Dr. Kelly Rulison (Public Health Education) received new funding from UNC Chapel Hill for the project “Evaluating Practice-Based Sexual Violence Primary Prevention Approaches from CDC’s Rape Prevention.”
Investigators are evaluating whether the program “Sources of Strength,” originally developed as a suicide prevention program, can prevent sexual assault. As part of the original grant, social network data has been collected at 24 schools in Colorado to test whether intervention effects are able to diffuse from trained peer opinion leaders to their friends who were not trained in Sources of Strength, through their school-based social networks. Implementation data (e.g., how often peer leaders meet; what campaign strategies they choose to use) has been collected, and this project will extend the original scope of work to mine the implementation data and to examine how differences in implementation across schools shapes the diffusion of intervention effects.
