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Mzansi Teen Lab Early adolescence is a critical time for healthy development that influences the rest of the life course and it presents a golden opportunity for preventative interventions to mitigate the risks adolescents face in South Africa.
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The Behaviour, Executive Function in Adolescents with CONduct problems (BEACON) is a Wellcome Trust Funded study led by Associate Professor Tamsen Rochat in the Centre for Excellence in Human Development (CoE-HD). The ultimate goal of BEACON is to deliver a clear understanding of the mechanisms of risky and violent behaviour in young South African adolescents so that prevention and intervention programmes can be designed and implemented. The complex intervention and prevention programmes likely needed are however expensive and difficult to implement, and they require substantial investment.
important as knowing that the intervention works. The Mzansi Teen lab which was established by Prof Rochat with seed funding from the CoE-HD in 2020 aims to address this gap. During the 2021 period, the teen lab has been formally established in a large open plan room providing teen friendly space that can host up to 20 adolescents at a time, in a variety of zones for the purposes of teen engagement and co-creation research, using digital technologies. A wide range of participatory techniques have been tested over the past year including focus group discussions, digital storytelling, interviews, telephone surveys and in 2021 we have focused on developing a flagship project called “Through my eyes”: A “Teencam” video observational study in Soweto, South Africa. Existing research has shown that the parent-adolescent relationship and its associated communication and interaction styles, are central to adolescent development and outcomes, but we have very little method-
Ensuring that interventions are salient, relevant and acceptable to the proposed end user, the adolescent is as
ology which allows us to measure this objectively, and self-report data is often limited by bias. In collaboration
