February is National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month. This month we are shining a spotlight on OPRE’s research on healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs for youth, which teach youth about healthy romantic relationships, healthy communication, and conflict management skills. While these programs do not necessarily aim to directly address teen dating violence, they do aim to prepare young people to develop and maintain healthy, stable romantic relationships throughout their life course.
The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation is a large, multi-site random assignment impact and implementation study of HMRE programs serving both adult and youth populations. Lessons learned from STREAMS can provide insights into strengthening HMRE programs for youth to more effectively provide skills and knowledge for youth to seek out and maintain healthy relationships.
STREAMS included an impact study to determine the one-year and longer-term impact of offering HMRE programming as part of the regular school curriculum on high school students’ relationship experiences, quality, and skills. The study found that most relationship skills, attitudes, and knowledge outcomes for students offered the HMRE programming did not differ from those of students in a control group who were not offered HMRE programming. This suggests that existing HMRE program models might not be intensive enough to have impacts on relationship outcomes that last for youth. Other lessons from the STREAMS project could shed light on approaches that programs can take to strengthen their programs and increase the likelihood of improving outcomes for youth.
A recent STREAMS publication shares key implementation lessons learned across four impact studies of HMRE programs for youth. These strategies can help bolster programs, helping them reach their goals of promoting stable healthy relationships. They include:
- Getting the dosage right. Programs must consider how many hours of an intervention are required to realistically make a difference in the lives of youth. At the same time, too many hours of a program can result in declining attendance. Booster sessions may be one way to deliver more hours of content without sacrificing attendance.
- Making the content relevant. The content being delivered must feel meaningful to the youth attending, which means it must be carefully aligned with their ages/grade level. It also must culturally represent the population being served.
- Considering the relationships between the facilitators and the youth. Strong relationships between facilitators and participants can help promote learning and engagement. This can mean hiring facilitators who are not school teachers, even if the program is being held during the school day. It is also important to consider if the participants see themselves reflected in the facilitators.
Another recent STREAMS publication documents how teens’ relationship skills, knowledge and attitudes change over time and at different rates, even without interventions like HMRE programs. HMRE programs can further support teens’ development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes related to romantic relationships by working to address those that are less likely to develop on their own. Understanding the nuanced needs of teens and how those needs change can help HMRE programs better teach youth about safe and healthy relationships and the skills they need to develop and maintain them.
We hope the work of STREAMS and similar projects can continue to strengthen programs that empower teens to build safe and healthy relationships throughout their lives.