The Buoy Project is a research collaboration that addresses the evidence gap in effective suicide prevention interventions for boys and men in Australia. The Buoy Project is a collaboration between five universities and 14 community organisations with a commitment to preventing male suicide.
The Buoy Project is testing seven different suicide prevention interventions for boys and men via a series of randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Five of the interventions encourage boys and men to look out for each other and talk to a counsellor or other professional if they’re facing life’s challenges. The other two are all about making sure that the services available to boys and men are tailored to their needs. Once it has tested all seven interventions, the Buoy Project will bring the findings from the RCTs together to model whether the male suicide rate could be significantly reduced if these interventions were delivered at scale.
WebSurvey by Logicly provided the technical support for five of the trials, working with the research teams to:
- design and map the technical workflows to collect robust and accurate longitudinal data
- implement automated survey timepoints based on a wide variety of trigger actions, such as completion of an online course, viewing a video, or completing a workshop
- implement a monitoring and alert function to notify study psychologists where specialised and urgent care interventions may be needed
- respond to Ethics Committee requirements
- implement sophisticated algorithms randomising participants into control and study cohorts
The WebSurvey Research team used each research team's “codebook” to create the variables used in the data collection, meaning the collected data was ready for immediate analysis.
Trial 1: Breaking the Man Code
This project evaluated Tomorrow Man’s ‘Breaking the Man Code’ workshops, designed to facilitate honest and authentic conversations with Year 10, 11 and 12 male students in order to define masculinity that ‘generates purpose, pride, and health for the men of today and tomorrow’.
The project aimed to determine whether the workshops have positive impacts on participants' likelihood of seeking help for personal and emotional problems, the likelihood of recommending that others seek help, perceived social support, conformity to harmful masculine norms, wellbeing, and depression risk.
WebSurvey helped the research team design the online data collection for a cluster randomised controlled trial wherein students were assessed on a range of measures prior to the workshop and after the workshop. These students were compared to other students who were waiting to receive the workshop.
The nature of the collection meant that it was essential to build appropriate privacy controls, consent steps and ethical requirements into the data collection workflow. Logicly’s WebSurvey Research team worked closely with the researchers to identify and address key decision points and risks throughout the project.
WebSurvey also designed an administrative portal via which school coordinators could open and close surveys by class, enabling them to schedule the workshops and collect the subsequent data at times that suited them.
Trial 2: Media-based male suicide prevention campaign
The Boys Do Cry randomised controlled trial involved almost 500 men and tested the effects of watching a four-minute music video re-working of the classic Cure song Boys Don’t Cry. The video aimed to increase Australian men’s intentions to seek help when they are experiencing mental health difficulties. Preliminary results of the trial showed that the men who watched the Boys Do Cry video had increased intentions to seek help.
The research team were keen to collect metadata relating to the participants’ viewing of the video as well as their survey responses. WebSurvey integrated the music video, as well as a control video, into the data collection portal so that the survey data could be augmented with this metadata.
Trial 3: The Mental Health First Aid - Conversations about Suicide
The University of Melbourne, the Victorian Men’s Shed Association and Mental Health First Aid Australia worked together to investigate the effectiveness of the Mental Health First Aid Conversations About Suicide course.
The course has been implemented in Men’s Sheds across Victoria with the aim of reaching older men, who have the highest suicide rate.
To enhance online data collection due to the diverse technical capabilities of the participants, WebSurvey provided data entry assistance, enabling the collection of survey responses through telephone interviews and paper-based responses.
WebSurvey’s in-house help desk provided timely assistance to participants.
Trial 4: Lifeline Australia
The University of Melbourne and Orygen partnered with Lifeline, Australia’s largest provider of 24-hour crisis support and suicide prevention services, to design and test a model of service delivery created specifically for men.
The efficacy of the intervention is being evaluated in a randomised controlled trial. Male callers who fulfil the inclusion criteria are invited to participate in a short survey to assess outcomes at the end of the call. The intervention group will then be compared with the standard Lifeline intervention group to assess the effectiveness of a specialist intervention for men calling a crisis line.
The course is being delivered through Lifeline’s existing Learning Management System. To streamline the experience for participants WebSurvey has integrated access to the course into its data collection application. This enables WebSurvey to automate survey timepoints based on course completion.
Trial 5: Men in Mind
Movember and Orygen, Centre for Youth Mental Health have partnered to develop and evaluate the Men in Mind training program. This is an evidence-based, online, five-module training program for mental health clinicians (psychologists, social workers, counsellors, etc.). The focus is on training clinicians to better engage men in mental health treatment, and in doing so, respond more effectively to men’s distress and suicidality. The training has been developed with expert learning and user experience designers at Movember and provides an extensive examination of men’s gender socialisation, strategies for engaging men in therapy, and evidence-based tools to intervene effectively in men’s suicidality.
Participating clinicians completed measures of their competency and were then randomised to either receive Men in Mind training or be allocated to a waitlist to receive the training at the conclusion of the study. Clinician outcomes will be assessed again after the training and compared to the waitlist control group to understand the effectiveness of Men in Mind.
Like the Lifeline Australia trial, the course was delivered through an existing Learning Management System. WebSurvey integrated access to the course into its data collection application, enabling the researchers to capture metadata relating to course completion and simplifying the automation survey timepoints based on course completion.
With a wide range of participants, WebSurvey was able to provide technical support via its in-house help desk team.
See Men in Mind for more information about this project.