Adolescents encouraging healthy lifestyles through a peer-led social marketing intervention: Training and key competencies learned by peer leaders

Background Adolescents who participate as peer leaders can benefit and acquire competencies from their peer leadership experience. Objectives To identify the competencies gained by adolescents who participated as peer leaders in a healthy lifestyle study and to determine whether the training characteristics were related to improvement in competencies. Design The present study was part of the European Youth Tackling Obesity (EYTO) project, a multicentre social marketing intervention involving four European countries. Setting and Participants Eighteen peer leaders (aged 13-15 years, three or five leaders per country) from disadvantaged neighbourhoods received training in designing and implementing activities for their peers. Measures The peer leaders' confidence, experience and interest in 11 tasks related to lifelong learning competencies were assessed with questions rated on a colour scale at baseline and at the end of the study. Results The peer leaders demonstrated improvements in experience, confidence and interest in different tasks, such as research, website or logo design, oral presentations, social media use and collaboration with people from other countries. They increased their confidence in management tasks (p = 0.03) and their confidence and experience in communication tasks (p = 0.01). The peer leaders from Spain and Portugal had greater improvements than those from the other countries. Conclusion The peer leaders improved their confidence in management tasks and their confidence and experience in communication tasks. Slight differences were detected in improvement in competencies by country, likely due to the differences in the peer training applied. Recommendations for peer leader training are proposed, although these results should be verified with larger sample size. Patient or Public Contribution The peer leaders contributed to the design and implementation of the training and intervention.