Addressing the health and well-being of adolescents can influence their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours that impact their health outcomes in the short and long term. Health risk behaviours such as dieting, physical inactivity, tobacco use etc are initiated during adolescence and often continue into late adolescence and young adulthood. This can influence the risk of chronic noncommunicable diseases and morbidity later in life, thus affecting health throughout the life course.

Data on emerging risk behaviours, particularly those stemming from technological advances such as vaping and cyber-bullying are sparse. There is a need to gain insights on contemporary negative health risk behaviours if they are to be addressed appropriately. In parallel, positive health risk behaviours such as trying out a new sport, giving a presentation to a large audience, etc involve positive outcomes that can theoretically fulfil adolescents’ developmental needs and motivations in culturally acceptable and relatively safe ways. Yet, the perspectives and motivations of adolescents engaging in negative and positive health risk behaviours have largely been unsought and unexplored. A deeper understanding of adolescents’ perspectives may help us create opportunities for adolescents to take risks in healthy and adaptive ways.

Adaptive risk-taking can vary greatly from person to person and be influenced by factors such as individual characteristics, physical and social environment including social media, and culture and social norms. Yet, how these factors play out and interact to influence health risk behaviours in adolescents in the Singapore context, where risk and norms are defined differently from the Western setting, is unknown. Growing evidence suggests that getting youths’ inputs and involvement in educational or health promotion program development and implementation is more efficacious due to the designed program better meeting their needs and interests.

Through in-depth interviews with adolescents (aged 15 to 16 years of age) from four government secondary schools in Singapore, including two co-education schools, one all-girls school and one all-boys schools, this research aims to understand adolescents’ perspectives of contemporary health risk behaviours (negative and positive) that are relevant, of interest and of concern to them, and their corresponding motivations and barriers. Besides gaining insights into factors influencing these behaviours, participants’ views on where, what and how they learnt best about health risk behaviours will be sought. They will also be asked to provide suggestions or solutions to develop relevant program and strategies.

Additionally, focus group discussions will be conducted with teachers-in-charge of Character and Citizenship lessons from the four schools to understand their current challenges and needs in educating students about health risk behaviours, and seeking their feedback on suggestions provided by adolescents. This can help educators and researchers prioritise the practical ideas that are feasible for translation to actual programs in the future. This proposed study will form part of the formative research required to provide the evidence base to develop tailored and effective intervention strategies to mitigate current negative health risk behaviours and encourage positive risk behaviours in adolescents.