How to run the Intervention Initiative at your institution

This programme was developed from an intensive research phase and is based on the strongest evidence and best practice for public health interventions to prevent violence. Please implement the programme in the following way:

Key implementation points for universities

Whole intervention

The intervention is complex. Individual sessions should not be extracted or condensed; they do not stand alone but work together as a whole.

Timetable

The intervention is a community-level intervention, designed to tackle a community-level problem.  This means it should be delivered to all members of your community, e.g. entire cohorts of students in a year group. It is suitable for delivery to mixed-sex groups.  It should be timetabled, not offered on a voluntary ad-hoc basis (otherwise those who most need it will not attend).  Within these parameters, there is no reason why Peer Opinion Leaders (e.g. student union post holders; sports society captains or teams; student reps; peer mentors) should not be invited or mandated to attend sessions.

Facilitators

The intervention should only be delivered by trained facilitators and is not suitable for peer facilitation. Facilitators may or not be academic staff.  They may include staff from counselling; wellbeing; student services who may be particularly well equipped to deliver the material. They should be trained in how to respond to disclosures.

Evaluation

Universities should evaluate the intervention in order to analyse its effectiveness.

During the academic year 2014-15 the team at UWE ran The Intervention Initiative using a control trial and assessing attitude change and behaviour change on a range of measures adapted from the existing literature.

UWS encourage all participating institutions to run the full evaluation measures. The full evaluation questionnaire (available in Qualtrics format or as a Word document for input into your own electronic systems) is available from the research team - please e-mail us at intervention@uwe.ac.uk. The full questionnaire incorporates the Social Norms questions which are used in Session 5. The accompanying theoretical rationale for the development of the evaluation materials is also available from the team.

When measuring the impact of the programme is important to ask participants to fill in the questionnaires before the programme starts, immediately afterwards and thereafter at intervals (we suggest 3 months; 6 months; one year) to assess changes over time.