Juntos Pilot Trial: Improving communication about healthy dating in Latino families
Adolescent relationship abuse is an unfortunately common among youth in the United States, and Latino youth experience it and its related negative health impacts at high rates. Parental monitoring can help prevent adolescent relationship abuse, but Latino immigrant families may face unique challenges to making this happen, such as differences in preferred language and cultural expectations between parents and adolescents.
In 2022 and 2023, our team conducted interviews with Latino adolescents and their parents/caregivers to understand how they already do (or don't!) talk about teen dating, what works and what doesn't in those conversations, and what they hope to learn about healthy relationships in the future. Using the information shared by our participants and other research on reducing teens' risk of experiencing dating violence, we created a 6-week educational program for Latino adolescents and their immigrant parents/caregivers to take together. The program is filled with activities and information designed specifically to highlight the strengths of Latino families and to help them develop new tools to use when tackling all of life's tricky conversations together, but especially about dating relationships.
This pilot trial will help determine if the program is feasible and effective in its goals of increasing familial communication about dating and providing knowledge about unhealthy dating and what to do if someone they know is in an unhealthy relationship. Our research team will invite participants to take surveys about their knowledge about dating violence, their life experiences, and their communication in the home. Half of the participants in the study will receive the program (intervention group) and the other half of participants will receive a resource guide and will be put on a wait-list to receive the program after the study is completed (wait-list control group). Our study team will compare their answers to a series of surveys over 6 months to make conclusions about what the program did well and ways it can be improved in the future.
The programming will begin in spring 2025 and will end in fall 2025.