Comprehensive sexuality education may help prevent intimate partner violence, but few evaluations of sexuality education courses have measured this. Here we explore how such a course that encourages critical reflection about gendered social norms might help prevent partner violence among young people in Mexico. We conducted a longitudinal quasi-experimental study at a state-run technical secondary school in Mexico City, with data collection including in-depth interviews and focus groups with students, teachers, and health educators. We found that the course supported both prevention of and response to partner violence among young people. The data suggest the course promoted critical reflection that appeared to lead to changes in beliefs, intentions, and behaviors related to gender, sexuality, and violence. We identify four elements of the course that seem crucial to preventing partner violence. First, encouraging participants' reflection about romantic relationships, which helped them question whether jealousy and possessive behaviors are signs of love; second, helping them develop skills to communicate about sexuality, inequitable relationships, and reproductive health; third, encouraging care-seeking behavior; and fourth, addressing norms around gender and sexuality, for example demystifying and decreasing discrimination towards sexually diverse populations. The findings reinforce the importance of schools for violence prevention and have implications for educational policy regarding sexuality education. The results suggest that this promising and relatively short-term intervention should be considered as a school-based strategy to prevent and respond to partner violence.
Despite calls for evaluation practice to take a complex systems approach, there are few examples of how to incorporate complexity into real-life evaluations. This article presents the case for using a complex systems approach to evaluate a school-based intimate partner violence-prevention intervention. We conducted a post hoc analysis of qualitative evaluation data to examine the intervention as a potential system disruptor. We analysed data in relation to complexity concepts particularly relevant to schools: ‘diverse and dynamic agents’, ‘interaction’, ‘unpredictability’, ‘emergence’ and ‘context dependency’. The data—two focus groups with facilitators and 33 repeat interviews with 14–17-year-old students—came from an evaluation of a comprehensive sexuality education intervention in Mexico City, which serves as a case study for this analysis. The findings demonstrate an application of complex adaptive systems concepts to qualitative evaluation data. We provide examples of how this approach can shed light on the ways in which interpersonal interactions, group dynamics, the core messages of the course and context influenced the implementation and outcomes of this intervention. This gender-transformative intervention appeared to disrupt pervasive gender norms and reshape beliefs about how to engage in relationships. An intervention comprises multiple dynamic and interacting elements, all of which are unlikely to be consistent across implementation settings. Applying complexity concepts to our analysis added value by helping reframe implementation-related data to focus on how the ‘social’ aspects of complexity influenced the intervention. Without examining both individual and group processes, evaluations may miss key insights about how the intervention generates change, for whom, and how it interacts with its context. A social complex adaptive systems approach is well-suited to the evaluation of gender-transformative interventions and can help identify how such interventions disrupt the complex social systems in which they are implemented to address intractable societal problems.
Evaluating social change programs requires methods that account for changes in context, implementation, and participant experience. We present a case study of a school-based partner violence prevention program with young people, where we conducted 33 repeat interviews with nine participants during and after an intervention and analyzed participant trajectories. We show how repeat interviews conducted during and after a social change program were useful in helping us understand how the intervention worked by providing rich contextual information, elucidating gradual shifts among participants, and identifying aspects of the intervention that appear to influence change. Long-term effects of social change interventions are very hard to quantify or measure directly. We argue that a qualitative longitudinal approach provides a way to measure subtle changes that can serve as proxies for longer term impacts.
Qualitative longitudinal research may help understand people’s changing experiences during interventions: dynamics which are often overlooked in evaluations. We present a case study of a partner violence prevention program where we conducted 33 repeat interviews every one to two months with nine participants, and analyzed participant trajectories. We found that participants’ relationship-related beliefs and intentions changed, promoting self-reflection that in turn helped alter their relationship dynamics. Our qualitative longitudinal approach allowed us to detect and track specific examples of change, identify influential elements of the program, and gather contextualized data about participants’ lived experiences. Qualitative longitudinal research provided evidence of gradual shifts on the pathways to violence prevention. Long term effects of violence prevention interventions are very hard to measure directly. We argue that a qualitative longitudinal approach provides a way to measure subtle changes that can serve as proxies for longer term impacts.
Comprehensive sexuality education may help prevent intimate partner violence, but few evaluations of sexuality education courses have measured this. Here we explore how such a course that encourages critical reflection about gendered social norms might help prevent partner violence among young people in Mexico. We conducted a longitudinal quasi-experimental study at a state-run technical secondary school in Mexico City, with data collection including in-depth interviews and focus groups with students, teachers and health educators. We found that the course supported both prevention of and response to partner violence among young people. The data suggest the course promoted critical reflection that appeared to lead to changes in beliefs, intentions and behaviors related to gender, sexuality and violence. We identify four elements of the course that seem crucial to preventing partner violence. First, encouraging participants’ reflection about romantic relationships, which helped them question whether jealousy and possessive behaviors are signs of love; second, helping them develop skills to communicate about sexuality, inequitable relationships and reproductive health; third, encouraging care-seeking behavior; and fourth, addressing norms around gender and sexuality, for example demystifying and decreasing discrimination towards sexually diverse populations. The findings reinforce the importance of schools for violence prevention and have implications for educational policy regarding sexuality education. The results suggest that this promising and relatively short-term intervention should be considered as a school-based strategy to prevent and respond to partner violence.
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