Search

Little evidence is available about the utility of web-based health education for students in low resource settings. This paper reports results from an evaluation of the TeenWeb project, a multi-year, web-based health education intervention implemented in two urban settings: Nairobi, Kenya (N =1178 school students) and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (N =714 school students). A quasi-experimental, school-based pre-test/post-test design was implemented at each study site to determine if easy access to web-based reproductive health information, combined with intellectual “priming” about reproductive health topics, would result in improved knowledge and attitudes about topics such as condom use, access to HIV testing, emergency contraception and abortion laws. Students in web-access schools completed one web-based module approximately every 6–8 weeks, and in return, had access to the Internet for at least 30min after completing each module. Although students were encouraged to access project-supplied web-based health information, freedom of web navigation was an incentive, so they could choose to access other Internet content instead. Most measures showed statistically significant differences between students in “web” and “comparison” conditions at post-test, but only about half of the differences were in the hypothesized direction. Results of an embedded experiment employing more directed feedback tripled the likelihood of correctly reporting the duration of emergency contraception effectiveness. Review of URL logs suggests that the modest results were due to inadequate exposure to educational materials. Future intervention should focus on teen's purposeful searching for health information when they are in personal circumstances of unmet health needs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

George Monbiot is a prominent writer, environmentalist and campaigner for social justice whose columns for the British newspaper, The Guardian, are widely read across the world. In this interview he speaks candidly about the experiences that led to the publication of his first three books: Poisoned Arrows: An Investigative Journey through Indonesia, Amazon Watershed: The New Environmental Investigation and No Man's Land: An Investigative Journey through Kenya and Tanzania. Significantly, whilst each of these volumes is a work of investigative travel, Monbiot states that he never saw himself as a travel writer. Indeed, Monbiot is rather dismissive of recent British travel writing in general, with the notable exception of figures such as Bruce Chatwin, Charles Nicholl and Wilfred Thesiger, whom he met in Kenya in 1994. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]