Building Healthy Teen Relationships: An Evaluation of the Fourth R Curriculum with Middle School Students in the Bronx.

摘要

National estimates indicate that anywhere from one in ten to one in five adolescents experience physical dating violence and an even greater number experience verbal or psychological abuse. The Fourth R: Strategies for Healthy Youth Relationships is a dating violence prevention curriculum, previously shown to reduce physical dating violence among Canadian ninth-grade students. Utilizing a randomized controlled trial design, this study tests the effectiveness of the Fourth R curriculum with a younger, diverse, urban population in the Bronx, New York. A secondary quasi-experimental study seeks to examine whether the Fourth R had any school-wide benefits across the experimental schools, reaching even those students who did not directlynreceive the curriculum. We hypothesized that students who were exposed to the Fourth R would show improvements in the following primary and secondary target attitudes and behaviors: teen dating violence, sexual harassment/assault, peer violence/bullying, sexual activity, drug andnalcohol use, perceptions of school safety, acceptance of gender stereotypes and pro-violence beliefs, and pro-social responses to violence.