire, namely: expanded health concept; conflicts present in adolescence; possibility of living normally even with some mental disorder; drug use / abuse; implications of sexuality on mental health; and relevance of discussing health at school. It is hoped that the course can contribute to an improvement in the knowledge of adolescents about their health and those around them, contributing, also, to a reduction of prejudices, stigmas and negative attitudes related to mental disorders, mediated by digital technologies and based on theory of meaningful learning.