The Risk of Doing Activities Because There Is Nothing Else to Do: Unpacking Intervention Effects on Delaying Sexual Activity Onset and Reducing Substance Use

Introduction: Building on the previous findings that boredom is a predictor of sexual debut, this study examines how targeting youth’s leisure, a context where teens often become bored, can prevent risky behaviors such as early sexual debut. This study focuses on understanding how leisure potentially mediates the path of intervention effects on sexual debut and substance use. Substance use is examined as an additional outcome to understand potential similarities and differences in paths to different risky behaviors. Doing leisure activities because there is nothing else to do (versus for more internally or externally compelled reasons like “I want to” or “I have to”) is specifically examined as a mediator because it reflects an intersection of factors associated with risky behaviors, including boredom, amotivation, and a perceived lack of community activities. To identify whether doing something because there is nothing else to do is risky or not, we focused on comparing three specific activities that researchers have found to be risky in some contexts and protective in others: hanging out with friends, doing sports, and going to parks/community centers (often vacant lots in South Africa).

Methods: Data were used from HealthWise (HW), a high school-based, leisure focused intervention in townships near Cape Town, South Africa. We examined whether HW students compared to a no-treatment control (N_total = 5,610) reported doing fewer leisure activities because they felt there was nothing else to do. Path analyses were used to examine whether doing each of three activities due to having nothing else to do mediated the effect of HW on delaying sexual debut between 8^th and 10^thgrade and whether those paths were similar for substance use. Analyses were separated by gender because girls and boys engage in different activities and risky behaviors at different rates.

Results: HW delayed boys’ sexual debut and this was mediated by HW reducing boys’ tendency to go to parks/community centers for nothing else to do. However, this pattern was not the same for substance use or for girls. Rather for girls, HW reduced girls’ polysubstance use via reducing their tendency to hang out with friends for nothing else to do.

Conclusions: The path to sexual debut can be influenced by the reasons teens do different activities and this path can be influenced by interventions. However, this path may not be the same for other risky behaviors like substance use as well as for different activities and genders. Overall, this indicates the need to target youth by gender in their free time activities and that there is also an overarching value of targeting youth’s unhealthy motives for doing activities, in particular for having nothing else to do.