Session: Adapting, Developing, and Evaluating Programs Focusing on Aggression Prevention and Relationship Promotion (Society for Prevention Research 23rd Annual Meeting)

SESSION INTRODUCTION: The goal of this symposium session is to highlight innovative exemplars for how three aggression prevention programs were adapted by combining  empirically-based intervention strategies with input from key local community stakeholders, and then to present the results from a series of systematic research studies testing the programs’ effectiveness for underserved populations.  The symposium is consistent with the conference themes of Advances Across the Stages of the Prevention Cycle and The Development and Testing of Interventions.  The symposium combines leading aggression prevention research teams from the United States and Canada.

The first paper, “Friend to Friend (F2F) Program: Preventing Relational Aggression among Urban African American Girls” presents how a community-based participatory research framework was used to develop this small group intervention program for 3^rd-5^thgrade urban girls.  In addition, results from a school-based clinical trial demonstrate 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, which was maintained at one year follow-up.

The second paper, “Uniting Our Nations: Strengths-Based Violence Prevention with Aboriginal youth” discusses how the evidence-based Fourth R program was adapted through partnership to ensure that it was delivered in a culturally-relevant, strength-based approach for Aboriginal youth.  Results from a longitudinal evaluation study suggest that the Uniting Our Nations program increased positive indicators of adjustment, and decreased problematic behaviors and academic outcomes, particularly among more vulnerable youth.

The third paper, “Enhancing Protective Processes to Prevent Bullying and Peer Victimization: A Cluster Randomized trial examining the Effects of the WITS Programs” details how an open-access adaptation of WITS could be used to facilitate the program’s expansion and scale-up.  Results from a cluster randomized trial with almost 2000 children, parents, teachers from 137 classrooms in 27 predominately rural schools across Canada suggested that changing protective processes that influence children’s behaviors in their classrooms (expectations of social responsibility, prosocial leadership) and school climate can reduce peer aggression and victimization and emotional problems in elementary school children.

At the conclusion of the presentations, the discussant will reflect on the challenges and advantages of using partnership-based methods for ensuring that empirically-based programs to prevent aggression are tailored to be most effective for specific at-risk or understudied-populations.  In addition, this leading expert on aggression prevention will discuss how these programs fill a gap in the existing landscape of aggression prevention programming.