The Violence Intervention and Prevention team (VIP): results of an action research evaluation.

Background/objectives: This paper describes a school-based youth violence prevention program and challenges encountered during efforts to evaluate it. Members of a community partnership team helped to shape the quantitative and qualitative data collection and to interpret results.

Methods: 48 youth participants in the violence prevention program completed a survey soliciting information about violence-related risk and protective factors, including employment readiness, school connectedness, association with delinquent peers, and violence-related attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Fourteen youth also participated in two focus groups about their satisfaction with the violence prevention program.

Lessons Learned: Through the preliminary data collection process, we learned three key lessons. (1) Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) new to community-based research may need to build capacity to evaluate the human subjects implications of this type of research. (2) The identification of control or comparison groups for school-based youth violence programs may be challenging and costly. (3) Methods for reducing loss-to-follow-up with high-risk youth are needed.