Oral Health Promotion: Youth as Agents Of Change

Given the proliferation of social media as a tool for health communication, this proposed pilot study will be conducted with adolescents and their parents in the greater Richmond area, including Petersburg, and examines whether disseminating oral health information to adolescents via Facebook will have a greater impact on their sharing of the message to their parents than providing them the information in written format- using a pamphlet. We hypothesize that parents in the Facebook arm of the intervention will be more likely to report receiving the oral health message from their child than those in the pamphlet arm. Further, this study investigates whether parents whose adolescents re provided the information via Facebook will have greater increase in intent to schedule dental appointments and dental appointment scheduling behaviors than parents whose children are in the pamphlet group. We hypothesize that parents in the Facebook group will report greater increase in dental appointment scheduling than those whose adolescents are in the pamphlet group. Lastly, we would like to explore whether parents and adolescents in the Facebook arm will have greater increase in oral health knowledge and greater decreases in perceived barriers to oral health activities, both which may be related to increases in parents' dental appointment scheduling.