WE’RE UP AND RUNNING!

After months of very hard work, the Lights4Violence Project is about to begin our work in secondary schools in Spain and in the other countries that are participants in the project. 

We’ll begin by piloting the project questionnaire, in order to analyze whether the questions are understandable to the students; this will allow us to correctly measure the aspects we intend to evaluate. It’s going to be a challenge to make sure that we measure the same thing in each of the six countries that participate (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Romania, Poland and England). 

Our pilot study was carried out with 20-30 students in each country aged 15 to 17 years old, with mostly satisfactory results. This will allow us to measure practically all of the evaluation tools (see more information here: http://www.lights4violence.eu/content/use-cronbach’s-alpha-assess-quality-rating-scales-example-interpersonal-reactivity-index).

At the same time, we began to work on the design and development of the different manuals needed for our intervention with students (teacher’s manual, activities manual, and manual for development of video capsules). This required the expert support of different team members, who provided their experience working in gender violence, health promotion, social skills training, problem resolution and self-confidence among the adolescent population, in addition to other aspects related to the development of film shorts. Now, after months of work, we’ve finally adapted each manual to the context of each of the participating countries. 

On September 6 we trained teachers in the center in Spain (Alicante) where we plan to carry out the intervention. The training served not only to train teachers in applying the intervention with their students, it also provided needed feedback to the team on the activities planned for the students. The feedback was very positive; the teachers highlighted the dynamic nature of the proposed activities and the content that will be provided during the intervention. All of the teachers’ suggestions have been taken into account in order to continue to improve.

Finally, there will continue to be teacher training throughout this month in the other countries, which means that the project is officially underway, along with upcoming challenges for all of the research teams.