Effective sexual health education plays a critical role in adolescent pregnancy and HIV and STI prevention. This article describes the formative research conducted to design, and then pilot-test, SkillFlix®, a streaming video training created to improve educators' skills in delivering sexual health education to youth by modeling Microskills®.…

Young people in East and Southern Africa need greater access to reliable information about health and education in order to make informed decisions on health matters--focusing on HIV and teenage pregnancy--and to increase basic education outcomes. Young 1ove organization, established in March 2014 in Gaborone, Botswana, is a grassroots, youth-led,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to outline the development of a resource designed to support practitioners, who are not sexual health specialists, but who work with young people who may be at risk of teenage pregnancy or parenthood. Its aim was to enable practitioners to carry out an assessment using a screening tool, and to use educational…

Adaptation of evidence-based interventions by implementers is widespread. Although frequently viewed as departures from fidelity, adaptations may be positive in impact and consistent with fidelity. Research typically catalogs adaptations but rarely includes the implementers' perspectives on adaptation. We report data on individuals implementing an…

The Population Council is building one of the world's largest bodies of research on programs to improve the lives of adolescents, especially girls. For the past two decades, the Council has been identifying best practices, refining the critical elements of girl-centered programs, and using rigorous evidence to help decisionmakers allocate scarce…

Youth development professionals (YDPs) working at community-based organizations (CBOs) can promote adolescent sexual health through programs. This study explored the programs and resources that youth access at CBOs and training YDPs receive. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with YDPs. Qualitative content analyses were conducted…

Background: Family structure and value system among Hispanic/Latino population are changing. However, very few studies have examined the combination of the influence of family structure, parental and sibling alcohol use, perceived peer norms about drinking, and alcohol use among Hispanic/Latino adolescents. Purpose: This study examined the…

The Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP) provides grants to districts and community-based organizations (CBOs) to initiate, expand, and improve physical education for students in kindergarten through grade 12. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education issued new regulations for PEP that included the following: (1) requiring grantees to…

American youths are becoming increasingly less physically active and have poor nutrition habits. Nationwide, less than one third of students reported achieving the recommended level of physical activity (one hour of exercise per day). In addition, most youths consume less than the recommended daily amounts of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.…

Background and Purpose: Given the urgency to design programs to increase physical activity, especially to combat obesity in children, the primary purpose of this study was to investigate perceptions and opinions of a nature-based physical activity intervention designed for low-income urban adolescents. Methods: Four focus groups of adolescents,…

The development and implementation of a new school-based suicide prevention education programme in one secondary school in Vancouver, British Columbia, recently provided us with an opportunity to conduct an in-depth, qualitative case study. The purpose of our study was to deepen our understanding of how school-based suicide prevention education…

Out-of-wedlock pregnancy among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa is a major concern, because of its association with health, social, psychological, economic and demographic factors. This article describes the development of the Teenage Mothers Project, a community-based intervention to improve psychological and social well-being of unmarried…

This article provides a theory-based, step-by-step approach to intervention development and illustrates its application in India to design an intervention to promote tobacco-use cessation among school personnel in Bihar. We employed a five-step approach to develop the intervention using the Social Contextual Model of Health Behavior Change (SCM)…

Project Advancing Cessation of Tobacco in Vulnerable Indian Tobacco Consuming Youth (ACTIVITY) is a community-based group randomized intervention trial focused on disadvantaged youth (aged 10-19 years) residing in 14 low-income communities (slums and resettlement colonies) in Delhi, India. This article discusses the findings of Focus Group…

The Boston Middle School Corner Store Initiative (CSI) brought together schools, businesses, and community partners to develop, implement, and evaluate a multicomponent pilot program designed to promote healthier beverage purchasing at corner stores among 3,500 middle school students living in Boston, Massachusetts. Healthy drinks were defined for…