The Central Mass. Sexual Victimization Prevention Project is a """"""""Research and Demonstration:"""""""" program that will serve l500 youth over three years. The research aspects of the proposal are of particular significance in that no grant ever awarded by the National Center For the Prevention and Control of Rape (see that Center's Short Summaries publication) has had the research foci of this proposal: The major ultimate aim of the program is to inform children about sexual victimization and about ways of coping with such victimization, thus the major goal of the research (Goal 1) is to assess the effectiveness of the training in meeting this aim. Therefore, the proposed research includes direct measures of changes in children's knowledge and behavior that result from their participation in the program. Other portions of the research plan are addressed to important goals subordinate to this major goal of the program. These additional goals include: (2) assessing the effects of leader training on the leaders, (3) assessing the influence of variations in such effects among leaders on the magnitude of changes in the children they train, (4) identifying variations between CampFire groups in the program components delivered, and assessing the differential effectiveness of some of these components in changing the children, (5) identifying characteristics that distinguish the children who participate from those who do not and characteristics that distinguish the leaders who volunteer to participate from those who do not, and (6) giving an articulate account of how the formation of this program might be generalized to other settings. This brief statement of the goals of the research is extensively elaborated, with attention to methodology in the """"""""Research Plan"""""""" section of the Proposal.
