Addressing challenges to carrying out intervention programs with youth populations: Successes and strategies

Abstract

We identify five challenges notoriously faced by researchers conducting youth intervention studies: access to the target population, successful recruitment, ensuring continued attendance, promoting engaged, enthused, and task-focused participation, and efficient data collection. To ensure research quality, we have devised strategies to address these obstacles. Successes and lessons are included from The Compass Project (TCP), a 9-week morality strengthening program designed to facilitate positive attitudinal and behavioral outcomes in young people. Despite four of the five identified challenges being overcome in TCP, the fifth challenge of data collection was insurmountable as many participants failed to complete questionnaire scales. We propose that researchers build on our success by building rapport and trust with participants and youth organizations and building a participant sense of community, and improve upon our design by scrutinizing the format, accessibility, and length of data measures. Ultimately, tests of whether intervention programs can result in positive outcomes in the lives of young people hinge on adequately overcoming the identified challenges. Implementation of the proposed strategies will be instrumental to allow for meaningful and powerful statistical analyses to more accurately gauge the positive impact of intervention programs on young people's lives.