HG Coaching: An IRB Approved Program

HG Coaching is a digital-first coaching program serving clients all over the world with services designed to address emerging subclinical mental health stressors. 

One of our primary goals is to study our program and see if it is actually effective at helping our clients. In order to ensure that we adhere to the standards of privacy and confidentiality, we initiated IRB-approved studies to measure the impact of our coaching programs.

We also collect data for quality assurance purposes. We don’t just do research, but also understand and improve the quality of the product we are producing.

The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is an external ethics review board that protects the rights of individuals that participate in research studies. The goal of the IRB is to minimize the potential harm to the participants of a research study and to ensure that the rights of the study participants are protected.

The IRB has approved coaching as a less than minimal risk intervention and authorized us to look at our research data in aggregate to analyze the quality and effectiveness of the HG Coaching program.

The IRB has approved 4 of our Coaching Programs (1-on-1 Coaching, Group Coaching, Creator Coaching, and Parent Coaching). They have also approved a questionnaire designed by HG to measure the positive and negative effects of video game usage in our participants of HG Coaching.

HG Coaching Research Process

We submitted a study protocol to the IRB, which is a document that outlines the design of the study and describes the objectives, methodology, and organization of the research to be carried out.

Over the course of a year, we analyzed the mental well-being of participants in the HG Coaching program. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that going through HG Coaching can result in a reduction in feelings of anxiety, feelings of depression, problematic gaming behavior, and an increase in feelings of life purpose.

Personal Coaching Outcomes

We created a system to anonymously store the survey responses of our previous clients. We analyzed this data for quality assurance and research purposes.  Our clients prior to meeting with a coach complete a series of questionnaires.  Our questionnaires include validated tools for measuring depression, anxiety, life purpose, and gaming behaviors.  Initially our coaching program was designed to help individuals with video gaming addiction, however as we analyzed our data we were able to determine that coaching also helps improve more than gaming behavior but mental well being more broadly.  Coaching is not a clinical treatment but our clients did see improvements in depression and anxiety.  

These results help demonstrate that coaching can be an effective tool to help someone. Coaching was not designed to replace therapy or clinical treatment, rather an expansion to traditional mental healthcare resources. We will continue to do QA and research work on our coaching programs to make it an even more effective resource for clients.

Group Coaching Outcomes

We created a system to anonymously store the survey responses of our previous clients. We analyzed this data for quality assurance and research purposes.  Our clients prior to meeting with a coach complete a series of questionnaires.  Our questionnaires include validated tools for measuring depression, anxiety, life purpose, and gaming behaviors.  Initially our coaching program was designed to help individuals with video gaming addiction, however as we analyzed our data we were able to determine that coaching also helps improve more than gaming behavior but mental well being more broadly.  Coaching is not a clinical treatment but our clients did see improvements in depression and anxiety.  

These results help demonstrate that coaching can be an effective tool to help someone.  Coaching was not designed to replace therapy or clinical treatment, rather an expansion to traditional mental healthcare resources.  We will continue to do QA and research work on our coaching programs to make it an even more effective resource for clients. 

Parent Coaching Outcomes

We created a system to anonymously store the survey responses of our previous clients. We analyzed this data for quality assurance and research purposes. Our clients prior to meeting with a coach complete a series of questionnaires. Our questionnaires include tools for measuring relationship satisfaction between parents and children, along with social engagement. We designed a coaching program to help parents with children that are struggling with gaming or technology addiction. The Parent coaching program was designed to help build alliances between parents and their children to help improve family dynamics. Our results demonstrated that the parents in our program noticed an improvement in their relationship with their child. These improvements led to more engagement with the world outside of technology.

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