Grant: Operating Grant: ECI grants in Maternal, Reproductive, Child & Youth Health

One in five Canadians is foreign-born. In 2018, over 321,000 immigrants arrived in Canada, the largest number since 1971. Immigrant adolescents make up a substantial proportion of newcomers to Canada. Adolescence is a time to establish lifelong healthy behaviours, and research indicates an alarming gap in adolescent's sexual and reproductive health (SRH) knowledge. Despite the importance of immigrants in Canadian society, there is a scarcity of research on the SRH needs of immigrant adolescents in the country. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies on SRH information needs of immigrant adolescents in Canada. To address this gap, we aimed to examine the SRH information needs and priorities of immigrant adolescents in Canada. This project will be conducted in four stages: Stage 1: First, an adolescent advisory group (AAG) will be formed. The goal of the AAG will be to participate in data collection, data analysis, mobile app development, gathering feedback on mobile app usability, and knowledge mobilization. Stage 2: A qualitative study will be conducted with immigrant adolescents age 13-19 years to explore their information needs and their level of knowledge related to SRH. Stage 3: We will actively engage with immigrant adolescents' and develop an interactive mobile app. Stage 4: We will evaluate the usability and usefulness of mhealth intervention. The development, implementation, and evaluation of this innovative mhealth intervention for immigrant adolescents will provide evidence-based information on SRH to adolescents and ultimately improve adolescents' SRH outcomes. To ensure the usefulness of our study, we will disseminate our findings to policymakers, service providers, and immigrants through diverse strategies, including report, a project website, and presentations. We will also present our results at three conferences and publish our results in three peer-reviewed journals.