Early marriage remains a critical issue in Indonesia. In 2023 alone, East Java recorded more than 12,000 court dispensations for underage marriage, with Jember among the highest. Young women who marry early frequently experience constrained self agency and unequal decision making power in domains such as reproductive health and family finance. Yet, despite the scale and depth of the problem, few interventions directly target relational wellbeing—the ways youth communicate, support, and decide together—which underpins mental health.

This project asks three core questions. First, can communication-focused relational wellbeing (CFRWB) — an index derived from observable communication cues such as facial expressions, vocal tone, and language use — predict mental health and agency more effectively than traditional wellbeing scales (PWB, SWB, RWB)? Second, how do communication patterns differ across relational settings (partners, parents, peers) and decision domains (health, finance, education, domestic roles)? Third, can CFRWB be used to guide youth-led, gender-equitable communication interventions, and do these interventions measurably improve relational wellbeing and mental health?

Indepth interviews, guided storytelling, and roleplay scenarios will be conducted with early married youth and their close networks (partners and/or parents). Sessions will be video and audio recorded. OpenFace (to read facial expressions), openSMILE (to analyse vocal tone), and natural language processing (to capture sentiment and emotional language) will be used to build a communication-focused relational wellbeing (CFRWB) index. Participants will also complete standardised surveys, including psychological, subjective, and relational wellbeing scales, alongside measures of self agency, gender norms, and power distance.

A subsample from the wider community will contribute a short phone-based storytelling task to test how well the CFRWB model generalises beyond the core interview sample. Network analyses will be applied to map advice, influence, and communication flows among youth, partners, parents, and peers.

Across the three years, the study will proceed in phases: Year 1 focuses on data collection and model development; Year 2 pilots and evaluates a communication skills intervention, delivered partly through a youth-facing chatbot that provides brief, skills-based coaching in empathy, emotional regulation, conflict resolution, and equitable decision making, assessed with pre–post measurements; Year 3 conducts youth-led policy design and advocacy to translate the evidence into practice.

The research intends to:

1. Develop and validate a communication-focused (CF) RWB model using multimodal communications data to accurately predict relational wellbeing across different relational settings (marital, parental, peer) - an index derived from multimodal communication signals (facial, vocal, textual) that capture how people relate, decide, and support each other.
2. Measure the impact of CF RWB on psychological outcomes such as self-agency, gender views and power distance (the degree of acceptance of unequal distribution of power), with a focus on identifying differences between early-marriage couples and their peers.
3. Conduct comparative theory testing to assess whether CF RWB has stronger predictive power than traditional wellbeing measures (PWB, SWB and RWB scales) in predicting psychological outcomes.
4. Compare communication patterns across decision-making contexts (health, finance, education, domestic) to understand how CF RWB varies by context and relational dynamics.
5. Design and implement interventions aimed at improving CF RWB and evaluate their effectiveness using multimodal pre- and post-intervention assessments.
6. Develop youth-led health communication policies, focusing on improving family and peer communications around reproductive health, gender equity and decision-making.

This study will validate whether CFRWB, captured through multimodal communication patterns (facial expressions, vocal tone, and textual content), is a strong and practical predictor of relational wellbeing across marital, parental, peer, and extended family settings.

Secondly, it will explore how CFRWB influences psychological outcomes such as self agency, gender views, and acceptance of unequal power, and how these relationships vary across contexts and relationships.

Thirdly, the study will produce evidence-based communication guidelines, interventions, and youth-led policy briefs to support healthier, more equitable decision making among young people affected by early marriage.

The research will include testing the effectiveness of interventions to improve CF RWB. These interventions will focus on enhancing communication skills such as empathy, emotional regulation and conflict resolution, with an emphasis on promoting gender equity in decision-making. The effectiveness of these interventions will be tested by comparing pre- and post-intervention CF RWB patterns and assessing whether they lead to an improvement in relational wellbeing in early-marriage couples and their peer groups. Engagement with, and response to, the chatbot (e.g., completion of coaching modules, improvements in empathy and conflict resolution language during practice dialogues) will be tracked as process indicators, while changes in CFRWB and related scales will serve as primary outcomes.