Abstract
Background
Missouri Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) provides sexual health education programs to youth with goals of reducing unintended teen pregnancies. Theories of change provide that youth improve their sexual health knowledge, intentions, attitudes, and behaviors as a result of program implementation. Program evaluations are needed to assess the degree to which PREP programs are meeting their goals of improving youth outcomes.
Objective
The purpose of this study is to examine youth sexual intentions to use a condom, engage in sexual behavior, and abstain from sex as a result of Missouri PREP program implementation. We evaluate the effectiveness of the Missouri program in modifying youth intentions toward healthier planned behaviors.
Method
All programs required youth to take pre- and post-program surveys. For this study, we evaluate a sample of 1335 youth’s pre- and post-survey intentions related to condom use, sex, and abstention. We utilize t-tests as well as a lagged logistic regression approach to account for youth’s respective pre-intentions.
Results
Youth’s scores on intentions, knowledge, and attitudes rise from pre- to post-survey. Knowledge gains are salient while attitudes remain relatively high and stable. Intentions to use condoms differ from those in intentions to have or abstain from sex. Program change in intentions to use a condom are highest among the three intention outcomes.
Conclusions
Missouri PREP saw improvements in knowledge, attitudes, and intentions as a result of program implementation. Findings suggest that the Missouri PREP program is effective at positively influencing youth intentions to engage in risky or sexual behavior.
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Notes
The teen pregnancy rate is the total number of pregnancies and not just those that resulted in a live birth.
Evidence-based programming refers to programs that are implemented based on prior evidence shown to produce positive results.
For reasons unknown to the IPP, year one’s results are an outlier in comparison to later years. The nature of pilot years in studies lead us to think that there could be outlying reasons as to why this year was different and thus was excluded. (Leon et al. 2011).
Publicly available Missouri Kid’s Count data can be found here: http://www.missourikidscountdata.org.
Full survey questionnaires are publicly available: https://motpp.missouri.edu.
Post-survey questions asked youth about PREP’s influence on their feelings about a particular topic.
It is possible that the country in which a student attended PREP differs from the one in which they reside; however, the data does not contain a student’s home location because of confidentiality.
We also tested this measure based on national and Missouri average rates but due to an unfavorable skew of Missouri results in comparison, our current measure was preferred.
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Lowrey, K., Altman, C. & Jungmeyer, A. Targeted High-Risk Youth in Missouri PREP: Understanding Program Impacts on Youth Sexual Behavior Intentions. Child Youth Care Forum 50, 415–435 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-020-09580-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-020-09580-3