Student program participants have healthier dating relationships than comparison groups!

Are the students that we've reached developing healthier relationship habits? Six months after the completion of our program we surveyed students who had participated as well as a group of students who had not been exposed to our program. We measured their experience using the Conflict in Adolescent Dating Relationships Inventory (CADRI) developed by Wolfe, Scott, Reitzel-Jaffe, Wekerle, Grasley & Straatman (2001). The CADRI measures what kind of actions the respondent has taken towards his/her partner and what kind of violent acts his/her partner has inflicted on her. These can range from extreme forms of sexual and physical abuse (e.g. "My partner threw something at me.") to acts of emotional violence (e.g. "My partner tried to turn my friends against me.") For many students just filling out the CADRI can be a revealing exercise. There is nothing quite like seeing a list of actions laid bare to let one know about the state of one's relationship.

Not all of our students had started dating, of course, but among those that have violent experiences were all too common. However, a hopeful pattern emerged when we started looking at current vs. past relationships. Students currently dating someone filled out the CADRI while thinking about that person and relationship. Students who had started dating, but did not currently have a boyfriend or girlfriend were asked to think of a past relationship when filling out the CADRI. To assess the effect of our treatment we created a regression model to see if those who had undergone our program were experiencing less violence and modeled students currently in a relationship separately from those describing past relationships.

Among students describing past relationships, the program had no significant impact on dating violence experience. Basically, treatment and control students had similar past relationship experiences. However, among students describing their current relationships the treatment had a major impact. Students who took our program reported experiencing less violence in their current relationship. The program led to about an 11% drop in dating violence compared to students who did not have the program.

In other words, students from the program have healthier ongoing relationships. Obviously, we cannot alter what students have encountered in the past, but this result would seem to indicate that students we have reached are learning healthier relationship habits and learning to protect themselves against dating violence.

Modeling dating violence in current and past relationships