Taking Action for College Students

The goal of this research is to investigate whether a peer-delivered illness self-management program called Taking Action can help college students with serious mental illnesses. Participants will be randomly assigned to either the experimental condition (Taking Action) or the control condition (information only). Participants in the experimental condition will attend five 2.5-hour Taking Action sessions. Participants will complete three interviews (baseline, post-intervention, and follow-up) to assess how well the program works, is liked, and benefits students clinically and academically. The investigators seek to test the following hypotheses: Compared to controls, students who do the Taking Action program will report greater improvements in mental health self-management attitudes, skills, and behaviors and will report greater improvements in mental health symptoms and recovery, and better academic outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness associated with Taking Action for college students with serious mental illnesses (SMI). The study will be a randomized controlled trial. The investigators plan to recruit 300 college students with SMI to participate in the study. A total of 60 students will be enrolled in the study per semester, 30 of whom will be randomized to Taking Action and 30 to the control condition. Enrollment will occur over a period of 5 semesters, with two Taking Action groups running concurrently each semester. The investigators will recruit from within Temple University and other colleges and universities in the United States. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of two groups, the experimental condition (Taking Action) or the control condition (information only). Participants in the experimental condition will attend five 2.5-hour Taking Action sessions that will be delivered in a small group format online via videoconferencing. All participants will complete 3 research interviews: baseline, post-intervention and follow-up, lasting about 1.5 hours each. Data related to the feasibility of research and intervention procedures, acceptability of the intervention, and clinical and academic outcomes will be collected and analyzed. The investigators will assess the feasibility of the intervention procedures by tracking data pertaining to recruitment, retention, and assessment using CONSORT guidelines, and data related to implementation of the intervention (i.e., fidelity, number of intervention meetings attended by participant). Fidelity to Taking Action will be assessed using a facilitator checklist based on prescribed content, procedures, and materials for each Taking Action session. Facilitators will also maintain attendance logs in RedCAP for each Taking Action session. The investigators will assess the acceptability of the intervention via quantitative and qualitative questions administered at post-intervention about participants' level of satisfaction and experiences with the intervention. The investigators will assess the clinical and academic outcomes of the intervention using the Mechanisms of Action Scale, Hopkins Symptom Checklist, Recovery Assessment Scale, College Persistence Questionnaire, Perceived Competence Scale, College Self-Efficacy Inventory, Study Habits Inventory, and Procrastination Assessment Scale - Students. Some exploratory measures will also be included in the interviews. Feasibility and quantitative acceptability data will be reported using descriptive statistics. Qualitative acceptability data will be analyzed using thematic analysis. To examine the impact of Taking Action on mental health and academic outcomes random effect ANOVAs on repeated measures data in PROC MIXES (SAS) will be used to compare the experimental and control groups over time on the various measures. Prior to running the random effects ANOVAs above, the investigators will examine whether the experimental and control groups were different at baseline on any background characteristics despite randomization, and if so, control for them in the analyses. In addition, exploratory analyses will be conducted to provide insight regarding the characteristics of students who are most likely to benefit from Taking Action. The investigators will recruit 300 individuals, which, with an estimated attrition rate of 25% based on previous experience with this population, will yield a sample of 225 participants with complete data. In a repeated measures ANOVA with two groups, three time points, and the correlation between repeated measures assumed to be 0.5, the investigators will be able to achieve .80 power to detect a small effect size of f=.085 in a time\*group interaction term when the probability of a type I error, alpha, is set at .05. Even so, the investigators anticipate these power estimates are conservative, because of the use of PROC MIXED in SAS for analyzing repeated measures data. PROC MIXED does not discard participants with missing data at some time points, making the impact of missing data and attrition on power much less severe. GPower was used for power analysis.