Dr. Brieger provided a look at the PRECEDE-PROCEED framework that can be used to guide needs assessments. He emphasized that effective strategies to address youth health needs must be based not only on behaviors, but on other influencing factors.
The framework starts with understanding the community and client contexts, as well as behavioral contexts and antecedents, before moving to the final step and matching strategies to behavioral antecedents. PRECEDE stands for Predisposing, Reinforcing, and Enabling Constructs in Educational Diagnosis and Evaluation and involves assessing community factors. PROCEED stands for Policy, Regulatory, and Organizational Constructs in Educational and Environmental Development and involves identification of desired outcomes and program implementation. Using the PRECEDE-PROCEED framework can help adolescent and youth reproductive health program implementers understand what is happening in a particular area or within a particular community.
Both Dr. Brieger and Mr. Mwinnya emphasized the need to include community members and youth voices in all the steps of the framework, and especially ensure their perspectives are documented during the needs assessment process. They discussed the usefulness of embracing qualitative data to understand variables in quantitative data and tell the whole story of what is happening in a community. Youth offer unique perspectives and have their own ideas about the reproductive health behaviors that they or their peers engage in, and how to create innovative solutions to effectively meet the reproductive health needs and desires of young people.