ProSAAF :: About the Project

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What is Promoting Strong Families?
Promoting Strong Families is a five-year research program designed to discover ways for African American couples to strengthen their relationships and build on strengths in their relationships to promote strong parenting skills. Growing together as a couple is one of the greatest blessings and challenges in life. Although children are a blessing – disagreements about parenting can be some of the most difficult to resolve.

The educational program incorporates curriculum from the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) and the Strong African American Families (SAAF) programs. PREP is one of the most comprehensive and well respected divorce-prevention/marriage enhancing programs in the world. PREP is a skills and principles-building curriculum designed to help partners say what they need to say, get to the heart of problems, and increase their connection with each other. The program, created and developed at the University of Denver, has been in existence for over 30 years. The SAAF curriculum, developed specifically for African American parents and their adolescent children, is focused on strengthening positive family interactions and enhancing parents’ efforts to help their children establish and reach positive goals during the critical transition between childhood and adolescence.

Why is Promoting Strong Families significant for the African American community?
Challenging socioeconomic conditions in the South sometimes take a toll on African American fathers’ ability to provide effective parenting for their children (Brody, et al., 1994), as well as maintain strong, healthy marriages (Karney, et al., 2005). When this happens, there is often a cascade of negative effects, with the result that many African American youth are not realizing their potential, exhibiting high rates of academic failure, behavioral and emotional problems, and substance use (Brody, et al., 2004; Willis, et al., 2003). Despite the urgent need to support effective, committed fatherhood, no culturally-appropriate programs are currently available to support African American men in the crucial and interconnected roles of husband and father (McBride, et al., 2004). By promoting strong marriages and strong families, ProSAAF provides tools to counter the stressful environment we live in and helps fathers create a better future for their children.

What makes Promoting Strong Families a unique and exciting program?

The program builds upon the strengths within families and promotes parenting practices and relationship skills. The program encourages parents to communicate better and commit to achieving their personal goals togetheras parents and couples.
The PREP curriculum has been shortened from a 15 week program to three 2.5-hour sessions, to better fit with the needs of modern couples who often times must balance multiple work schedules as well as busy family obligations.
By including material and activities that recognize how institutional and implicit racism affects and works against the success of African American marriages, the curriculum has been adapted to better confront the realities that can undermine even the best of marriages.
The SAAF curriculum has been paired with PREP for the first time so that parents can use their marital relationship skills to strengthen their parenting partnership.
By focusing directly on parenting, the SAAF curriculum provides a number of skills for dealing with the challenge of parenting through adolescence. As a result, the whole family benefits.

Who will be a part of Promoting Strong Families?
Couples are eligible to participate in the program if they meet the following criteria:

An African American adult at least 21 years of age who:

Has a mate (of any age or race) who is also willing to participate
Is legally married and living together or has definite plans to marry.
Lives with a mate and an adolescent child 10- to 16-years of age
Parents the 10- to 16-year-old adolescent child with the mate
Has a 10- to 16-year old adolescent (i.e., teen lives with and is parented by the adult and mate) that is willing to answer questions about their experiences
Is willing to spend six weeks in an in-home educational program

Four hundred sixty African American couples will take part in this program. Two hundred thirty couples will participate in the Promoting Strong Families educational program and be asked to take part in six relationship and parenting enrichment sessions for a period of six weeks, with facilitators visiting and reviewing materials with them. Another two hundred and thirty couples will be asked to review written materials on their own instead of having the facilitators visit them at home. All participants will take part in an assessment to see what they have learned and what benefits they have gotten from their participation.

What will participants do?
The couple will be asked to complete four in-home interviews throughout the program—at baseline, 3-months, 14-months, and 24-months. During these interviews, a field interviewer will meet with the couple at a convenient time for them and drive to the couples’ home. Couples will be asked to respond to questions on a laptop computer. The interviews focus on several areas:

Relationship skills and attitudes (e.g., communication, conflict, support, commitment, forgiveness)
Parenting practices (e.g., monitoring, emotional support, involvement in child’s schoolwork, teaching children how to handle discrimination).
Other factors that can influence parenting such as mood, stress, and community conditions.

Between the baseline and 3-month interviews, couples will be asked to participate in one of two educational programs that focus on relationship and parenting enrichment.

What can couples expect if they decide to participate?
Each couple will receive $100.00 for each of the four in-home interviews (per couple).

How will couples benefit?

Learn how to support each other in ways that make their relationships better
Develop new understandings about each other
Find out how to handle or prevent problems in their relationships
Discover new techniques for effectively parenting adolescents
Discuss issues that are important to them as African Americans
Reflect on your life experiences, beliefs, and values

What counties are the couples from?
Metropolitan Atlanta (including Bartow, Cherokee, Cobb, Fulton, Clayton, Henry, DeKalb, Fayette, and Gwinnett counties), and the following counties: Hart, Hall, Stephens, Butts, Spaulding, Pike, Upson, Crawford, Peach, Jones, Monroe, Twiggs, Wilkerson, and Bleckley. Couples that reside in Athens, Georgia and the surrounding counties, including Barrow, Oconee, Jackson, Madison, Greene, and Oglethorpe, for example, are also welcome to participate.

What will happen with the information that the couple provides?
The information provided by each individual couple is kept confidential. After all the couples have been interviewed, the information is grouped together and analyses are conducted for the whole sample. Ultimately, the information from this study about couples will be used to inform service agencies, policy makers, and other marriage scholars and those interested in relationship enhancement programs that are uniquely designed for the African American community.