Study design and study population
psychiatric illness
SECONDARY, CHRONIC DISEASES
We conducted a matched, pair-cluster randomized controlled trial from July 2019 to September 2020 in secondary girls’ schools in Rangpur district, Bangladesh. We screened all secondary urban and rural girls’ schools of Rangpur district on the basis of some criteria like—infrastructure of the school (building or tin-shed), presence of digital lab (laptop, projector), supply and availability of electricity, and number of students. We found that digital lab was available in all the girls’ schools. In the case of urban schools, most of them were operated in buildings whereas the rural schools were operated in tin-shed houses. There was electricity in the urban schools but there were few disruptions in the supply of electricity in rural schools. The number of students was higher in the urban schools than that of the rural schools. In our study, we excluded the schools having any programme such as nutrition education, health message, mid-day meal. We maintained sufficient buffer zone between control and intervention schools. In rural site, the intervention and control schools were located in two different sub-districts. In the case of urban schools, even though intervention and control schools were located in Rangpur Sadar (same sub-district), they were located far enough from one another.Our study participants were all the adolescent girls of 11–15 years from grade six, seven and eight of the selected schools. During assessment of the study participants, we followed inclusion criteria that included never married adolescent schoolgirls, girls having no chronic diseases, girls having no major psychiatric illness. Participant follow-up was completed in September 2020. After taking well-informed written consent from the mothers or caregivers of the study participants and assent from study participants, we approached for collecting data from them.