Designing and development of educational intervention

Definition of occupational neck pain and its causes, benefits of healthy preventive behaviors, strategies to deal with barriers towards doing neck pain prevention behaviors, improving self-efficacy in adopting and performing neck pain preventive behaviors, stressors in the workplace and their effects on neck pain preventive behaviors, stress management techniques, effective communication, angry management skills, excitement management skills, ergonomic principles on neck pain prevention, correct movements that reduce neck pain, stretching movements that strengthen neck muscles, sleeping properly, proper sitting and standing, correct posture while working with computer/mobile phone, and all skills regarding doing all daily activities in correct posture are included in intervention content. Before implementing intervention, the prepared educational contents are reviewed by experts in the fields of health education/health promotion, occupational health, ergonomics, and physiotherapy and also psychology in terms of scientific and appropriateness validity. Moreover, before presenting the educational contents to the participants in intervention group, the contents are examined in terms of simplicity, clarity, comprehensibility and appropriateness by a sample of teachers who are similar to target group of the study. Moreover, accuracy of their mobile device and internet access will be checked during educational intervention transferring.

Participants can communicate with the researcher by email and phone call. The intervention group will receive training in the form of webinars, group discussions, questions and answers, videos, animations, posters, pamphlets, and infographics. The procedure of teacher training is supervised by the researcher. The training will be provided to the intervention group through social media for 1 month. After, the reminder training will be provided to the intervention group for 3 months. During this period, the control group will not receive any intervention. However, the training package will be provided to the control group after the study is finished. Although there is no auditing plan in this study, if there are any participants with this problem, he/she will be excluded from the study.

The main outcome of the study is promoting of neck pain preventive behaviors that will be assessed using a researcher-made questionnaire. Data collection instrument is a researcher-made questionnaire that is completed and collected in three stages. Therefore, before the intervention, 1 month after the intervention and 3 months after the intervention, the questionnaire is presented to the intervention and control groups for completion. The data obtained in three stages in both groups are analyzed to determine whether the educational intervention is effective in promoting neck pain preventive  behaviors in teachers.

Questionnaires are completed anonymously to gain participants’ trust in the intervention. This questionnaire has different domains of HBM such as knowledge, perceived sensitivity, perceived severity, perceived barriers, perceived benefits, and cues to action, self-efficacy, and behavior. Knowledge questions have the Likert form with three-part spectrum as true (with score 2), no idea (with score 1), wrong (with score 0), and domain questions of perceived sensitivity, perceived intensity, perceived barriers, perceived benefits, self-efficacy, and cues to action which have 5-part Likert spectrum form like completely agree with score 5, agree with score 4, no idea with score 3, disagree with score 2, and completely disagree with score 1. Behavior questions are considered as a five-part Likert scale: never with score 1, rarely with score 2, sometimes with score 3, often with score 4, and always with score 5. This questionnaire measures the variables of knowledge, perceived threats, self-efficacy, reinforcing factor, and barriers towards behavior doing. A higher score in each area of the questionnaire indicates a better situation.

In this study, public participation of the participants was used to design an educational social media intervention and evaluate its impact on promoting preventive behaviors.