Program Profile: It's Your Game... Keep It Real

A health education program for 7th and 8th graders designed to delay sexual behavior and promote healthy dating relationships. The program is rated Promising. The program was shown to statistically significantly reduce emotional and physical dating violence victimization. However, the program did not have a statistically significant effect on physical perpetration of dating violence.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals

The goals of It’s Your Game… Keep It Real include the development of healthy dating relationships; delayed sexual initiation to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV; and the prevention of both the perpetration and victimization of dating violence.

Program Activities

It’s Your Game… Keep It Real is a health education program that incorporates both computer- and classroom-based activities in a 24-lesson curriculum for 7th and 8th graders. The curriculum consists of 12 lessons in 7th grade and 12 lessons in 8th grade. Of the 12 lessons at each grade level, eight are classroom-based and four are computer-based. Trained facilitators use a detailed training manual while implementing the classroom-based lessons. A virtual-world environment is the setting for the computer-based activities, which include interactive skills-training exercises, videos, optional quizzes, animations, fact sheets, and real-world-style adolescent serials that allow students to provide online feedback.

The 7th-grade curriculum covers topics related to healthy relationships, including identifying the characteristics of healthy and unhealthy friendships and dating relationships; skills training related to evaluating relationships, peer pressure, and social support; setting personal limits and respecting others’ limits; and recognizing peer norms. The 8th-grade curriculum reviews these topics as well.

The curriculum also includes six parent-child homework activities (three for the 7th grade and three for the 8th grade) and individualized journaling activities for both grade levels. Parent–child homework activities concentrate on communication in healthy friendships and dating relationships, refusal skills, expectations of dating partners, and parental rules regarding dating relationships.

Key Personnel

Teachers or other school staff may implement It’s Your Game…Keep It Real.  Training is required for all program facilitators. Anyone preparing to implement the curriculum should attend the 2-day training provided by the University of Texas Prevention Research Center.

Program Theory

It’s Your Game…Keep It Real is grounded in social–cognitive theory, social-influence models, and the theory of triadic influence.

Study

Peskin and colleagues (2014) conducted a group randomized trial of It’s Your Game…Keep It Real in 10 middle schools in southeast Texas in 2004, using a sample of 766 predominately ethnic-minority students. Using a multiattribute randomization protocol to ensure the two groups were similar at baseline, five schools were assigned to the intervention group, and the other five schools were assigned to the control group. Because the focus of the study was on dating-violence prevention among dating adolescents, students who were not currently dating were excluded from the study. The sample was approximately 60 percent female and, on average, 13 years old. A total of 303 students participated in the intervention group, whereas 463 students were in the control group. The intervention group received the It’s Your Game… Keep It Real program in 7th and 8th grades. The program was provided during physical education, homeroom, or science classes, depending on the school in which the students participated. The control students did not receive the intervention. This study compared the baseline surveys completed by the 7th-grade students with parental permission in the fall of 2004, with the follow-up surveys completed by the same sample in the fall of 2006, at the beginning of the students’ 9th-grade year. Students received a $10 incentive for completing each survey.

With the exception of race/ethnicity and age, there were no significant differences in baseline demographic characteristics and dating-violence behaviors between the two groups. The researchers adjusted all the logistic regression models for age, gender, race/ethnicity, and time between measures. They also included baseline exposure to dating violence in all models to isolate the impact of the intervention on dating violence that occurred after randomization.

All students participating in the study completed a survey adapted from the Peer Rejection Questionnaire. Audio computer-assisted self-interviews were conducted on laptop computers with all students, who wore headphones to ensure their privacy during the 30- to 45-minute interviews. Although most data collection was conducted in schools during regular class time, other locations were used when data collection could not be conducted in schools, specifically for the 9th-grade follow-up survey. Four outcome measures were used to assess dating violence: physical dating-violence victimization, physical dating-violence perpetration, emotional dating-violence perpetration, and emotional dating-violence victimization. Students were asked about behaviors that occurred with a boyfriend or girlfriend in the past year. The researchers used multilevel logistic regression models to determine the effect of the program on each dating-violence outcome. The program ended in the spring of 8th grade, and the follow-up survey was conducted during the fall of 9th grade, within 6 months of the end of the program.

There was a substantial amount of attrition in this study, as only 53 percent of the originally randomized students were included in the analytic sample. However, the authors reported that attrition in the study cohort was nondifferential between the conditions. No subgroup analysis was conducted.

Implementation information about the It’s Your Game…Keep It Real program can be found at https://www.etr.org/store/curricula/its-your-game-keep-it-real/

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

Markham, Christine, Susan Tortolero, Melissa Fleschler Peskin, Ross Shegog, Melanie Thiel, Elizabeth Baumler, Robert Addy, Soledad Liliana Escobar-Chaves, Belinda Reininger, and Leah Robin. 2012. “Sexual Risk Avoidance and Sexual Risk Reduction Interventions for Middle School Youth: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Journal of Adolescent Health 50:279–88.

Tortolero, Susan, Christine Markham, Melissa Fleschler Peskin, Ross Shegog, Robert Addy, Soledad Liliana Escobar-Chaves, and Elizabeth Baumler. 2010. “It’s Your Game: Keep It Real: Delaying Sexual Behavior with an Effective Middle School Program.” Journal of Adolescent Health 46:169–79.