Friend to Friend (F2F) Program: Preventing Relational Aggression Among Urban African American Girls

Introduction: Although school-aged children frequently exhibit physical aggression, research has found that girls, in particular, are likely to express their anger by manipulating others’ social standing, which has been termed relational aggression (e.g., gossiping, excluding others; Crick & Grotpeter, 1995).  Research suggests that relational aggression is related to peer relationship problems, social cognitive processing deficits, and a host of internalizing symptoms (Crick, 1995; Crick, 1996; Leff et al., 2003), and that it is associated with later delinquency, risk taking behaviors, and other mental health disorders among girls (Kamper & Ostrov, 2013; Spieker et al., 2012).  Further, children from urban, high poverty schools are at great risk for emotional and behavioral adjustment difficulties because of the many acute and chronic stressors they face.  As such, developing early interventions for urban ethnic-minority relationally aggressive girls may help to prevent the development of serious mental health disorders. 

The goal of this presentation is two-fold: (1) to discuss how the Friend to Friend (F2F) Program was developed through an extensive community-based participatory research process to ensure that it would meet the needs of urban African American relationally aggressive girls; and (2) to present the results of a clinical trial of the program.

Methods: A randomized parallel-group study design was conducted comparing the effectiveness of F2F to an attention control condition among 144 relationally aggressive girls from six urban low-income elementary schools.  Analyses of covariance were utilized for comparing post-test measurement between the two conditions while adjusting for pre-test measurement.  Further, we examined whether the effects were maintained from post-test to follow-up among girls in F2F.

Results:  Results suggest that relationally aggressive girls in F2F decreased their levels of relational aggression and increased social problem-solving knowledge as compared to similar girls randomized to the attention control condition, both of which were maintained at the one-year follow up.  In addition, a range of implementation variables were associated with improvements in relational aggression.  For instance, higher levels of content and process integrity and higher levels of teacher partner engagement were associated with less relational aggression. 

Conclusion: F2F was developed through partnership to meet the needs of urban African American girls. The results suggest that F2F has a meaningful impact for relationally aggressive girls in this setting, and will be a useful and appealing program for urban elementary schools with a largely African American student population.