The Violence Intervention and Prevention team (VIP): results of an action research evaluation

This paper describes a school-based youth violence prevention program and challenges encountered during efforts to evaluate it. Members of a community partnership team helped to shape the quantitative and qualitative data collection and to interpret results.

48 youth participants in the violence prevention program completed a survey soliciting information about violence-related risk and protective factors, including employment readiness, school connectedness, association with delinquent peers, and violence-related attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Fourteen youth also participated in two focus groups about their satisfaction with the violence prevention program.

Through the preliminary data collection process, we learned three key lessons. (1) Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) new to community-based research may need to build capacity to evaluate the human subjects implications of this type of research. (2) The identification of control or comparison groups for school-based youth violence programs may be challenging and costly. (3) Methods for reducing loss-to-follow-up with high-risk youth are needed.