LOGIC MODEL
View the Impact Model for Care to Wait that explains how Care to Wait expects to impact youth and families.
View the Logic Model for Care to Wait that explains risk or resiliency factors targeted by the program and the measures used to evaluate program effects.
View the Outcome/Activity Chart that shows how each activity is related to an outcome objective.
Logic Model Narrative
The logic model is based on empirical research and processes from several theories (in bold) that document the following :
Biological forces associated with puberty, especially testosterone levels, relate to interest in sex, and earlier puberty is related to age of first coitus. These findings have implications for both our intervention and evaluation: The program needs to normalize sexual interest in adolescents but also teach teens how to channel these feelings in ways that are not risky, and the evaluation needs to assess pubertal development because it is likely to affect key outcome variables. Prepubertal youth are less interested in sex, and so abstinence is less a matter of behavior than attitudes and intentions. Also, teens who begin dating earlier initiate sex earlier because of opportunity for sexual experimentation, although pubertal development likely contributes to interest in both dating and sex.
Certain personality traits are related to earlier sexual behavior, especially impulsivity or risk taking. Initiation of sex is delayed when youth are high in self-efficacy beliefs and have a clear sense of their future, perhaps because they realize concretely what they have to lose by becoming a parent too early in life. Social learning theory indicates that self-efficacy beliefs are a key mechanism underlying achievement, good decision making, and self-regulation, and these behaviors in turn are consistently related to avoidance of high-risk behavior. Teens will be taught concrete behavioral skills to assess risks and make good decisions, adopted from the health belief model; regulate their behavior, based on social learning approaches in which youth are taught to focus on long-term rewards and self-distraction methods; and ways to develop a stronger sense of competence, based on previous success in doing so with the DARE to be You model.
In families marked by open communication, parents more often convey their values and attitudes toward sex, which along with religiosity is another form of social control. Adolescents who perceive that their parents disapproved of teens' sexual activity are less likely to be sexually active.
Parent monitoring is consistently related to delayed sex. For example, poor parental monitoring is directly related to risky sexual behavior as well as to association with deviant peers. Various family processes appear to be interrelated and predispose teens toward abstinence: parent involvement and warmth, teen self-disclosure that is related to parent monitoring, and open communication. Information about effective parent monitoring—as opposed to permissiveness or intrusiveness—and practice with it is hypothesized to increase open communication and parent awareness of the teens’ friends and whereabouts. These changes in turn will increase the abstinence rate of the intervention group. We will assess peer orientation because affiliation with deviant peers is implicated in various risky or antisocial behaviors.
Health belief models emphasize the role of risk assessment, evaluation of potential outcomes, and decision making. For teens, this means that peer refusal skills are likely to be essential in dealing with peer pressure to engage in risky behavior. In previous studies, conformity to peer pressure predicted risk behaviors such as sexual activity and substance use. The DTBY program is expected to increase adolescents’ decision-making skills such that they will (a) more accurately assess the risks of early sex (as well as substance use), (b) be less likely to endorse risk-taking cognitions and behaviors, and (c) dissociate themselves from deviant peers.
This logic model is the basis for program goals and objectives, informs the curriculum, and guides the selection of evaluation measures. The Outcomes/Activity Chart details specifically which curriculum activities are designed to influence each of the parent and teen outcomes.
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