Three Components of Co-Regulation for Middle-School Aged Youth (PDF)
The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) has been engaging in work that furthers what is known about self-regulation and co-regulation among participants and staff in the human services programs funded by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). Self-regulation is the act of managing one’s thoughts and feelings to enable goal-directed actions. This developmental process is relevant across age groups, contexts, and populations. Self-regulation is reinforced by co-regulation, an interactive process in which others provide (1) warm, supportive relationships; (2) coaching, modeling, and feedback; and (3) structured supportive environments. OPRE’s work on co-regulation involves programming that covers the human lifespan. Because the key contexts where development occurs change as we grow, the process of co-regulation should adapt to the types of decision-making that occur within the key contexts of a particular developmental stage. This blog highlights efforts that build and expand on previous efforts related to healthy relationship education in adolescence. Specifically, it focuses on co-regulation supports that may strengthen youth self-regulation in ways that support healthy decision-making in the contexts where adolescents make choices about sexual activity.
OPRE collaborates with ACF’s Family and Youth Services Bureau on the evaluation and provision of technical assistance for its Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (APP) programs. APP programs are implemented by states, US territories, Tribal communities, and other jurisdictions and use education to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections among adolescents. One APP program is the Title V Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) grant program, which teaches youth to voluntarily refrain from sexual activity. The SRAE program requires that program providers teach youth self-regulation skills, among other prosocial youth behaviors. However, the program does not have specific requirements for which curricula or approaches providers must use to teach self-regulation skills. As noted in a previous blog post, co-regulation strategies are not confined to packaged curricula. Rather, co-regulation strategies can build on what programs are already doing to promote self-regulation and other aspects of youth development that support sexual risk avoidance, particularly in the case of SRAE programs. Among SRAE programs, some facilitators likely draw from their lived experience and preference for strengths-based tactics to model and bolster self-regulation skills. These approaches are congruent with broad co-regulation frameworks. Co-regulation occurs within typical interactions between SRAE program facilitators and youth participating in the program, i.e., the warm relationships coupled with concurrent coaching by the facilitator to support youth’s management of their thoughts and emotions regarding decisions on delaying sexual activity. However, for learning and evaluation purposes, it is important to define the features of those interactions and relationships so that we can evaluate them and identify which features have the greatest impact on particular youth and under what conditions.
To advance research on and enhance the implementation of co-regulation strategies within APP programs, the SRAE National Evaluation (SRAENE) is undertaking a few interrelated activities. For one, SRAENE includes a rigorous, evaluation on the implementation of co-regulation strategies among select SRAE programs as outlined in a practice guide for facilitators (PDF). The evaluation aims to identify whether using co-regulation facilitation strategies is associated with improvement in program implementation factors (e.g., youth’s perceptions of program climate/environment) and youth outcomes in the shorter-term (e.g., intentions to delay sex) in SRAE programs. The work assumes that using co-regulation strategies that were defined, tested, and further refined based on testing results—like the strategies included in the practice guide for facilitators (PDF) mentioned above-- lead to improved relationships between facilitators and youth, and that youth who have positive relationships with the facilitators are more likely to engage with the SRAE program content and exhibit the outcomes intended by the program. The evaluation will solicit feedback from participating facilitators and youth because their experience and voices are essential for developing any practitioner-focused resources for integrating co-regulation strategies into existing programming.
While the role of trusted adults in the co-regulation process (PDF) has been well-documented, SRAENE is exploring a relatively novel concept: can peer-based, co-regulation strategies be used to support youth’s self-regulation? The initial activities for this effort involve compiling existing literature on co-regulation strategies and supportive peer relationships, including peer mentoring, and convening a group of researchers and SRAE practitioners with expertise in those areas. The goal of these activities is to determine if further research on peer-based, co-regulation strategies is feasible. Learning in this area may hold promise for fortifying connectivity among youth and honing self-regulation skills in new and empowering ways.
A previous blog post on co-regulation demonstrated how the use of co-regulation strategies in ACF programs is expanding. However, our ability to measure the intended changes that result from implementing those strategies has been limited. Facilitators and other practitioners need ways to assess how well their diligent work leads to improvements in the lives of the youth they serve. To address this gap, SRAENE also aims to create and pilot a measure of self-regulation for use by youth-serving programs.
SRAENE’s co-regulation activities shared in this blog serve as one example of OPRE’s interest in and commitment to understanding how co-regulation is used in ACF programs and how well it meets the needs of those who participate in ACF programs. Ultimately, the SRAENE co-regulation effort and related OPRE co-regulation work aim to illuminate the best efforts in federal human services programs so that those approaches can be adapted for use by other service providers and applied across multiple contexts. More information on co-regulation holds promise for optimizing and extending the vital work of ACF program providers.
This blog is part of a larger series of posts focused on the development of a learning agenda. The OPRE Self-Regulation Learning Agenda Team includes: Sarita Barton, Caryn Blitz, Selma Caal, Erin Cannon, Kathleen Dwyer, Calonie Gray, Nancy Margie, Kelly Jedd McKenzie, Aleta Meyer, Katie Pahigiannis, Emily Ross, and Neda Senehi.