Challenges and lessons learned when adapting evidence-based HIV prevention interventions: Being guided by the teens

Issues: Numerous adaptations of the Women's CoOp, an evidence-based HIV prevention intervention developed and tested with crack-using African American women in North Carolina, have proven successful in domestic and international settings. To address the needs of younger women, the Young Women's CoOp (YWC) study was designed to adapt and test the Women's CoOp for African American female adolescents who dropped out of school in Raleigh and Durham, NC. Description: Besides traditional formative methods that have already been reported, two Teen Advisory Boards (TABs) were convened to help adapt the intervention and provide advice on effective ways to implement the research study. The TABs provided input on all study materials (e.g., intervention content and activities, screeners and assessments), and offered innovative ways to enhance recruitment and retention of participants (e.g., monetary and non-monetary incentives, eye-catching marketing materials). The majority of TAB members agreed to be videotaped and describe their life circumstances to create new intervention content. Lessons Learned: The TABs were effective in offering suggestions to adapt the intervention and implement the study. However, initial recruitment and retention of TAB members was challenging, and required innovative strategies to keep them engaged and interested in the YWC study. Recommendations: If TABs are expected to play an integral role in a research study, they should be trained how to comfortably interact with their peers, present themselves as role models to successfully recruit and retain participants, and manage competing demands of personal commitments and demands of the research study.