| The Teen Dating Violence Prevention Projects: Best Practices for School-Based TDV Prevention Programming |
| Introduction The TDV Project is a collaboration between the Illinois Department of Human Services, participating Teen Dating Violence Prevention educators in Illinois, and Paul Schewe. The goal of the project is to improve the effectiveness of TDV prevention programming in Illinois. The three primary objectives of this project were to: 1) Develop a common set of outcome measures that could be used to assess the effectiveness of TDV prevention programs, 2) Identify the best programs in the state for improving the attitudes, knowledge, and behavioral intentions of male and female students, urban, suburban, and rural students, and Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic students, and 3) Identify the content and characteristics of prevention programs that are most associated with success. |
| Outcome Measures Educators from 10 TDV prevention programs assisted in the development of the outcome measures for this project. The educators used logic models of their programs and brainstorming to develop a list of potential outcomes of their interventions. Consensus among the educators was used to identify the most common constructs targeted for change. The educators then worked in small groups to develop questions that could be used to measure the selected constructs. The questionnaires that were previously developed to evaluate the STAR Project were used as a guide in developing the common set of evaluation measures. The measures were then administered to a pilot sample of high school students and further revised based on feedback from students and from psychometric analysis of the pilot data. During the 2002-2003 school year, prevention educators from across Illinois administered the questionnaires pre and post intervention to over 2000 student participants of their programs. Psychometric analyses of this data revealed adequate convergent validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability for each of the measures. |
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| Star Performers Data collected from nearly 2000 students during the 2002-2003 school year was used to identify the best performing agencies for various sub-groups of students based on gender, race, and geographic location. During the upcoming years, those best performing agencies will begin to disseminate their programs and to provide peer training and technical assistance to other agencies. |
| Best Practices A variety of regression and multivariate analyses were performed in order to identify the content and characteristics of programs that are most associated with success. Below are some of the key findings to date that predict improvement on the outcome measures. |
Characteristics of Prevention Programs Associated with Success
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Content of Prevention Programs Associated with Success
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Content of Prevention Programs Inversely Related to Success
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Presentation Formats of Programs Associated with Success
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Presentation Formats of Programs Inversely Associated with
Success
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| Next Steps TDV agencies will repeat the evaluation process when funding becomes available. The results of that evaluation will strengthen and expand our knowledge of best practices, and will allow us to determine the extent to which agencies were able to use the results of this initial evaluation to improve the effectiveness of their interventions. [1] Success is defined by the aggregate change scores from the six outcomes measures. [2] “High risk” is defined by scoring below the statewide average at pre-test on the outcome measures |