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Abstract
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Each year, over 500,000 youth seek care in U.S. emergency departments for assault-related injuries. Middle school-age males in urban environments both witness and directly experience violence at an elevated rate in comparison to their peers, with one national survey showing that 19% had witnessed a shooting or stabbing, and 13% had a weapon pulled on them in the past year. Alongside this burden of violence, significant disparities exist in the U.S., with African American and Latino communities experiencing rates of violence and injury far above non-Latino, White peers. The need to focus on primary prevention is incontrovertible. However, it is safe to say that a multitude of challenges confronts the effective implementation of community-supported youth violence prevention programs.
Oscós-Sánchez et al. present meaningful insight into how to build primary youth violence prevention programs, with a focus on engaging Latino communities. The use of a community-based research approach, engagement through the social-ecological framework to access multiple levels of youth violence prevention, and leveraging novel technology that can reach a wider and youth-focused audience created a study that is both innovative and compelling. The study involved a community-based, randomized intervention trial with the primary outcomes of self-reported violence outside of and in school through self-administered surveys. The results showed that a Violence Prevention Program had positive effects by decreasing reported violence outside of school at 12 months, and a Positive Youth Development Program had an effect by decreasing reported violence in school at 6 months. In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that longstanding public health issues like youth violence impact communities of color disproportionately, and studies like this are critical to finding public health solutions that will lead to not only behavior and policy changes but also sustainable improvements in health equity.
Central to this study was their use of community-based participatory research (CBPR). CBPR is an approach to research that allows those most affected by a health issue to be equitably engaged in research. This can have a significant impact, particularly when addressing public health problems in which traditional approaches have had only limited success, and especially in which a clear health disparity exists, such as youth violence. Moreover, engagement of youth in the co-creation of study materials and the programmatic infrastructure, as was done in this study, is even more important to the desired outcome of a sustainable intervention...
Language: en |