This project is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of commonly used pesticide safety training materials with migrant adolescent farm workers. Most migrant farm workers are poorly educated and do not speak English as a primary language. While materials are available to train farm workers on pesticide safety, few of the training methods have been evaluated with non-English speaking populations and no studies have addressed the effectiveness of agriculture health and safety training with adolescent migrant farm workers. This project will determine if cultural, developmental, and age-related factors are associated with the adolescent's knowledge and beliefs of pesticide hazards and safety precautions and to what extent these factors influence the effectiveness of pesticide safety training. Specifically the project will compare 1) the effectiveness of video methods of training and more interactive flip-chart approaches to training, 2) the effectiveness of training delivered in the context of an educational program versus traditional methods of grower initiated training, 3) the effectiveness of traditional methods of delivering the training (audio-visual materials, training packets) to an individualized computer-assisted approach. The educational interventions that will be used in this project are built upon previous community-based projects with the migrant agricultural community and are dependent upon collaborative relationships with organizations that serve and advocate for the Latino agricultural community. Results from this proposed project will provide a model for future educational intervention research in agricultural occupational safety and health and contribute to the knowledge of workplace exposures and health effects in this vulnerable population.
