Session: Bridging the Gap Between Efficacy and Effectiveness in Aggression Prevention and Social-Emotional Learning Prevention Research (Society for Prevention Research 25th Annual Meeting)

The current symposium will address the testing and disseminating of well-known aggression prevention programs through the use of sophisticated randomized control trials across a wide range of school settings. Each of the programs has been previously adapted so that they would meet the needs of the targeted community and ensure that they are both developmentally appropriate and ecologically valid for the targeted audience. The first paper presents results from the Early Adolescent Coping Power program that was adapted from the Coping Power Program (CPPRG, 2010) such that it would be developmentally appropriate for a middle school audience. Preliminary results suggest that the program has strong effects on externalizing and internalizing problems as well as bullying for 249 youth from 40 middle schools across two states. The second presentation will address how the Second Step social-emotional (SEL) universal prevention program was rolled out to an ethnically diverse sample of almost 9000 youth across 61 schools and two states. An information-theoretic approach was undertaken to study models to estimate potential growth patterns across four measurements across two years in order to examine when the most robust changes occur. Intervention effects were found across several distal outcomes over multiple years including conduct problems, emotional symptoms, hyperactivity, and reading achievement. Finally, the Friend to Friend (F2F) Program, a culturally adapted indicated prevention program was studied through a randomized parallel-group study design with 144 relationally aggressive ethnic minority youth across six schools. Improvements in problem-solving knowledge and reduction in relational aggression was found both at the end of the program and at one year follow-up. In addition, the indicated prevention program had a number of broader effects including decreasing aggression and improving teacher-student relationships for non-targeted girls and boys within classrooms of girls participating in the F2F program. In sum, the symposium will highlight how sophisticated designs can move prevention research from efficacy to effectiveness research across diverse school settings with a focus on building healthier school communities. The symposium will discuss the use of different research designs to bridge the gap between efficacy and effectiveness research. In addition, next steps for research and practice related to large-scale dissemination of social-emotional and aggression prevention programs will be presented.