Effects and Effectiveness of Life Skills Education for HIV Prevention in Young People

Abstract

For 20 years, "life skills" education has been advocated as a key component of HIV and AIDS education for young people. But what do terms such as life skills imply, and what evidence is there that a life skills-based approach really works? This article reviews the literature on the effects and effectiveness of life skills-based education for HIV prevention. Evaluated interventions were identified by using three search strategies. The review identified a surprising number of rigorously designed and evaluated interventions from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Most interventions used life skills training as a component of the overall education strategy. Programs worked best to positively influence knowledge, attitudes, intentions, skills, and abilities. Programs rarely produced consistent effects on sexual behavior. Also, life skills, training had little effect on biological outcomes. The narrow focus on achieving behavioral outcomes may be at the loss of documenting other positive impacts.

The evolution of sex education and students' sexual knowledge in Finland in the 2000s

“…Twothirds of the reviewed programmes had a significant positive impact on behaviour. These positive results were confirmed in a review of the effects and effectiveness of life skillsbased education for HIV prevention (Yankah and Aggleton 2008).…”

Effectiveness of a School HIV/AIDS Prevention Program for Spanish Adolescents

“…Effects from the HIV prevention interventions on adolescents can differ depending on their gender and if they have previously been sexually active; however, previous studies have not consistently tested for intervention effects for these subgroups of interest (Yankah & Aggleton, 2008). Givaudan and collaborators (2008) observed at baseline that nonsexually active adolescents showed more favorable attitudes toward condoms and HIV testing, and a greater perception of condom use in their peers, relative to their sexually active peers.…”

“…Medium-and long-term follow-up assessments in future studies will be an important way to improve HIV prevention research in Spain. Another limitation of this study is that all data were assessed by self-report measures (Harper et al, 2009;Yankah & Aggleton, 2008), which are prone to social desirability effects. In the present study, these were minimized by administering the questionnaires to small groups and assigning personal codes.…”

Disease prevention and health promotion programs: benefits, implementation, quality assurance and open questions—a summary of the evidence

“…As social technologies, DPHP programs have triggered fundamental and controversial discussions (Rosenbrock 2008;Rosenbrock and Michel 2006;Wulfhorst and Hurrelmann 2009). The following sections therefore present a problem-oriented summary of the status of research on the usefulness and requirements for programs.…”