How to Develop Trauma-Informed Health Communications for Teens

Change is difficult, especially for teenagers who often experience many barriers to change. While prevention efforts tend to focus on why teens should incorporate a new healthy behavior into their lives, many teens don’t know how that new behavior fits within their lives, their social groups, the adversity they face, and the trauma they might have experienced. Trauma-informed messages can make it easier for teens to change by showing them how the behavior fits into their lives and can improve it. In this educational video, Rescue President and Executive Creative Director Jeff Jordan explains the steps you can take to make radically selfless, trauma-informed public health messages for teens.

Key Moments

2:30 Messages for teens must be social group informed, as that’s the lens through which teens will view health communications. We use peer crowds, the macro-level connections between peer groups with similar interests, lifestyles, influencers, and habits, to better understand the unique needs of teens in each group. To learn more about peer crowd science, watch our video “Psychographic Teen Segmentation.”

3:05 Each peer crowd faces different risk behaviors. Here, Jeff discusses the data we gathered in our Virginia Youth Survey. This statewide survey used the YRBS methodology across 83 Virginia high schools with 3,138 student participants to investigate how tobacco use differed by peer crowd. Spoiler: Not all peer crowds are at equal risk for using tobacco. Check out the results of that survey here.

7:31 When we incorporated an Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) scale into one of our peer crowd studies with 1,000+ teens in Virginia, the resulting data helped us understand what might be driving some teens into certain peer crowds over others. See the results here and learn more about how ACEs and peer crowds are connected.

10:35 Now, we have two pieces of communication that are extremely important. First, peer crowds tell us the kinds of values teens have, as well as the look and style we should communicate with. Second, ACEs help us understand what teens are likely facing and the context in which behavior change needs to occur. Discover how to use this information to start developing trauma-informed, value-informed, and social-group-informed messages that will help you reach the highest risk teens.

12:10 Jeff provides some examples of trauma-informed, value-informed, and social-group-informed messages for teens. Watch our ad “Country Legacy” developed for the Country peer crowd.

13:20 Learn more about why we developed our Down and Dirty ready-made campaign and how it was designed specifically for teens in the Country peer crowd who’ve experienced the death of a parent. You can also view additional examples of trauma-informed, value-informed, and social-group-informed messages for teens.

If you’d like to learn more about our approach to research and campaign development⸺and read published research papers about peer crowd science⸺visit our website or contact us.