Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), proposes a research plan designed to improve understanding of effective strategies to prevent early sexual initiation and its precursors among academically at-risk urban minority boys and girls. Working in continued collaboration with the New York City Public Schools and the Joseph Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, we build this work on a strong foundation of research that has identified the need to begin interventions prior to entry into middle school and support both students and their parents through the transition to early adolescence. The proposed study will ask two primary questions. First, do the risk and protective factors that predict sexual risk taking and its precursors in young adolescence operate similarly in middle childhood? Second, given the early age of sexual initiation among urban minority youth, can interventions shown to be effective in early adolescence be developmentally adapted for middle childhood to delay sexual initiation and its precursors? To address these questions, we will work with a school community that serves African American and Latino children and their families. Over 5 years, our aims are to: 1. Adapt a multi-component RFH intervention for implementation with boys and girls in middle childhood (beginning in 5th and continuing through 6th grade). This intervention includes: parent-child communication education, classroom curriculum, and service learning, in which youth participate in structured, supervised volunteer work as part of their regular school day. 2. Conduct a randomized trial (n=600) to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention in reducing sexual risk taking and its precursors in early adolescence (at a 6-month follow-up in 7th grade). 3. Conduct qualitative interviews with a random sample of children stratified by gender and level of risk taking (n=90) to elaborate on the meaning of sexual risk taking and the context in which it occurs. 4. Use quantitative evaluation data and qualitative interviews to assess whether risk and protective factors that predict sexual risk taking and its precursors that we have identified for young adolescents operate similarly for middle childhood youth. 5. Evaluate the impact of the intervention on mechanisms hypothesized to reduce sexual risk taking and its precursors, including the personal resiliency and social competencies of youth (ethnic identity achievement, gender role expectations, prosocial attitudes, and psychological well-being), and the social influences of parents, peers, school, and community on their lives. 6. Collect data on the costs and process of implementation to inform subsequent dissemination.
| O'Donnell, Lydia; Stueve, Ann; Agronick, Gail et al. (2005) Saving Sex for Later: an evaluation of a parent education intervention. Perspect Sex Reprod Health 37:166-73 |
