Study Details

A subsequent study by the same group of researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the program among a different target population of incarcerated male adolescents. The study used a randomized controlled trial involving adolescents recruited from a state reformatory in the southern United States. The study randomly assigned participants to either a treatment group that received the program in six one-hour sessions over three weeks or a control group that received an anger management intervention. Surveys were administered immediately before random assignment (baseline) and again six months after study participants were released from the correctional facility.

The study found that at the time of the six-month follow-up survey, there were no statistically significant program impacts on measures of the frequency of unprotected and condom-protected sexual activity in the past three months, or on having had oral intercourse, the number of sex partners, or the percentage of intercourse occasions protected by condoms. These findings are not directly comparable with those reported in the prior study of the program (St. Lawrence et al. 1995) because of differences in the definition of the outcome measures and the analytic methods used to estimate program impacts.