Focus on Youth with ImPACT Core Elements and Key Characteristics

The core elements of Focus on Youth with ImPACT have been organized in three sections: content, pedagogical and implementation. Content core elements are the essential elements of what is being taught by the intervention that is believed to change risk behaviors. Pedagogical core elements are the essential elements of how the intervention content is taught. Finally, implementation core elements are the essential characteristics of an intervention that relate to some of the logistics that set up a positive learning environment.

Implementation core elements:

  • Core Element1: Deliver intervention to youth in community-based settings.
  • Core Element 2: Use two skilled facilitators to model communication, negotiation and refusal skills for the youth.
  • Core Element 3: Use “friendship” or venue-based groups (i.e., a basketball team, a scout troop, church group, an existing youth group) to strengthen peer support.

Content core elements:

  • Core Element 4: Use culturally appropriate interactive activities proven as effective learning strategies to help youth capture the important constructs in the theory.
  • Core Element 5: Include a “family tree” to contextualize and personalize abstract concepts, such as decision making and risk assessment.
  • Core Element 6: Enable participants to learn and practice a decision-making model such as SODA (Stop, Options, Decide, Action).
  • Core Element 7: Train participants in assertive communication and refusal skills specifically related to negotiation of abstinence or safer sex behaviors.
  • Core Element 8: Teach youth proper condom use skills.

Key Characteristics:

  • The program is implemented with between 6 and 10 youth.
  • New members should not join after the third session.
  • Participants meet for at least 100-145 minutes.
  • Culturally and linguistically based activities are embedded for your target population.
  • Groups contain members of the same gender and age group.
  • Parents/guardians must be told what the program is about and should sign a permission slip.
  • At least one facilitator matches the ethnicity of the majority of the participants.

Any modification of key characteristics should be done with great care, and should not compete with or contradict the intent, theory and internal logic of the intervention.

Next: ImPACT Core Elements and Key Messages


Education, Training and Research Associates and CDC. (In press). Adaptation guidance for science-based pregnancy, STD and HIV prevention education programs for adolescents. Scotts Valley, CA: ETR Associates.