A Collective Efficacy Intervention to Promote Community Resiliency: Rationale for and Design of a Quasi-Experimental Evaluation (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Community and youth violence are pervasive and have devastating health, economic, and social consequences. Violence too often impacts people of color and the life trajectories of youth in the United States, especially among people living in urban settings. OBJECTIVE In response, this study evaluates the effectiveness of a novel Community Resiliency Collective Efficacy Intervention (CRCEI), which seeks to increase individual and neighborhood levels of collective efficacy and reduce youth and community violence. The CRCEI has three phases: (1) community organizing and mobilization (engaging and working with diverse community members and collaborators to build capacity, plan, and recruit); (2) collective efficacy training (learning, discussing, and practicing relationship building, and facilitating thriving, resiliency, and strategies for organizing and intervening); and (3) community-based prevention project (based on what participants learn in the training). METHODS The study is set in eight urban, high violence, racially segregated, and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Community partners and researchers select four intervention sites based on perceived need and appropriateness. We then use participatory propensity score matching to select four comparison sites, which receive health education sessions in lieu of the CRCEI. The study assesses impact of the CRCEI on participant-level collective efficacy and exposure to community violence (Aim 1) and community-level collective efficacy and incidence of community violence (Aim 2) and via several data sources, including pre- and post-surveys with participants and community members, quantitative and qualitative data from observations and interviews, and secondary neighborhood-level data (e.g., violence incidents, poverty rate). We complement this impact analysis with an ethnographic process evaluation, which tracks fidelity and costs, describes implementation, and identifies facilitators and barriers across sites (Aim 3). RESULTS We hypothesize that the CRCEI will provide a concrete, action-focused strategy to increase resiliency and reduce community and youth violence, with impact demonstrated by increased reports of collective efficacy and decreased exposure to violence at the individual (Aim 1) and community levels (Aim 2). CONCLUSIONS Innovations of this project include testing a community and collective efficacy oriented violence reduction intervention (vs. criminal-legal and punishment-oriented strategies), implementation in participatorily-identified and asset-mapped local settings (e.g., neighborhoods for inclusion and community partners to host the intervention identified by community members as trustworthy), a capacity-building approach (e.g., training facilitators from focal neighborhoods), and community member integration into collaborative team science. In this manuscript, we outline the rationale and design for the evaluation of this collective efficacy intervention. CLINICALTRIAL NIH National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information ClinicalTrials.gov Registration number: NCT05768217 URL: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05768217?term=Community%20Resiliency%20Collective%20Efficacy%20Intervention%20(CRCEI)%20for%20Prevention%20of%20Community%20Violence%20-%20A%20Cluster%20Randomized%20Clinical%20Trial&rank=1