Abstract
Introduction: Youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health (SRH) interventions are essential for the health of adolescents (10–19 years). Co-designing is a participatory approach to research, allowing for collaboration with academic and non-academic stakeholders in intervention development. Participatory action research (PAR) involves stakeholders throughout the planning, action, observation, and reflection stages of research. Current knowledge indicates that co-producing SRH interventions with adolescents increases a feeling of ownership, setting the scene for intervention adoption in implementation settings. Objectives: This scoping review aims to understand the extent of adolescents’ participation in PAR steps for co-designed SRH interventions, including the barriers and facilitators in co-designing of SRH intervention, as well as its effectiveness on adolescents’ SRH outcomes. Methods: Database searching of PubMed, Medline, Embase, CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and organisational websites was performed, identifying 439 studies. Results: Upon screening, 30 studies (published between 2006–2021) met the inclusion criteria. The synthesis identified that adolescents were involved in the planning and action stages of the interventions, but not in the observation and reflection stages. Although the review identified the barriers and facilitators for co-designing SRF interventions, none of the included studies reported on the effectiveness of co-designing SRH interventions with adolescents; therefore, meta-analysis was not performed. Conclusions: While no specific outcome of the interventions was reported, all papers agreed that adolescent co-designing in ASRH interventions should occur at all stages to increase understanding of local perceptions and develop a successful intervention.
Highlights
The period of the maturation and development of adolescents into adulthood is an important phase of one’s life that is often accompanied by heightened sexual attention, thought, and experimentation
30 studies selected for extraction and synthesis (Figure 2), published between 2006–2021
The only identified difference was that smaller participation groups allowed for slightly more detail in their explanations of their current knowledge on ASRH and what knowledge they wanted to gain [19,24,38,41]. These findings indicate that adolescents can be successfully involved in the planning and action stages of the Participatory action research (PAR) framework, the collective theme of the included studies concluded that with the development of a sexual and reproductive health (SRH) intervention and a greater understanding of local perspectives, adolescents play a vital role in co-designing ASRH interventions
Summary
The period of the maturation and development of adolescents into adulthood is an important phase of one’s life that is often accompanied by heightened sexual attention, thought, and experimentation. The chance of contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancies, or early childbearing increases with ill-informed early sexual experimentation [1]. Adolescents across the globe face sexual and reproductive health (SRH) complications, due to a lack of informative services, barriers to such services, social stigmas, laws, and policies [1]. The adolescent period involves significant development; it can be determinative of SRH risks in later life. Adolescence is an optimal stage for targeted SRH interventions [2,3]. Providing suitable adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) interventions at the appropriate time and setting makes it possible to improve these statistics in the future
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