Designing the first culturally-sensitive stigma survey tailored for adolescents: RN-CSS

AIMS: The Red Noses Culturally-Sensitive Stigma Survey (RN-CSS) contributes to the underexplored research domain of adolescents' stigmatising attitudes and behaviours towards peers with mental health difficulties and mental healthcare services. It also addresses the need for comprehensive and culturally-sensitive tools to assess stigma in this context.

METHODS: Drawing on insights from focus groups and building upon the existing Stigma in Global Context-Mental Health Study, we have successfully developed and implemented the first culturally-sensitive stigma survey tailored for school-aged adolescents of different migration/cultural backgrounds. The questionnaire includes an unlabelled case vignette depicting a peer with symptoms of depression and gathers data on various domains, including (1) sociodemographic variables; (2) education-related information; (3) COVID-19; (4) perceptions of mental health difficulties and mental healthcare services (i.e. severity assessment, causal attributions, care recommendations, personal stigma, perceived stigma, and service stigma); (5) subjective wellbeing and familiarity with mental health difficulties; (6) social support; (7) school context; (8) bullying; and (9) knowledge of anti-stigma campaigns.

RESULTS: Our final sample comprises 5075 pupils from 38 secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium.

CONCLUSIONS: In this article, we present the study's background and rationale, the development of the questionnaire, and the sampling and recruitment methods employed. Furthermore, we provide a summary of the sample characteristics and preliminary descriptive results of the RN-CSS. Subsequent empirical studies will address the research objectives outlined in this protocol paper. The research opportunities provided by the developed materials and dataset are being discussed.