ParentText User Engagement and Effectiveness Study

The study has two main aims. The first aim is to optimise user engagement in ParentText. The goal is to identify the optimal delivery of ParentText for parents/caregivers from low- and middle-income countries, using a randomised between-subjects factorial experimental design. The second aim is to examine the preliminary effectiveness of the chatbot adaption of the Parenting for Lifelong Health programme, ParentText, on the primary outcome of child maltreatment and secondary outcomes of positive parenting, parental self-efficacy, parental communication about sexual abuse, financial stress, parental stress, child behaviour problems, and intimate partner violence. This study is part of a multi-phase research project. The full research project has been registered to the Open Science Framework platform. To address the first aim, the investigators will be conducting a factorial experiment which will examine the impact of four components, Personalisation (High/Low), Gamification (On/Off), Gender Targeting (On/Off), Frequency of message (1 per day/ 3 per day) on participant engagement. The factorial experiment will be conducted in two countries, Malaysia and South Africa. Within each country, the investigators have local partners who will be involved in deploying the intervention and recruiting participants. Parents/caregivers will be primarily recruited through country-specific UNICEF U-Report platforms and government partners. RapidPro, the programme on which the chatbot is deployed, will randomly allocate participants to the 16 experimental conditions. The purpose of the factorial experiment is to estimate the main and interaction effects of the four components. Based on the results the investigators will optimise the delivery of ParentText by selecting components or components levels that promote the highest level of engagement based on effect size. The second aim will be addressed by conducting latent growth curve models or multi-level models, to examine the change