ArticleAddictive behaviors reports2025
A short, animated storytelling video to reduce addiction stigma: A pilot randomized controlled trial.
Article in Addictive behaviors reports, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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9 authors.
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Abstract
Background and aims: Public stigma towards people with addiction negatively impacts help-seeking, treatment and recovery. This pilot study tested the feasibility of conducting a large-scale, online trial to measure the effect of a short, animated storytelling (SAS) stigma reduction video, with and without soundtrack, on addiction stigma, optimism, warmth towards people with addiction, and hopefulness at two timepoints (immediately post-exposure and 14 days later). Design: We used a parallel group, three-arm randomized controlled trial (RCT). Setting: We conducted this fully online study on the Prolific Academic research platform (participant recruitment) and the Qualtrics survey platform (data collection). Participants: We recruited 631 English-speaking adult participants, aged 18-49, residing in the United States. Interventions: Intervention group A received the SAS video intervention. Intervention group B group received the SAS video intervention without sound. The control group received written information about global addiction prevalence, estimated to be time-equivalent with the video interventions. Measurements: We measured participant retention rate at the two-week follow-up to determine the feasibility of conducting the definitive trial. Our co-primary outcomes were addiction stigma, optimism, warmth towards people with addiction and hopefulness, measured using an abbreviated 18-item version of the Attribution Questionnaire (AQ-18), the Brief García's Interactive Optimism Scale (BIOS-G), a stigma thermometer and a visual analogue scale (VAS). We used repeated-measures ANOVA to assess group-by-time interactions and compared changes from baseline to post-intervention. Participants completed follow-up surveys 14 days post-intervention. Findings: The retention rate from baseline to follow-up was 88.0 %. Exposure to both the video with sound and without sound resulted in significant positive changes compared to the control group, for pity [F (4,1046) = 3.26, η Conclusions: This pilot study demonstrates the feasibility of proceeding with our registered, largescale, multi-country, online RCT. The significant effect observed in a relatively small pilot population, after a single exposure to this 2.5 min SAS intervention aimed at reducing addiction stigma, was unanticipated and is worthy of highlighting. A larger sample size will adequately power the full trial to detect both immediate effects and their potential durability over time, in various global settings.
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