Center for Research on High Risk Behaviors

Violence, substance use, unprotected sex, and related risky behaviors take a major toll on individual lives and the vibrancy of communities. The Center for Research on High Risk Behaviors at EDC works to better understand why people engage in risky behaviors and what can be done to reduce risk-taking and promote health. The center works with families, schools, community-based organizations, and health services through its offices in Massachusetts and New York. It has special expertise in HIV and STD prevention and in addressing the links among multiple risk and problem behaviors.

Challenges

Engaging in risky behaviors is a major, and largely preventable, cause of morbidity and premature death, especially among economically disadvantaged youth and men and women of color. Prevention, however, requires a greater understanding of what individual factors and environmental circumstances contribute to risk-taking, and how these factors can be best addressed through effective interventions.

Mission

The center’s mission is to develop, evaluate, and disseminate theoretically sound, empirically informed interventions for reducing health risks related to early and unprotected sex, violence, and alcohol and substance use.

Strategies

• Conduct research to generate new knowledge about what individual and environmental factors place people at risk, how these factors can be addressed through intervention, and how gender and cultural differences impact risk-taking and resiliency
  
• Develop gender- and culturally sensitive, empirically informed interventions to promote individual resiliency
  
• Design, evaluate, and replicate interventions to reduce HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, violence, and substance use, particularly among economically disadvantaged minority communities
  
• Disseminate information through academic publications, as well as by packaging and distributing interventions that have been proven to be effective
  
• Provide training and technical assistance to health agencies, schools, and community organizations seeking to implement and evaluate interventions aimed at reducing risky behaviors

Selected Projects and Results

• Saving Sex for Later, developed with extensive input from parents and youth, consists of three audio CDs that use engaging and dramatic stories to model how parents can help their sons and daughters navigate the normal pubertal changes and the challenges of becoming a teenager and, importantly, help them stay abstinent during the critical early adolescent years. For more information about this and other projects addressing risk behaviors among youth in high-poverty urban settings, please see our feature story.

• The MetroWest Youth Risk Behavior Survey Project is a project in which EDC staff will conduct Youth Health Surveys for high school districts in the MetroWest region of Boston beginning in the fall 2006.  This is part of a 10-year initiative supported by the MetroWest Community Health Care Foundation to better understand and address the health needs of adolescents in the region. Work will include survey design, administration consultation, analysis, report preparation and presentation to community and school leaders.

• Especially for Our Daughters is a study on the effectiveness of a parent education program to reduce early sexual initiation and alcohol use among young adolescent girls. Narrated by Angela Bassett, the CD presents entertaining role-model stories that highlight the importance of parental communication, monitoring and rule-setting in delaying sexual initiation.

• Mobilizing School Communities To Promote Pro-Social Bystander Actions To Reduce School Violence is a CDC-funded project in which EDC works in collaboration with the Columbia Center for Youth Violence Prevention.  The project uses a theoretically and empirically grounded, video-based intervention, Voices Against Violence, to investigate the attitudes and behaviors of middle-school students, their parents and school staff regarding the role bystanders can and should play in preventing school violence.  It also tests an innovative delivery strategy – sending the video home to parents and incorporating parent-child communication as part of home work assignments - to increase parents’ involvement in school violence prevention.

• VOICES (Video Opportunities for Innovative Condom Education and Safer Sex) is a video-based HIV/STD prevention program for African American and Latino men and women. This package of video and print materials, a planning guide, and technical support has been pilot-tested in HIV, STD, and family planning services. This intervention has been proven effective in reducing rates of new STD infection among this population.
  • In collaboration with RTI and Mile End Films, EDC is developing three new videos to supplement VOICES/VOCES. Two of the videos (in Spanish and English) will target Mexican-American audiences and one video will target African American audiences.  This project will extend the intervention and make it culturally-relevant and appropriate for broader audiences.  

• Reach for Health is a longitudinal study of the effectiveness of school-based interventions on reducing high-risk health behaviors among African American and Hispanic youth living in poor urban neighborhoods. About 3,600 middle school students in Brooklyn, New York have participated in the project.

• Hermanos Jovenes/Young Brothers promotes community-level interventions to reduce HIV infection among men. The interventions provide the skills, services, and social support these men need to stay healthy.
  

Funders

• National Institutes of Health
• Office of Research on Women
• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• MetroWest Community Health Care Foundation

Director

Lydia O'Donnell, Ed.D.

Associate Directors

Alexi San Doval, M.P.H.
(800) 755-6767