Louisville Teen Pregnancy Prevention Project

Summary

This study is comparing the impact of two teen pregnancy prevention interventions, Reducing the Risk and Love Note with a non-related training on community building to determine which is most effective for which participants in delaying sexual initiation, enhancing use of condoms and other forms of birth control, decreasing sexually transmitted diseases and decreasing the number of pregnancies. The participants were 1450 youth between the ages of 14 and 19 including those from poor urban settings, those from immigrant and refugee families and those from the foster care system. Both girls and boys were be in the study. The investigators predict that girls, immigrants and refugees and foster youth will have better outcomes when participating in Love Notes, a program focused on healthy relationship formation and maintenance as a frame for how to manage the sexual aspect of relationships while boys and urban youth will have better outcomes when participating in Reducing the Risk. Both groups will have better outcomes than those in the control condition.

Conditions

• Pregnancy
• Sexually Transmitted Diseases

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Reducing the Risk

Reducing the Risk: Building Skills to Prevent Pregnancy, STD and HIV (RtR) was developed by Richard Barth, MSW, Ph.D. in California. The training manual is in its 5th Edition and was last published in 2011. This curriculum is one of the first that was evaluated using an experimental design, with a longitudinal follow up (6 months and 18 months) and tested on a large group of high school students (N = 758). It is also one of the first programs to show an impact on beliefs of adolescent sexual behavior prevalence and actual behavior as well as increasing parent-child communication about abstinence and contraception (Kirby, Barth, Leland, and Fetro, 1991).

BEHAVIORAL

Love Notes

The second healthy relationships program for high-risk youth, Love Notes, was developed to educate participants about healthy relationships, including issues of decision-making, communication and conflict resolution, and overall safety, including the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease (Pearson, 2009). Love Notes is a derivative of the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP; Stanley, Markman, \& Jenkins, 2009), which is relationship marriage education program listed as an evidence-based practice (EBP) by SAMSHA (www.samhsa.gov). This curriculum builds on social exchange theory and meets the needs of youth who are alienated and in need of loving personal relationships.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Department of Health and Human Services

  collaborator FED

• University of Louisville

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Anita P Barbee, Ph.D. · Kent School of Social Work University of Louisville

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

14 Years

Max Age

19 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2011-09-30

Primary Completion

2014-03-31

Completion

2016-04-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations