Evaluating effectiveness of abstinence education

Purpose: This study examined the effectiveness of an abstinence education program that was sensitive to federally mandated curriculum and measures. Methods: The intervention was delivered to 5,772 middle school and high school students. Effectiveness was assessed by a measure that was anchored on A-H themes, which are components of federally mandated curricular components of abstinence education. To better understand the relationship of different variables and determine the significance of student’s improvements on the A-H measure scores, the ANCOVA was used with the pretest score and age as covariates and the use of gender and ethnicity as fixed factors in the analysis. Results: While controlling for the effects of the pretest, the analyses showed that age and gender were main effects but that ethnicity did not prove to be related to the outcome scores. Results demonstrated that the effectiveness of the program decreased as adolescent boys aged. There were no significant interactions in the gender and ethnicity variables. Conclusions: The findings of this study will be beneficial to program developers in understanding what variations and demographics are most receptive to this particular abstinence-only education model. Further studies in this area are needed to evaluate the effectiveness of currently available programs.