Promoting Healthy Relationships and Masculinities among Adolescent Boys

Deinera Exner-Cortens, Debb Hurlock, Pam Krause

Introduction: A large body of research demonstrates that adolescence is a key period for promoting healthy relationship skills as part of efforts to prevent bullying and dating violence. However, many healthy relationships programs take a gender-neutral approach, which may miss differential risk and protective factors experienced by male and female youth. For adolescent boys in particular, continued gender-role socialization can mean vast pressure to conform to masculinities that are more likely to support gender inequality and violence. Conversely, the development of healthy masculinities promotes gender equity, emotional literacy, empathy, and ultimately, healthy relationships. While focusing on gender-specific contexts and experiences, including gender-role socialization and emotionality, is thus a promising youth violence prevention strategy, the availability of specific programs that target these constructs is extremely limited. In response to this gap, the Calgary Sexual Health Centre (CSHC) created WiseGuyz, a participatory school-based program that aims to build healthy relationship skills and healthy masculinities among adolescent boys.

Methods: Formative, mixed-methods evaluation data were collected for the past three years from 268 participants in a large urban school district in Alberta, Canada, in order to understand preliminary effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. Survey data included measures on male gender norms; homophobic attitudes; and sexual health practice self-efficacy, while focus group data from 13 groups of boys explored the impact of the program on relationships, behaviors and beliefs about masculinity.

Results: Quantitative data have consistently demonstrated impacts on attitude measures. Across the three years, participants reported significant changes in beliefs about male norms, sexual health self-efficacy and homophobic attitudes from pre- to post-test. For male norms, improvements from pre- to post-test were particularly strong for items focused on the expression of emotion. Supporting these quantitative findings, focus group data have consistently shown that boys in the program feel more comfortable with the expression of emotion, are less homophobic, are better able to engage in healthy relationships, and evidence improved critical thinking skills.

Discussion: Taken together, these findings indicate that WiseGuyz shows promise to promote healthy masculinities and healthy relationship skills by allowing boys to change homophobic discourse, express emotions, and experience connection with their peers. Ongoing evaluation focused on examining quantitative impacts on behaviors, as well as implications of findings to date for healthy relationships promotion programs, will be discussed.

This abstract was submitted to the 2017 Society for Prevention Research Annual Meeting.