A Clinical Practice Experience: Focus Groups for Prevention Activities with Adolescents

Aims: This study had three main objectives:

- To identify the principal risk factors in psychiatric adolescents attending a Neuropsychiatric Unit in Padua (Italy) that provides daily psychiatric services for children and adolescents;
- To elucidate the thinking and reasons underlying the adolescents’ risky behaviour;
- To seek protective factors and strategies for dealing with their unsafe conduct.

These objectives were developed in the light of content emerging during sessions held with a focus group. The statistical analysis for this study was conducted on a text analysis performed using the “Atlas.t” program.

Methods: This qualitative study used text analysis to investigate risk factors emerging from focus group (FG) sessions conducted with 11 psychiatric adolescents (6 girls and 5 boys, aged from 14 to 18, mean 15.5 years old) attending a daily psychiatric service. The FG met from January to April 2014, at the Family Unit for Children and Adolescents (ULSS 16) in Padua, for the purpose of conducting a secondary prevention activity, taking a psycho-educational approach to the young participants in the group. The FG sessions consisted of five fortnightly meetings lasting two hours each, which were co-conducted by a psychologist and an educator. The focus was on the adolescents’ risky behaviour. A silent observer attended the sessions and wrote reports on the group. These reports were subsequently examined using a text analysis technique with the aid of the “Atlas.ti” software. This program identified the various topics of interest that recurred most frequently in the FG’s discussions. The software was then used to generate an encrypted grid containing 14 thematic areas with a number of corresponding codes. This enabled us to ascertain how the themes were structured and developed during the various FG sessions.

Results: Our results show that the principal risk factors on which the adolescents focused were: unsafe sex, unsafe use of internet and drug abuse. In the adolescents’ opinion, the main reasons for taking such risks included: curiosity, the urge to feel or try something new, and peer group influence. By the end of the FG sessions, among the strategies to use to protect themselves, they recognized the importance of talking with adults, more than talking with peers.