María José Distéfano, a doctoral student, and Dr. Belén Mesurado, a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy, presented the poster entitled “ HERO , an online and self-administered program to promote prosocial behaviors in adolescents. Pilot study of acceptance and usability,” at the International Congress of Applied Positive Psychology held at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from September 12 to 13, 2019. The meeting brings together psychologists from Latin America interested in Positive Psychology.

You can read the summary here:

Hero is a recently designed program for promoting prosocial behaviors in adolescents. Its unique feature is that it is digital, distributed online, and self-administered. A pilot study was conducted with adolescents to explore the program's acceptance, ease of use, perceived usefulness, and transfer of learning throughout the intervention. The sample consisted of 37 adolescents of both sexes, aged 14 to 17. After completing the intervention, they were invited for an in-person interview to evaluate their perception of the program's acceptability and usability using an ad hoc instrument. Subsequently, a mixed-methods analysis of the results was performed: closed-ended questions were analyzed quantitatively using descriptive statistics.

The open-ended questions, designed to delve deeper and provide more detail to the responses to the closed-ended questions, were analyzed qualitatively from an empirical phenomenological perspective. The detailed results of this study will be presented, revealing a high level of acceptance of the program, a favorable perception of its usefulness, ease of use, and transfer of learning to daily life. Furthermore, over 70% of participants indicated they would recommend it to other adolescents. This study proved highly useful as it allowed for adjustments to the intervention for its subsequent implementation in an effectiveness study.