The Client: King County Domestic Violence Council Subcommittee: Youth and Domestic Violence
The Challenges:
The King County Prosecutor's Office chairs a standing committee addressing Domestic Violence issues in the area. One subcommittee, Youth and Domestic Violence, wanted an assessment and intervention specifically to reach out to teens and address teen dating violence. Representatives from community-based agencies and local government entities agreed on the focus and scope of the project. Although the members of the committee were adults, they were committed to conducting a participatory project, to include local teens as data collectors and analysts. The goal was to reach local youth using popular technology including social networking websites. Following the assessment, the committee sought ongoing guidance from our consultant to see the innovative intervention project through to a final product.
Our Method:
- Participant observation of subcommittee meetings.
- Focus groups and interviews with youth agency staff who were trained to use participatory methods, manage data collection, transcribe and analyze qualitative data and write reports.
- Mentoring process with staff to build leadership capacity and research expertise with skills in writing and producing reports.
- Consultant data review and analysis.
- Meeting facilitation and background research to support the chosen innovative intervention: teen-targeted video contest.
The Results:
- Expanded community-based agencies' capacity to conduct assessments and develop an intervention.
- Identified teens' knowledge about teen dating violence and its many iterations in a technological society.
- Identified MySpace as a starting point to launch an intervention with widespread outreach. Utilizing MySpace would enable the intervention to transcend social networking sites and to link to other media environments.