Training TikTok creators in mental health communication improves audiences’ mental health knowledge, competencies
Providing training in mental health communication to social media content creators can help improve their audiences’ abilities to gather and understand mental health knowledge as well as boost their emotional support skills, according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication (CHC).
The study was published May 22 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports. Senior author was CHC senior director Amanda Yarnell. Other CHC co-authors included first author Yuning Liu, Katharine Speer, and Elissa Scherer.
Previous research has shown that providing creators with training that includes evidence-based mental health information can increase such content in those creators’ posts. But it hasn’t been clear whether creator training leads to changed mental health attitudes and behaviors among their audiences.
To learn more, the researchers conducted two randomized trials. One sought to understand whether training TikTok creators in evidence-based content influenced their audience’s mental health knowledge construction—the process of understanding concepts, phenomena, and situations. The researchers analyzed 188,169 user comments from 1882 videos by 49 creators who’d received training—and found a 4% increase in the audience’s mental health knowledge construction.
The second trial looked at whether training creators in how to offer emotional support to friends affected their audience’s ability to provide such support. Researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. youth aged 14-22. They found that, among youth exposed to TikTok videos from the creators who’d had training, competency in providing emotional support increased—both perceived as well as objectively assessed competency.
“Taken together, these findings highlight the potential of creator-focused interventions to promote positive mental health behavioral outcomes on video-based social media platforms,” the co-authors wrote. “They also suggest that relatively simple, scalable resources, such as training toolkits, can be a powerful means of achieving public health impact through social media.”
Read the study: Training TikTok creators in mental health communication can benefit their audiences
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