Drs. Jay Silverman and Sabrina Boyce are leading a five-year CDC funded evaluation of the Close to Home (C2H) program in partnership with the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) and ValorUs (formerly CALCASA). C2H is a sexual violence (SV) prevention program that uses community mobilization to engage and unify communities and amplify social norms that reject the acceptability of SV. C2H is one of the few approaches to SV prevention that moves beyond the individual and interpersonal level of the social ecology to target greater social norms and structures. While CDPH has invested 10 years in developing C2H as an RPE model, it has yet to be evaluated. The UCSD/CDPH partnership is uniquely poised to conduct the first rigorous evaluation of C2H in California at this time, given

1. the large number of diverse communities across the state currently implementing C2H,
2. CDPH’s sustained capacity to support this model,
3. UCSD’s expertise in conducting rigorous evaluations of GBV prevention programs and in social norms and social network assessment and analyses,
4. and UCSD’s long-term partnership with CDPH on RPE evaluation.

The UCSD/CDPH C2H evaluation is novel in that it addresses multiple challenges to rigorous, quasi-experimental evaluation studies of community mobilization and other community-level SV prevention programs. The C2H evaluation uses a participatory research model, with an active research advisory board comprised of members of UCSD, CDPH, ValorUs, and C2H implementers and an active youth research advisory board comprised of youth who are part of a C2H group.

KEY PERSONNEL: 

Dr. Jay Silverman, Co-Principal Investigator, UCSD
Dr. Sabrina Boyce, Co-Principal Investigator, UCSD
Emma Jackson, Research Program Manager, UCSD
Ricardo Vera-Monroy, Data Systems Manager, UCSD

California, USA

KEY WORDS