Defining strength: Prevention educators’ perspective on strong teen dating violence policies and prevention education

The purpose of the present study was to examine the impact of state-level teen dating violence (TDV) policies on school-based TDV prevention education programs. Roughly, thirty-eight states have TDV language in their legislation and prior research has used the language in these policies to determine their strength. Black et al. (2022) identified seven states as having strong policies and this finding was used to recruit participants. Seventeen (n= 17) prevention educators from local gender-based violence (GBV) agencies were interviewed. Interviews were analyzed using two qualitative methods: reflexive thematic analysis and qualitative content analysis. Findings from the reflexive thematic analysis led to three themes: (1) Justifies the Need, (2) Buy-in not Included, and (3) Looking for More. Categories from the qualitative content analysis include: (1) Benefits of Policy and (2) Drawbacks of Policy. Collectively, these findings reveal that policies considered strong by researchers do not equate to good TDV prevention implementation practices. Findings indicate the need to incorporate the practice-based knowledge of prevention educators into policy and TDV prevention programming implementation.

Author

• Fishwick, Kathryn

Identifier

hdl:10057/30057

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:soar.wichita.edu:10057/30057