Coping Power in the City: A Culture- and Context-Relevant Adaptation of an Evidenced-Based Intervention in Baltimore City High Schools

Introduction: Exposure to violence has been shown to interact in complex ways with the general challenges of adolescence to increase the risk for serious conduct problems, school drop-out, and mental health problems for urban youth, especially low-income, African American and Hispanic males (Thomas et al., 2011). These concerns are compounded in Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS), an urban school district with a high concentration of students exposed to violence and challenges related to elevated tensions between youth and police and an unprecedented surge in homicides in the neighborhoods where participating schools were located.

Method: A comprehensive process was carried out to adapt Coping Power (Lochman & Wells, 2002), an evidenced-based, multi-component indicated preventive intervention, to enhance the cultural and contextual relevance, utility, and effectiveness with students in 10 high schools in BCPS. This involved iterative modifications to ensure fidelity, based on qualitative interviews, direct observations, consultation with the developer, researchers, and practitioners of Coping Power and a small-scale pilot of key adaptations of the intervention model in two schools in BCPS.

Results: Steps were undertaken to ensure adequate cultural and contextual adaptations of the intervention, with respect to skill-building and new components for youth, parents, teachers, and school police officers. Community-Based Participatory Research principles were utilized in the adaptation and pilot-testing stages to ensure a cultural fit with 9^th-graders. This included strategies for the engagement of youth, school officials, school police officers and a multi-disciplinary team of academic-based researchers and practitioners working in tandem to: 1) ensure that present applied prevention research efforts were carried out with an appreciation of the particular needs and cultural norms of the local communities being served in mind, 2) recognize inherent assets and strengths within communities and harness these to increase the partnering schools’ own capacity for carrying out interventions to promote school safety and decrease violence among enrolled youth; and 3) yield greater sustainability of effective approaches in urban schools to prevent violence among youth.

Discussion: Implications for best practices to synergize fidelity and adaptation processes to optimally address the strengths and needs of urban school communities will be discussed.