Assessing the Effectiveness of Volunteering in a Diabetes Self-Management Technology Program on Youth's Health Awareness and Prevention of Chronic Illness

Background and Purpose:Research suggests that many young people tend to be addicted to mobile technology devices, adopt poor eating habits, and do little exercise. They build few interpersonal relationships and often have poor stress management skills. Prevalence of metabolic syndrome is high among youth with reduced physical activity and inadequate diet(Bucksch et al., 2014; Janssen & Leblanc, 2010). The Intergenerational Mobile Technology Opportunities Program (IMTOP) offers youth a volunteering opportunity to assist teaching a 8-week curriculum for people age 55 and older with type 2 diabetes mellitus. The program teaches patients the skills of using mobile devices and apps for their self-care management, accessing online health-related resources, communicating with families and friends for social support, and improving connection with health care system. Recruited from various universities in Taiwan, undergraduate students attended a 4-hour orientation workshop to learn about aging process, the tablet training curriculum, and skills to work with older adults (i.e., communication skills, problem solving skills) in a small class setting conducted in two hospitals in Taiwan. The purpose of this study is to understand how this intergenerational program influences young people’ self-care awareness and disease prevention.

Methods: The present study uses both qualitative and quantitative data from the longitudinal IMTOP study. Grounded theory was used to analyze qualitative data obtained from after-class logs and monthly volunteer reflections during and after the IMTOP program. Survey data were collected from baseline and two follow-up surveys at 2- and 4-month after. Health awareness and promotion were measured by a short-form version of the Adolescent health promotion scale (21 items) consist of six distinct domain: nutrition (α =. 81), social support (α =. 88), health responsibility (α =.73), life appreciation (α =.88), exercise (α =.77), and stress management (α =.73).

Findings: There were 140 youth participated in the program as volunteer teaching assistants, predominantly female with the mean age of 19.6 years old. Qualitative results show that health awareness among young volunteers significantly improved after they assisted in teaching technology in the IMTOP program. They learned the knowledge of diabetes as a disease, skills for self-care management, and association between self-care management and diabetes. The majority of them acknowledged the importance of diet and regular exercise on preventing diabetes and changed their eating behavior with taking variety of food with fiber and reducing fat and sugar consumption. This finding is supported by significant quantitative results of changed scores in the nutrition scale (p = .01). They considered healthy diet and lifestyle (i.e., regular exercise, sleeping patterns) be adopted at early adulthood.

Conclusion and Implications: Our results of mixed methods indicate that skills, health information, and experiences in assisting diabetes seniors provided by IMTOP program has a significant effect on young people’ awareness of healthy dietary choices for themselves and for their family members but more modest effects on regular physical activity and other health promotion scales. An intergenerational program like IMTOP has the potential to enable young people to increase control over and improve their health in early adulthood.