Implementation of Student and Parent-Focused Curricula to Prevent Teen Dating Violence: A Process Evaluation of Cdc's Dating MattersŪ Initiative

Prevention research has recently paid increased attention to the quality of program implementation. Implementation data can inform program improvement and help researchers assess the feasibility of implementation and broad dissemination in challenging settings. This presentation will describe methods and results to date from a large scale process evaluation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Dating Matters^® Initiative.

Dating Matters^®, a comprehensive teen dating violence (TDV) prevention program, includes preventive strategies for youth, families, schools, and neighborhoods. Four local health departments in high-risk urban settings are funded to implement the initiative. One aspect of the process evaluation describes implementation of curricula with 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grade students and with parents of 6^th and 7^th graders, and informs implementation technical assistance (TA) provided to grantees. For this purpose, three types of data are collected: (1) session logs completed by implementers after every curriculum session document fidelity and challenges; (2) TA tracking forms track site-specific TA provided to implementers by supervisory staff; and (3) parent satisfaction surveys collect feedback from parent participants.

In the first two years of implementation and evaluation, more than 6,400 session logs have been collected, representing 749 classes of students and 63 groups of parent participants. Adherence to curricula has been strong; across sites, 92.7% and 97.0% of session activities were implemented in the student and parent programs, respectively. Both student and parent engagement and overall session quality were rated highly by implementers. Parent feedback has been extremely positive; 89.7% of parents have reported that their overall feelings about the program have been “very positive.” The most common barrier to adherence was time constraints (reported in 25.5% of student and 17.1% of parent sessions). Multivariate multilevel analyses have shown that there were significant differences in several dimensions of fidelity between sites, and in some cases, curricula. TA has most commonly involved problem solving issues in curricula implementation, providing observation and feedback, schedule coordination, provision of materials, and guidance on program requirements.

The Dating Matters^® process evaluation is unique in its scope and depth of information collected. Results to date suggest that TDV prevention programming can be implemented with high fidelity on a broad scale in diverse communities, and shed light on implementation similarities and differences across communities, schools, and implementers. Process evaluation data can be used in the future to help interpret the outcomes of the student and parent-focused programming.