BUDDY Trial Programme — Brief Universal Dyadic Dialogue for You

BUDDY is a staged dyadic field-feasibility programme examining whether brief, psychologically safe peer-listening approaches can be delivered, accepted and measured in university first-meeting contexts. The current MRes study is a two-arm dyad-level randomised feasibility study at VIVES University of Applied Sciences, Belgium, comparing Reflective Listening within a Fast Friends Procedure (RPL+FFP) with Active-Constructive Responding in a feelings-first Fast Friends frame (ACR-FFP). Primary outcomes are feasibility and process outcomes: recruitment, paired attendance, primer completion, self-report fidelity, data completeness, retention, acceptability, burden and safeguarding. Immediate relational outcomes, including DESI-18, are exploratory. Howest contributes to PPIE/co-design only. GeoLondon is an optional separately reported first-week/co-residence contextual implementation extension and is never pooled with or formally compared against VIVES. DESI-18 validation is maintained separately at osf.io/y7hge. The programme is led by V. J. de Blauwe at Nottingham Trent University under the sole formal MRes supervision of Professor Clifford Stevenson.