The effects of a web application supporting young adults neither in education, employment, nor training

2024-10-21

2025-12-31

(1) Register data measures on labor market participation or education enrollment: employed, earnings, enrollment in education, participation in labor market programs initiated by NAV.
(2) Survey measures on current life situation: 1) Perceived stress (PSS-10; Cohen and Williamson, 1988); 2) Warwick-Edinburgh mental well-being scale (Stewart-Brown et al., 2009; Tennant et al., 2007); 3) Symptoms checklist (SCL-10; Strand et al., 2003).

Mechanisms
(1) Self efficacy (Gaumer Erickson et al., 2016)
(2) Stress mindset (Yeager et al., 2021)
(3) Procrastination (IPS; Steel, 2002 & 2010; translation to Norwegian by Svartdal, 2015)

Treatment Fidelity
(1) Fixed mindset scale (Yeager, 2016)
(2) Stress manipulation test (Yeager et al., 2021)

Other outcomes
(1) Locus of control (Pearlin and Schooler, 1978)
(2) Knows future career (Resnjanskij et al., 2021).

All youths registered at the Norwegian public Follow-up Service will be invited to participate. The Follow-up Service in Norway supports young people up to the age of 24 who are entitled to upper secondary education but are not currently in school, training, or regular employment. They reach out to those who have not applied for education, have left education or training, or have lost their entitlement to it, helping them find suitable educational, training, or job opportunities.
Upon providing consent and logging into the web application, participants will complete a baseline survey. Following this, they will receive weekly content through the web platform. The participants will receive an SMS each week for five consecutive weeks, with a note that a new session in the app is available. There will also be reminders to complete the content in each session.

Not available

Randomization happens individually and is automated in the app at the individual level.

We randomize at the individual level with equal probability of each treatment.

No

2000 individuals

We invite all youths aged 16-25 who are registered with the Norwegian public Follow-up Service and are not currently in a program involving full-time education, employment, or job training. This will give us a sample size of about 10.500 youth. We will have a first-serve policy up until at least 2000 youths have consented to participate.

We will have 1000 in treatment and 1000 in control.

We calculate the MDES using Optimal Design Software (Spybrooke et al., 2001). We have individual-level randomization and a sample of 2,000 youths who have signed up to participate. This sample is equally split between treatment and control. Assuming 80 percent power and a two-sided 95-percent confidence interval, we have a Minimum Detectable Effect Size (MDES) of 0.13 standard deviations, not including any control variables. If we assume that control variables explain 20% of the variation in the outcome variables (R^2=0.2), the MDES reduces to 0.11 standard deviations. If we assume an R^2 as high as 0.8 (as we observe baseline values of most of our outcome variables), it would go down to 0.06 standard deviations. Adding data from the first field implementation may give us even more precision.