Love Notes Shown Effective In Preventing Teen Pregnancy

Love Notes Shown Effective In Preventing Teen Pregnancy

The Dibble Institute is thrilled to announce that its relationship skills program, Love Notes, has been added to list of teen pregnancy prevention Evidence Based Programs (EBP) maintained by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. Love Notes was included based on statistically significant decreases in sexual activity, increases in contraceptive use, and avoidance of pregnancy.

"We are pleased that we now have proof that relationship skills education is an effective strategy to prevent teen pregnancy, " Kay Reed, Executive Director of The Dibble Institute noted. "It's great to have a new approach that works, especially with high-risk youth between the ages of 14 and 19."

Love Notes, a comprehensive healthy relationship education curriculum written by Marline E. Pearson, teaches young people how to build healthy romantic relationships as well as how to preventing dating violence and avoid unprotected sex. Love Notes was evaluated inCHAMPS (Creating Healthy Adolescents through Meaningful Prevention Services), a 5-year $4.8 million study through the Kent School of Social Work, University of Louisville. Anita Barbee, Ph.D. was the Principal Investigator.

The study consisted of a cluster-randomized trial involving over 1,400 youth. Stringent data analyses examined data from 933 at-risk, low-income youth including urban, foster, refugee, and immigrant participants who were recruited from 23 community-based organizations.

The study found that six months after the instruction, adolescent participants were significantly less likely than youth in the control group to report ever having had sex, ever having been pregnant, having had sex in the last three months, and having had sex with out a condom or without birth control in the last three months. At one year, participants were less likely, by a significant measure to have not become pregnant. (Control = 6.4% vs. Love Notes 3.5%).

Dr. Barbee commented, "After decades of studying relationships, I thought teaching pregnancy prevention skills in the context of learning how to form and maintain healthy romantic relationships could really make a difference. I'm gratified to say that my hunch was correct."

"We chose to study Love Notes to see how the intervention would work with disenfranchised youth searching for meaningful connections such as those from oppressed minorities living in poverty, those living in foster care, and those who are refugees from war torn countries. It worked well with all those populations."

The EBP review findings were recently updated to cover research released from July 2014 to August 2015. As part of this update, the review team identified and assessed evidence for 16 new programs. Seven of these 16 programs met the review criteria for evidence of effectiveness, showing evidence of a favorable, statistically significant program impact on at least one sexual risk behavior or reproductive health outcome of interest to increase the list of Evidence Based Programs to 44. Love Notes, which shows impact on three outcomes, is only one of six programs on the federal list to show efficacy in preventing pregnancy.

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