Preventing Risky Behaviors Among Latino Youth through an Online/Social Media-Based Parent Education Program

Introduction: Parents can play an important role in helping their adolescent children make healthy decisions. This is particular important in Latino families, given that Latino youth tend to confront difficult challenges such as bicultural/bilingual struggles, low SES, and other negative social determinants of health. Despite this critical need, few parent education programs that help parents better understand what they can do to support healthy adolescents have been designed specifically for Latino parents. Furthermore, programs that are offered to Latino parents tend to involve face-to-face meetings, which face obstacles such as logistical constraints, language barriers, and discomfort of Latino parents to participate in programs that are not culturally relevant to them. Salud y Exito--an innovative, culturally-targeted, and community-informed program—aims to break these barriers and engage Latino families online. The intervention consists of dramatic, gender-, and developmentally-crafted audio stories, where fictional parents are heard monitoring and setting rules for their children’s behaviors, and communicating proactively about various health-related issues such as sex, peer pressure, and substance use. This paper will first present evidence that the intervention is effective in changing Latino youth’s attitudes and behaviors related to early sexual onset. Second, it will present data from a pilot social media campaign to engage Latino parents in the online version of the program.

Methods: The effectiveness study consisted of a randomized control trial, where 27 schools in the Southwest and Northeast regions of the US were assigned to either Salud 100 (all students in sixth grade received the CDs), Salud 50 (only 50% of sixth grade students receive the CDs based on randomization), and control schools. The marketing campaign consisted of using embedded analytical data to measure the number of users engaging in the online version of the program through a Facebook campaign, as well as how users engaged with the program once on the site.

Results: The effectiveness study demonstrated that students whose parents received the CDs were less likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors, report lifetime sex, and to report intentions to have sex in the following six months. The evaluation of the social media campaign showed that the campaign brought over 80,000 Latino parents of adolescents to the site, 35% of them returned to the site, and 25% of them stayed on the site for more than 10 minutes to listen to tracks.

Conclusion: This presentation demonstrates how online parent education programs and social media campaigns can engage Latino parents in parent education programs that support efforts to reduce adolescent risky behaviors.