Effective components of universal secondary school-based interventions: A meta-analysis

There is a large number of universal secondary school-based interventions targeting adolescents’ social safety and socio-emotional adjustment. These interventions aim to improve adolescents’ social skills, and/or attitudes about the school and social topics (i.e., social safety) and cognitive and affective skills, and/or attitudes about the self (i.e., socio-emotional adjustment). However, still little is known regarding their effectiveness and the components associated with this effectiveness in particular. This meta-analysis aims to (1) examine general effectiveness of these interventions, (2) identify most commonly used components to establish change, and (3) analyze which components are most strongly associated with effectiveness immediately after treatment and at follow-up.
PubMed, PsycInfo, ERIC, and CENTRAL were systematically searched until November 2016 for controlled studies of universal secondary school-based interventions aiming to improve the social safety and socio-emotional adjustment of adolescents. The search resulted in 7968 unique articles that are currently being selected for inclusion. Variables concerning research design, participants, and intervention components will be extracted from the studies. In order to code the components as accurately as possible, additional information concerning program content of the intervention will be gathered from published outcome articles, related publications and freely available materials. Effect sizes will be calculated for all comparisons between the intervention and control group to analyze general effectiveness. Characteristics of the program (i.e., practice, instructional, and program components) will be used to predict the effectiveness on measures of social safety (e.g., aggression, bullying) and socio-emotional adjustment (e.g., emotion regulation, resilience). We will use a multilevel meta-analytical approach to analyze the data.
By identifying components that appear effective in improving adolescents’ social safety and socio-emotional adjustment, insight is gained in which components address which behavior. This enables schools to be more critical about which intervention to select and which components are necessary to target specific behaviors.