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Integrating Primary Prevention throughout your organization

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**Training Professionals in the Primary Prevention of Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence: A Planning Guide** by Deborah Fisher, Karen S. Lang, and Jocelyn Wheaton for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2010)
“An effective, comprehensive program to prevent sexual violence and/or intimate partner violence takes a multitude of approaches, one of which is training professionals to engage in sexual violence prevention and/or intimate partner violence prevention. This Guide describes how to develop, implement, and evaluate a training process, taking into account your available level of resources. Additionally, this training process emphasizes turning awareness and knowledge into mastered skills and practices to prevent sexual violence and/or intimate partner violence by:

  1. Teaching based on organizational context.
  2. Providing opportunities for skill development through participatory learning.
  3. Following up to assess progress and determine level of mastery.

“The Guide is intended for use by state-level entities providing training to community based organizations (CBOs) or to other state- level entities as well as for CBOs providing training within their own organizations or to other professionals in their communities. The Guide can help plan, deliver, and evaluate trainings whether you initiate the trainings yourself or are asked by others to provide trainings.”

**Guidelines for the Primary Prevention of Sexual Violence & Intimate Partner Violence** by the Virginia Sexual & Domestic Violence Action Alliance in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Health (2009)
“These guidelines are meant to serve as an organizing philosophy rather than an irrefutable prescription for prevention work. Due to the enormous amount of resources needed to achieve all of these ideals, it is not realistic that prevention initiatives could ‘check off’ all of the programmatic components contained in these guidelines. Rather, the questions posed by the guidelines are meant to act as benchmarks, facilitating constant improvement in primary prevention program development. It is our hope that this document will help every existing SV/IPV primary prevention program operate at its full capacity, and provide potential programs with information on how to build a foundation for primary prevention work. An increase in public and private resources for this work is anticipated, and this document will help ensure that all current and future SV/IPV primary prevention programs are able to use these resources to maximum effect.”

Table of Contents:

  • Introduction
  • Key Definitions
  • Virginia’s Guidelines for Implementing Sexual Violence & Intimate Partner
  • Violence Primary Prevention Strategies
  • Appendix A: Glossary
  • Appendix B: Priority Risk & Protective Factors for Primary Prevention of Sexual & Intimate Partner Violence
  • Appendix B-1: Quick Reference for Priority Risk & Protective Factors
  • Appendix B-2: Priority Risk & Protective Factors (with examples)
  • Appendix C: References
  • Appendix D: Virginia’s Guidelines for the Primary Prevention of SV/IPV Assessment Tool

Internal Capacity
Before you start the process of launching a new prevention initiative, it can be helpful to look assess your capacity to take on new programming. This web-conference, “Building Capacity for Prevention Efforts” is conducted by Jeanne Bell, CEO of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and will help you to assess your capacity for effectiveness.

Strategic Plan
The Community ToolBox has produced this chapter on creating a strategic plan.

Creating Measurable Change Objectives
One important piece of planning your prevention work is creating a scope of work with measurable change objectives. The American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses has produced this list of measurable change objective behaviors.

From the CDC publication Training Professionals in the Primary Prevention of Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence: A Planning Guide:
“Outcomes – sometimes called objectives – are specific, measurable statements that let you know when you have reached your goals. Outcome statements describe specific changes in your knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behaviors you expect to occur as a result of your actions.

If you are training to increase knowledge, your training goals could be to:

  • Increase knowledge about sexual violence and dating violence perpetration and victimization
  • Increase knowledge of the overlapping risk factors for sexual and dating violence perpetration and youth violence
  • Identify appropriate opportunities to address issues related to sexual violence and dating violence in current program efforts

If you are training to increase knowledge and also skills, your training goals could also include those shown above as well to:

  • Increase skills to interrupt language and behaviors that objectify and demean women and to promote respectful language and dating behavior.

Good outcome statements are specific, measurable, and realistic. Think carefully about what you can realistically accomplish in your trainings given the groups you want to reach and the scope of your resources.

Develop short, intermediate, and long-term outcomes as follows:

  • Short-term outcomes should describe what you want to happen within a relatively brief period (e.g. during the course of one or several trainings, depending on how many sessions you conduct). Focus your short-term outcomes on what you want people to learn. An example of a short-term outcome would be that coaches learn about the risk and protective factors for sexual violence and/or intimate partner violence.
  • Intermediate outcomes describe what you want to happen after your trainings are completed. Focus your intermediate outcomes on what you want people to do when they go back to their [classes, workplaces, etc] and apply what they have learned. An example of an intermediate outcome would be that coaches demonstrate interrupting sexual harassment and teaching respect.
  • Long-term outcomes describe the impact you hope to have on the primary prevention of sexual violence and/or intimate partner violence after the trainings are completed, but farther into the future. Describe what you hope will change as a result of your trainings. An example of a long-term outcome would be that incidents of sexual harassment decrease in schools.

Well-written and complete outcome statements will usually define the following five elements (Fisher, Imm, Chinman & Wandersman, 2006) as you describe:

  • Who will change – the [people] you are training
  • What will change – the knowledge, attitudes, and skills you expect to change
  • By how much – how much change you think you can realistically achieve
  • By when – the timeframe within you hope to see change
  • How the change will be measured – the surveys, tests, interviews, or other methods you will use to measure the different changes specified

A useful way to remember these elements is the ABCDE Method of Writing Outcome Statements (Atkinson, Deaton, Travis & Wessel, 1999):

  • A – Audience (who will change?)
  • B – Behavior (what will change?)
  • C – Condition (by when?)
  • D – Degree (by how much?)
  • E – Evidence (how will the change be measured?)”

Fisher D, Lang KS, Wheaton J. Training Professionals in the Primary Prevention of Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence: A Planning Guide. Atlanta (GA): Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2010).

Creating a logic model
Jodie Drisko, MSPH of the Health Disparities Grant Program created this powerpoint presentation to outline how to use a logic model to plan your prevention work.
WK Kellogg Foundation Logic Development Guide.pdfWK Kellogg Foundation Logic Development Guide.pdf