Peer-reviewed article
A Collective Efficacy Intervention to Promote Community Resiliency: Protocol for a Quasi-Experimental Evaluation.
Ohmer ML, Jacobs LA, Beery J, Fabio A, Falk K et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study evaluates a Community Resiliency Collective Efficacy Intervention designed to reduce youth and community violence in eight high-violence neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. The intervention has three phases: community organizing, collective efficacy training, and community-based prevention projects. The quasi-experimental design compares four intervention sites with four matched comparison sites, measuring changes in collective efficacy and violence exposure at individual and community levels.
Key points
- The intervention targets individual and neighborhood-level collective efficacy to reduce youth and community violence in urban, economically disadvantaged areas
- The study uses participatory propensity score matching to select comparison sites that receive health education instead of the intervention
- Data collection includes pre- and post-surveys, observations, interviews, and secondary neighborhood-level data on violence incidents and poverty
- The intervention builds capacity by training facilitators from focal neighborhoods and integrating community members into the research team
- An ethnographic process evaluation tracks implementation fidelity, costs, and identifies facilitators and barriers to intervention delivery
Limitations
This is a protocol paper describing the planned study design rather than reporting results, so it cannot tell us whether the intervention actually reduces violence or increases collective efficacy. The findings will depend on data collection and analysis that extend to May 2025.
Abstract
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 aims to evaluate 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 projects (based on what participants learn in the training). Methods The study was set in 8 urban, high-violence, racially segregated, and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Community partners and researchers selected 4 intervention sites based on perceived need and appropriateness. We then used participatory propensity score matching to select 4 comparison sites, which receive health education sessions in lieu of the CRCEI. The study assesses the impact of the CRCEI on participant-level collective efficacy and exposure to community violence (aim 1), community-level collective efficacy, and incidence of community violence (aim 2) via several data sources, including pre- and postsurveys with participants and community members, quantitative and qualitative data from observations and interviews, and secondary neighborhood-level data (eg, violence incidents and poverty rate). Data for aim 1 were collected from February 2023 to January 2025, and data for aim 2 were collected from September 2022 to May 2025. We complemented this impact analysis with an ethnographic process evaluation, which tracks fidelity and costs, describes implementation, and identifies facilitators and barriers across the intervention 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-oriented and collective efficacy-oriented violence reduction intervention (vs criminal-legal and punishment-oriented strategies), implementation in participatorily identified and asset-mapped local settings (eg, neighborhoods for inclusion and community partners to host the intervention identified by community members as trustworthy), a capacity-building approach (eg, 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.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Community Resiliency Collective Efficacy Intervention consisting of community organizing and mobilization, collective efficacy training in relationship building and resiliency strategies, and community-based prevention projects
- Population
- Community members and youth in four intervention neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; comparison group from four matched neighborhoods receiving health education