Discussion
anxiety, PTS
RECRUITMENT
Our study examined the impact of SS/CF on young men’s mental health in urban informal settlements, the intervention being originally designed to reduce men’s perpetration of IPV (There are three potential mechanisms through which SS/CF impacted on anxiety and PTS. The first possible explanation could be due to it being an economic intervention that significantly strengthened young men’s livelihoods thereby alleviating poverty. Research has shown a connection between unemployment and poor mental health (Our investigation has several limitations, the first being that the evaluation of mental health outcomes was done using screening instruments, although it is unclear how screening measures would have impacted on the outcomes, as these were consistent across both arms. Secondly, this is a post-hoc data analysis of the intervention, which was primarily designed to improve IPV. Thirdly, the sampling techniques used (snowball and purposive) are forms of convenience sampling, which may negatively impact the generalizability of our findings. Data were also not collected for the number of individuals who were screened or refused to participate in the study. Individuals were not blinded to the study arm during recruitment, which might lead to recruitment bias. At the point of participant recruitment into the study, participants were aware which arm they were in, and this may have led to bias in recruitment. The lack of blinding was because the team were concerned that poor marginalized young people have often been promised support and not received it, and thus built-up resentment to broken promises. As such, there was no blinding. Despite attempts to locate participants, there was a difference in the follow-up by arm at end line, although multiple imputation was used to preserve statistical power and sample size. A higher attrition was detected among the intervention than the control group, although intention to treat analysis was used, where all participants were included in the final analysis. There are restrictions on how broadly our research can be generalized in other contexts, however this does not affect the validity of the results. The main outcomes paper describes the broader trial’s limitations (