There are approximately 34 million adolescents, between the ages of 11-17 in the United States. Approximately 12 percent of them are African American. These youth are experiencing earlier puberty onset, face earlier challenges to participate sexual activity, and earlier potential for pregnancy and contraction of sexually transmitted diseases (Commission, 1999). A recent national commission of experts in adolescent research recommended developing and implementing new interventions to reduce early sexual (sic) targeting early adolescents in middle school. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of the NIA intervention on intention to engage in early sexual behavior, and actual involvement in early sexual behavior in a convenience sample of 6th and 7th grade African American girls. The NIA intervention will be compared against a usual after school activity control group of 6th and 7th grade African American girls in two public middle schools in the Pittsburgh Public School system. Using the theory of reasoned action (TRA) the study's specific aims are to determine if girls assigned to the NIA intervention show: 1) a greater decrease in favorable attitudes towards early sexual behavior than those in the control group; 2) a greater influence of subjective norms supporting a delay in involvement in early sexual behavior than those in the control group; 3) a greater intention not to engage in early sexual behavior than those in the control group; 4) less involvement in early sexual behavior than those in the control group; and 5) a sustained or greater improvement in the study dependent variables at post intervention (3 months), and 6 and 12 months post intervention. The study will use a 2 school by 2 group by 2-application quasi-experimental nested-factorial design with repeated measures at four time points. There will be two schools with subjects randomly assigned within schools to two NIA intervention groups and two control groups (crossing NIA and control groups across schools in alternating years x 4 years) across 4 measurement occasions. The primary statistical procedure will be a 2 x2 x 2 multivariate-fixed effect analysis of variance (MANOVA) with the 4 repeated measures treated as a multivariate variable. The repeated measures ANOVA will be conducted on each of the dependent variables separately. In level two of the analysis, path analysis will explore the theoretical relationships in the TRA.
| Doswell, Willa M; Braxter, Betty J; Cha, Eunseok et al. (2011) Testing the theory of reasoned action in explaining sexual behavior among African American young teen girls. J Pediatr Nurs 26:e45-54 |
| Braxter, Betty J; Doswell, Willa M; Ren, Dianxu (2011) Another look at heterosocial behaviors: one side of the early intimate sexual behaviors coin. Soc Work Public Health 26:35-45 |
