Implementation and Evaluation of the Empower Youth Program

Abstract

The goal of this research was to implement and evaluate the Empower Youth Program—a holistic, peer support, and education intervention aimed at enabling middle school-aged adolescents to take greater control over their health through improving self-care resources (SCR). Empower is based on the Mind, Body, Spirit Program developed by Rodgers and colleagues and tested on adults. An experimental pretest and posttest design was used to compare outcomes for two randomly assigned groups. Forty middle school participants completed measures of academic and emotional SCR before and after the 9-week intervention. It was hypothesized that after controlling for strength of preexisting SCR, participants who received the intervention would show greater improvement in self-reports after completing the program compared to participants receiving usual school services. The differences in scores between groups are clinically meaningful but not statistically significant. Future studies with larger samples may be able to detect significant contributions of the Empower program.