Deborah Gorman-Smith, Patrick Tolan, David Henry, and Michael Schoeny, Principal Investigators
2009

This effectiveness trial is intended to help establish the utility of a program for preventing violence in inner-city communities—the Schools and Families Educating Children, or SAFE Children program. This intervention combines components focused on: 1) enhancing parent and child orientation to school; 2) academic tutoring; 3) promoting self-control in the child; 4) promoting the child’s social competence; 5) reducing aggression, and 6) improving parenting and family functioning. Delivered during the first year of school, the program is designed to help families as they work to guide the healthy development of their children within the inner-city community. The program components are focused on helping children to succeed at school and socially, and thus to reduce the risk for aggression, school failure, and later violence.

This research has three specific aims. The first aim is to test, for families living in inner-city Chicago with children entering first grade, the effectiveness of SAFE Children. In this trial, strong scientific methods including random assignment are applied along with careful measurement of growth patterns over several years to test for replication of positive effects under conditions approximating those of service provision typically. To do so, we are collaborating with community mental health providers and participating schools to test the effectiveness of SAFE Children when delivered by community mental health providers and student-tutors. Instead of using undergraduate tutors and graduate student family interventionists, as in the SAFE Children efficacy trial, the proposed study implements SAFE Children with eighth-grade tutors recruited from the schools the first-grade subjects attend, and with family interventionists drawn from the staff of mental health centers serving the targeted communities.

The second aim of the study is to demonstrate that this intervention can be implemented with fidelity within a typical service delivery system found within inner-city neighborhoods. The goal is to show that with strong training and a good collaborative relationship between the center and the community schools and agencies we can have effective implementation. To that end we will study variation in implementation and how it relates to the impact of the program. This information will be important for advancing knowledge about the use of efficacious programs in larger-scale attempts to reduce youth violence.

The third aim is to understand how intervention effects are influenced by variations in characteristics among the population and neighborhood conditions. This focus will help inform prevention efforts to ensure they are ecologically sensitive.