“It’s Our Own Community Where We Can Educate Other People and Educate Each Other”: Youth Perspectives on Staffing a Textline

Abstract

Peer education is a valued strategy for sexuality education and health promotion. Innovative approaches beyond traditional classroom settings offer critical opportunities to support adolescent sexual health. Yet, such models have been rarely used. It’s OK to Ask Someone (IOTAS) is the first to use customized software to enable youth to both ask and answer sexual health questions using cell phones. This article describes an evaluation aimed to understand high school peer educators’ experience staffing IOTAS and perception of how participation impacted their peer education training. Our findings suggest a value in direct peer education opportunities for participants through IOTAS in expanded education and skill development. The health promotion impact of sexuality education using cell phone interventions could be far-reaching for both peer education students and young people outside program participation.

Keywords:

• Adolescents
• peer education
• sexual health
• technology
• qualitative
• evaluation

Ethical approval

Internal research review processes were not pursued for the evaluation activities as it was not considered research according to internal protocol.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).