Comparing the Functioning of Youth and Adult Led Prevention Coalitions

Introduction: Youth-led coalitions are a promising prevention and health promotion strategy. They provide opportunities for youth to build capacity and commitment for life-long involvement in health promotion. Further, youth are in a unique position to understand and develop effective strategies for youth behavior change. In advocacy efforts, youth have a uniquely powerful voice because adults are expected to protect youth health, thereby making opponents appear uncaring. Despite these advantages, youth-led teams face unique challenges because youth have less experience and skill in coordinating large projects and addressing complex problems. Adult advisors can mitigate these challenges, but they may still compromise coalition functioning, which subsequently influences support for program and policy implementation and coalition sustainability. The goal of this study is to understand the similarities and differences in the functioning of youth and adult led prevention coalitions.

To achieve the study goal, we compare responses on a coalition functioning survey from both youth and adult coalitions. The youth coalitions focused on tobacco control whereas the adult coalitions focused more broadly on youth substance use and delinquency. Aspects of coalition functioning under examination include leadership, task focus, interpersonal relationships, participation costs and benefits, and community support.

Method: We administered coalition functioning surveys to 44 participants in 3 youth coalitions in Texas and New Mexico. We compared these results to the responses of 663 members from 53 adult coalitions spread throughout the state of Pennsylvania. We used multilevel regression models to compare youth and adult coalitions, controlling for demographic characteristics and level of coalition involvement.

Results: Findings indicate the youth and adult coalitions are not significantly different on most measures of coalition functioning. Youth did face substantially more participation difficulties.

Conclusions: Although the adult role in the youth coalitions is substantially different, coalition functioning in youth and adult led efforts are similar. These findings are encouraging given the success of the adult coalitions, which reduced community-level rates of substance use and delinquency in a quasi-experimental evaluation. Youth coalition functioning appears strong and is likely to facilitate the implementation of successful tobacco control efforts.

The higher levels of participation difficulties require attention however. Youth may have less control over their schedule, thus making scheduling conflicts more difficult to manage. This presentation will discuss how to manage this and other unique challenges youth coalitions face.