Evaluation of Pregnancy Prevention Programs in the School Context.

This study looks at a primary pregnancy prevention program carried out in cooperation with the Baltimore City School System in an urban junior and senior high school and makes a case for an evaluative design that can distinguish the effects of each major component of the program as well.

Abstract

This study looks at a primary pregnancy prevention program carried out in cooperation with the Baltimore City School System in an urban junior and senior high school. The program was run by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Departments of Pediatrics and Gynecology/Obstetrics. It combined education counseling and medical services and operated both in the schools and in an adjacent clinic with staff shared between the sites. A team consisting of a social worker and a nurse (practitioner or midwife) was assigned to each school. The social worker and at times the nurse were based in a health suite in their respective schools and were available to faculty to give homeroom or classroom lectures and available informally to students for individual counseling small group rap sessions and educational encounters. The text begins with an overall description of the evaluative design discusses its quasi-experimental form and outlines some of the difficulties. It reviews data collection in a school setting including the knotty questions of parental notification anonymity and dealing with the entire school community. It then discusses issues in the school population sample including questions of program exposure by grade and age treatment of dropouts absentees transfers problems related to attendance and seasonal change and the designation and use of control sites. The survey instrument is described in detail as well as the use of self-report in calculating rates of sexual activity pregnancy and program utilization. In each case examples are used to illustrate the applicability of this methodology to other kinds of programs. This book does not advocate 1 service model over another nor does it argue for or against specific components of the project which proved successful. What it does is show how programs can be assessed overall and makes a case for an evaluative design that can distinguish the effects of each major component of the program as well.