Take Charge! 2.0 Exploring the Impact of Training for Mentors to Reduce Peer Assault

Due to promising results on reducing violent behaviors, mentoring programs are building partnerships with emergency departments and other community organizations that serve violence exposed youth. One challenge for mentoring programs that serve violence exposed youth is providing training and support that enables mentors to meet their needs. Most mentoring programs are built upon the development of a relationship between the mentor and the child/adolescent and therefore, tend to minimize curriculum structured engagement. Instead they support a “child-centered approach,” where an activity allows an interpersonal relationship between the youth and the mentor to develop. While most mentor programs offer training and support for an interpersonal relationship, limited training is available to address risk-behaviors, including peer assault. This research was an examination of the Take Charge! 2.0 Big Brother Big Sister (BBBS) mentoring training to reduce youth violence among adolescents who sought medical care at the emergency department for peer assault injuries. The aims of this study are to 1) explore the satisfaction with a mentor training about a youth violence prevention, 2) examine if completion of the training increased mentor confidence to talk about strategies to prevent violence with their little and 3) determine if length of match was associated completion of the training.

Youth aged 10-15 years old with who sought medical attention for peer assault injuries in two emergency departments were randomly assigned to an intervention enrolling them in the Take Charge! 2.0 program. Assessments for mentors included pre/post training and at nine months after match initiation. BBBS match support documentation was also analyzed to determine time to match, length of match, and program completion. Measures for this analysis included agency indicators (length of time to match and training completion prior to match), mentor indicators (age, sex, confidence in talking about violence prevention activities), and mentoring outcome of length of match.

Seventy mentors were approached to participate in the Take Charge! 2.0 program and 37 were matched (53%). Of the mentors that were matched, most (68%) completed the Take Charge! 2.0 program training prior to their match (vs. 32%). The average length of match for pairs in this study was 14.1 months (8.3 SD). Most of the mentors had no change in confidence to talk about strategies to prevent violence with their little from the training to the nine month follow up (81%). Logistic regression found that training prior to initiation of match was associated with an increase in the number of months of the length of the matched (p = .04), however changes in confidence of talking about violence prevention strategies had no impact on match length (p=.98).

In this presentation, we will present the results of the training for Take Charge! 2.0, focusing broadly on the constructs of Social Cognitive Theory (self-efficacy, importance indicators, and attitudes). Additionally, we will describe how we collaborated with BBBS to implement the training and monitor engagement highlighting important lessons learned about the feasibility of implementing training around risk-behaviors.