The impact of Strong Families, Strong Communities on relationship functioning in low-income African American and Hispanic individuals: Findings from a federally funded randomized control trial.

Low-income minorities face many complex barriers to building stable and healthy relationships. AVANCE Houston, a non-profit community-based organization in Houston, Texas, developed the Strong Families, Strong Communities (SFSC) program to address such barriers by providing interactive healthy marriage and relationship skills workshops to low-income English- and Spanish-speaking Hispanic and English-speaking African American individuals. Using a randomized control trial (RCT) design with random assignment to the 7-week treatment group (n = 649) or a 12-month wait-list control group (n = 600), we examined the impact of the program on four dimensions of relationship functioning: relationship satisfaction, connectedness, and quality; and conflict resolution, at post-test and then 6 and 12 months later.

School and program related factors influencing disclosure among children participating in a school-based childhood physical and sexual abuse prevention program.

Background: School-based child abuse prevention programs were created to provide knowledge so that children can recognize abuse, teach skills that decrease children's risk for abuse, normalize the disclosure process, and provide a pathway for children who may be experiencing abuse to report the abuse.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore school and program factors that trainers in a school-based prevention program believed were associated with disclosure among youth from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Participants And Setting: This study is based on eighteen trainers and administrators who work with the Play it Safe!® school-based program in Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Managing and Mentoring: Experiences of Assistant Professors in Working with Research Assistants.

Support from research assistants (RAs) is often framed as a resource to facilitate faculty research productivity, yet most assistant professors have received minimal training on how to effectively make use of this resource. This study collected data from a national sample of assistant professors to examine tasks RAs are asked to perform, satisfaction with RA work, challenges in working with RAs, and lessons learned to be successful. Authors used a sequential mixed-methods design, first conducting a Web-based survey with 109 assistant professors in social work schools with doctoral programs, then qualitative interviews with a subset of 13 respondents who volunteered to talk more about their experiences.