GREAT Schools and Families

GREAT Schools and Families is part of a four-site, national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) project evaluating a promising, existing family- and school-based violence-prevention program.

It is the largest violence-prevention study ever funded by the CDC, involving approximately 800 students and 160 sets of parents at the Duke-Durham site alone. If the program proves successful, CDC will encourage its adoption at schools nation-wide.

David Rabiner is the principal investigator at Duke. The Center for Child and Family Policy's team is collaborating with investigators from Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Georgia at Athens to develop and test this theory-driven program. The Center is home to the GREAT Schools and Families Data Center as well as being one of the intervention sites.

Initial planning for the study started in 1999, and pilot testing of the intervention took place in the 2000-01 public school year. Duke's portion of the full-scale study began in the 2001-02 year with sixth-grade classes in eight Durham middle schools. The program has three major components:

1. Students in all eight participating middle schools are asked to fill out research surveys.
2. Students in four of those eight schools will also attend the GREAT Students class in social-cognitive problem-solving skills once a week for twenty weeks. The class has been made a regular part of the curriculum for these schools for fall semester 2001 by Durham Public Schools.
3. Students and their families from four of the eight schools will be asked to participate in intensive problem-solving and family skills training sessions called GREAT Families. Two of the schools in this group will come from the schools who participate only in the survey portion of the study and two will come from schools that participate in the survey and in the GREAT Students classes. Families will be asked to participate in GREAT Families if their child has shown behaviors of both aggressiveness and leadership (the ability to influence peers).
   

The study's hypothesis is that the greatest benefit will be seen in students who participate in all three components: the survey and the GREAT Students and GREAT Families programs. The study seeks to discover whether the overall safety and climate of a school can be improved if behavior can be changed in students who are aggressive and are perceived as leaders/influencers. Few interventions have proven effective in reducing the violence rates of youth in middle schools. The program's effectiveness will be measured by comparisons with student violence in control schools.

GREAT Schools and Families staff