Project seeks to create a framework for rolling out the digital tool across schools in Brazil
The Protagonists project, led by Dr Gabriela Pavarini, Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI) and Professor Sheila Murta at the University of Brasília, aims to assess the effectiveness of a digital intervention, “Cadê o Kauê?”, to equip young people in Brazil with skills to provide mental health and wellbeing (MHWB) support to their peers and to take collective action within their communities. The 3.5-year project aims to establish a framework for nationwide implementation of the digital tool in schools across Brazil.
Aimed at 15-17 year olds, the interactive storytelling chatbot (chat-story) is accessed via school desktops and follows a narrative based on finding a missing friend, discovering his mental health struggles, and practising how to provide MHWB support. Choices are made from predefined responses and, as the narrative progresses, the player receives guidance to help them develop their skillset.
Protagonists is a collaborative network of researchers in the UK and Brazil committed to enhancing youth voice and MHWB and creating supportive school environments. Building on previous research, Engajadamente, it will refine a chat-story for school use as well as create supplementary resources for teachers. The project also will assess the effectiveness of “Cadê o Kauê?” through a randomised trial and an arts-based realist evaluation, across Brazil’s five macro-regions.
“In the past decade, there has been a significant shift in how we think about mental health. Central to this is a collective sense of responsibility and agency, recognising that promoting mental health and wellbeing concerns everyone, regardless of age, sector, or location,” commented Dr Gabriela Pavarini, Protagonists’ principal investigator and DSPI’s Senior Research Fellow. “This project will help to improve the mental health and wellbeing of adolescents in Brazil, supporting them to be agents of change including creating more supportive school environments.”
Funded by a £1 million grant from Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the project brings together DSPI and the University of Brasília, in collaboration with Oxford Population Health, four partner universities across Brazil (Federal University of São Carlos, Tuiutí University of Paraná, Federal University of Amazonas, and University SENAI-CIMATEC) and a creative audiovisual team at Morena Flor Films.
Professor Sheila Murta, PI and Project Lead in Brazil, University of Brasília, noted: “The Protagonists project is a great opportunity to find out how to engage with teachers and young people in order to strengthen youth participation in mental health in schools. It is exciting to be able to pool resources across universities and countries to create welcoming schools where a culture of peace and human rights can flourish.”
Why this research is needed
Improving adolescent mental health is increasingly recognised as an essential component of public health. However existing interventions mainly place adolescents as passive beneficiaries of resources, rather than active agents in promoting community wellbeing.
Also, as adolescents place high value on peer relationships, they are in a unique position to raise awareness, offer support, encourage helpseeking, and engage in collective action to support whole peer communities. By building an adolescent’s knowledge of MHWB and support skills, they will be able to improve the wellbeing of their peers as well as their own mental health.
Crucially the impact of supporting young people’s participation in wellbeing promotion can be significant in low- and middle-income countries, where 90% of the world’s adolescents live. Mental health awareness and support initiatives are urgently needed in Brazil, where one in three high school students face mental health difficulties. Listening to and centring young people in driving solutions is key to achieving meaningful, lasting change in mental health across the country.
What is unique about the Protagonists project
Interventions aimed at influencing adolescent behaviour often fall short due to their failure to align with adolescents' fundamental need to be acknowledged, heard, and respected.
Additionally, most existing interventions target only the symptoms or behaviours of adolescents, overlooking the significant role of factors such as identity and social environment which are involved in adolescent development.
The project’s strategy is innovative in the following ways:
- New approach: the project takes a scalable community approach, replacing previous interventions that empower communities which often lack scalability, and digital interventions which frequently do not have a community focus.
- Digital ecosystems: by integrating "Cadê o Kauê?" into schools, the project will help to bridge the gap between digital interventions and physical spaces, especially care systems.
- New methods: the project involves a participatory randomised controlled trial and an arts-based process evaluation, which supports current efforts to integrate experimental designs with realist and culturally sensitive approaches.
- Collaboration: the project creates supplementary resources for teachers through an immersive co-design process with researchers, local teachers, and creative partners working together as equals. Involving UK-Brazil academics and cross-sector partnerships between government, education and the arts to support youth mental health and human rights, it mobilises expertise, innovation and the lived experience of communities in the Global South.
- Community benefits: the project will bring direct benefits to school communities by building their capacity to support students and build MHWB understanding, and also will contribute to making academic research more relevant and accessible.
- Policy impact: the Protagonists project will result in a culturally-sensitive educational resource that can be utilised nationwide, and has the potential to be integrated into other countries.
“This project is deeply personal to me — returning to the very schools that shaped me, now as a researcher, fills me with pride. We'll be learning from teachers and supporting them to uplift youth voices. This is how we transform education from within,” reflected Rafa Alves, Young person co-lead, University of Brasília.
Find out more
Visit the Protagonists project page
Visit the research website
