REPLICATING A PEER INTERVENTION IN A MULTI-CULTURAL CITY

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DESCRIPTION (Adapted from Applicant's Description) High rates of STDs and pregnancies among teens, and high personal and societal costs associated with teen pregnancy, STDs, and HIV, demonstrate that interventions to reduce sexual risk behavior are urgently needed. Examination of the success of school-based interventions suggests that providing information is not enough, and that interventions need to be culturally tailored and grounded. This application, submitted in response to RFA HD-98-015, proposes to replicate a community- based HIV intervention that targets naturally- occurring friendship networks, "Focus on Kids" (FoK), that Stanton et al. (1996) demonstrated to be efficacious in randomized trials with low income, African-American youth in Baltimore, MD. The investigators will tailor the intervention to a different, multicultural population, in a randomized, controlled experiment. They will compare the FoK intervention to two alternative conditions; to disentangle confounded effects of intervention content and mode of delivery: a control group similar to Stanton's; and an alternative control group that delivers the same intervention to youth who are not attending with friends, to allow the investigator to determine whether any intervention effect observed is due to the effect of friendships or to the content of the intervention. They will also assess a range of beliefs, norms and intentions, in order to understand how the intervention achieves the goal of behavior change. Specifically, the investigators aim: (1) to replicate, in a different and more ethnically diverse, community, the "Focus on Kids", intervention; (2) to determine whether the intervention effects are due to the intervention content, to grouping participants within friendship networks, or to both; (3) to evaluate mediators of the effects of the intervention suggested by Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA); (4) to examine the maintenance of intervention effects over a 12-month follow- up period; and (5) to involve individuals, agencies, and other groups in the target community in the intervention and its implementation, and to build resources that will enable the intervention, if effective, to be delivered to young people in the control groups at the end of the follow-up period.