Evaluation of the Green Dot bystanding intervention program in Kentucky high schools

Annual rates of dating violence and forced sex have increased in Kentucky over the past 5 years, yet the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs and the University of Kentucky are working to reduce this trend. CDC recently funded an evaluation of a primary prevention intervention termed Green Dot which has recently been implemented in high schools throughout the state. At the heart of the Green Dot intervention is the acknowledgement that while most students neither participate in nor condone violence, many respond passively to a culture that may tacitly support violence. By empowering individuals to actively but appropriately question peer support for sexual and dating violence; bystanders become change agents who can play a significant role in reducing violence. While several bystander intervention programs have been implemented, few have been empirically evaluated and none have been evaluated on a statewide basis. In this presentation we will present the methods for a comprehensive evaluation among high schools across Kentucky. We hypothesize that students in high schools randomly assigned to implement Green Dot will report lower rates of sexual and dating violence over time compared with students in comparable high schools randomized to serve as comparison schools. We will present methods for our evaluation including 1) a population based annual survey across all 26 high schools, 2) a web based survey among the intervention 13 high schools to measure diffusion of the Green Dot intervention, and 3) a qualitative evaluation of how Green Dot is experienced within the high schools.