The effects of primary prevention educational interventions on dating violence in adolescence: a narrative systematic review

Abstract

Dating violence poses a significant health burden to the global population with adolescents experiencing a higher occurrence and severity in dating violence experiences. There are many educational programs which have been developed to prevent dating violence in adolescents. These programs often involve different approaches, and it is unclear which characteristics are crucial for dating violence prevention. The goal of this thesis was to conduct a review of primary educational dating violence prevention programs and examine their characteristics to determine which ones influenced dating violence prevention.

This review followed the Cochrane guidelines for systematic reviews and examined the results using a feminist lens. A search was conducted on March 13, 2023, resulting in 2,594 studies, 11 of which were included in the final review. The Cochrane characteristics of included studies and template for intervention description and replication checklists were used to analyze the characteristics of the included studies. A risk of bias assessment using the original Cochrane risk of bias tool was also conducted.

This review found that no intervention characteristics resulted in a clear change in either physical, psychological or sexual DV. However, interventions that were delivered within a month all resulted in an improvement in DV knowledge. Of the studies which used theory to inform intervention development, none explicated stated using feminist theory. Finally, all studies needed to improve on their methods for allocation concealment and blinding of the outcome assessors.

Overall, this review presented a comprehensive delineation of complex intervention characteristics not previously demonstrated in the literature. However, the results were generally inconclusive. To allow for future reviews to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of DV prevention programs studies need to first create and then utilize a gold standard tool to measure occurrences of DV. Until this is accomplished, reviews will continue to have varying results due to the inability to synthesize outcomes in a meaningful way.