Research to Practice Center Grants

Research to Practice Center Grants is sponsored by HHS Office of Population Affairs. Funds projects that synthesize and translate existing research into practice to improve adolescent health and reduce teen pregnancy.

Current TPP Research & Evaluation Grant Recipients | HHS Office of Population Affairs U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Current TPP Research & Evaluation Grant Recipients Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Research to Practice Center Grants Period of Performance: September 30, 2022-September 29, 2026 FY22 awards are projects that will synthesize and translate existing research into practice for health promotion activities that will lead to adoption of healthy behaviors, improve adolescent health more broadly, and ultimately help to reduce teen pregnancy.

Funded Centers are expected to have a high caliber of scientific and technical competency, be forward-looking, provide strong leadership, and collaborate with stakeholders and community partners including state and local health agencies and non-profit, community (including youth and parents) and non-governmental organizations in the development and delivery of research to practice products.

Annual Funding: $1,092,000 Project Overview: Building upon the work conducted in their FY20 award, Child Trends and Chapin Hall are partnering to further refine and carry out the work of Activate, a Research to Practice center with the goal of promoting adolescent health and preventing teenage pregnancy by bringing adolescent sexual and reproductive health research to youth-serving professionals, particularly those who serve youth in the child welfare and/or justice systems, youth experiencing homelessness, and opportunity youth.

Annual Funding: $1,063,776 Project Overview: Healthy Teen Network and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Adolescent Health are funded to create a Research to Practice center to expand the delivery of trauma-informed and inclusive practices in adolescent sexual and reproductive health programming and care.

FY 2022 Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Evaluation and Research Grants Period of Performance: September 30, 2022-September 29, 2024 FY 2022 awards are evaluation and research projects that explore new questions in teen pregnancy prevention, adolescent sexual and reproductive health, and family planning more broadly that improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of these programs for adolescents or young adults, and/or reduce existing disparities.

Annual Funding : $322,000 Project Overview: This project is a components study of six EBPs: Draw the Line/Respect the Line, Love Notes, Making Proud Choices, Positive Prevention Plus, Promoting Health Among Teens-Abstinence Only (PHAT), and Reducing the Risk.

Phase 1 is a descriptive study to identify the core components of six EBPs and how each addresses participant equity through 1) a systematic qualitative review and analysis of EBPs’ curriculum materials (theory of change, manual, ancillary materials, evaluation studies) and 2) interviews with the curricula’s developers and experienced implementers.

Phase 2, AMTC will conduct a quantitative descriptive analysis to empirically investigate critical outcome questions related to the core components identified in Phase 1 and test theoretical implications and discoveries that affect program effectiveness.

State University of New Jersey, Rutgers Annual Funding : $198,917 Project Overview: The overarching goal of this project is to longitudinally evaluate the effects of state-level school-based sex education policies and practices on adolescent sexual risk behaviors and sexual health outcomes by conducting secondary data analyses using a novel combination and integration of publicly available reports and datasets merging existing state-level, school-level, and individual-level data from 2001 to the present.

University of Maryland, Baltimore Annual Funding : $312,528 Project Overview: This project focuses on identifying which core components of Power Thru Choices contribute to its effectiveness as an evidence-based intervention; and concurrently examines its effectiveness among subgroups of these youth based on social and behavioral characteristics known to have an impact on teen pregnancy, such as aggression and violence, prosocial and problem peers, and substance use.

University of South Florida Project Overview: This project seeks to scale up and conduct a process/implementation evaluation of Choosing Myself. Choosing Myself is an innovative, theory-and evidence-informed, inclusive, comprehensive sexual health program designed for justice-involved and marginalized youth. It stems from a strengths-based approach that centers the needs, goals, values, and lived experiences of participants.

This program also acknowledges systems of oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism) and social determinants of health (e.g., housing, food) which influence youth’s decision-making.

FY 2020 Pregnancy Prevention Research Grant Awards Period of Performance: September 30, 2020-September 29, 2022 The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston Project Overview: This project plans to leverage four large data sets of ethnically diverse pre- and early adolescent youth drawn from randomized trials of sexual risk reduction and healthy relationship promotion interventions.

The study aims to identify the core components of these interventions most strongly associated with positive impacts on sexual health and reductions in sexual health disparities. It will also delineate moderators and mediators of TPP program outcomes.

The large sample will allow them to overcome the methodological limitations of prior efforts and determine which factors are most impactful in preventing, and reducing disparities, in adverse sexual health outcomes.

The Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Project Overview: This project aims to examine the importance of delivery and neighborhood settings of teen pregnancy prevention programs as well as understand for whom these programs are most effective. The project uses evaluation data from 11 studies of five program models (four evidence-based and one evidence-informed) from the HHS Teen Pregnancy Prevention Evidence Review.

Multilevel modeling analyses will be used to examine combinations of setting and youth characteristics to determine under what conditions are TPP programs most and least effective in preventing teen pregnancy.

Oregon Health and Science University Project Overview: This project is using a socio-ecological framework to assess the impact of social determinants of health, specifically immigration and community-level vulnerability, on reproductive health outcomes among Latina adolescents. They will be analyzing survey data from the United States and Mexico.

Results from this study will allow pregnancy prevention programs to integrate a targeted socio-ecological approach as part of evidence-based pregnancy prevention interventions.

FY 2020 Research to Practice Center Grant Award for Adolescent Health Promotion in Order to Prevent Teenage Pregnancy Period of Performance: September 30, 2020-September 29, 2022 Annual Funding: $1,092,000 Project Overview: Child Trends, Inc. in partnership with Chapin Hall and Healthy Teen Network, will develop and disseminate research-based practice resources for professionals who work with youth.

The Center aims to bridge the gap between research and practice especially among youth who have experience with the child welfare and/or juvenile justice systems, youth who experience homelessness, and youth who are neither working nor in school.

The Center will form a Research Alliance composed of youth, professionals, researchers, and policy makers who work in or with youth and other collaborators to gather, synthesize, and disseminate information about effective and promising teen pregnancy prevention and health promotion policies and practices.

The alliance also aims to equip professionals in youth-serving systems with consistent and accurate resources to address teen pregnancy prevention and broader health promotion needs and facilitate a dialogue on optimal adolescent health and teen pregnancy prevention between researchers and professionals.

FY 2020 Teen Pregnancy Prevention Tier 2 Phase 2 Grant Awards - Rigorous Evaluation of Promising Interventions Period of Performance: July 1, 2020-June 30, 2023 Child Trends, Incorporated Project Overview: Child Trends, along with their partners Identity and University of Maryland, proposes to implement and rigorously evaluate El Camino , a sexual risk reduction intervention developed for and with Latinx teens.

The overarching goal of this project is to reduce adolescent childbearing and STIs and promote educational attainment and optimal health among Latinx adolescents.

The proposed research will contribute to the limited number of culturally tailored sexual risk reduction programs for Latinx teens available for English- and Spanish- language implementation settings, and will be implemented in high-need high schools in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Children’s Hospital Corporation Project Overview: This project plans to implement a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of a counseling plus health intervention for young women, 18- to 19-years old, who experience depression. This group tends to have a disproportionately high risk of adverse sexual and reproductive health outcomes and are currently underrepresented in teen pregnancy prevention programming.

The intervention, Momentary Affect Regulation – Safer Sex Intervention (MARSSI) , aims to reduce unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections in adolescent/young adult women with depression. The Policy and Research Group is the independent evaluator implementing the randomized controlled trial.

Public Health Management Corporation Project Overview: This project will conduct a randomized controlled trial of Talking Matters , a promising, innovative program for 14- to 19-year old Black adolescents recruited from school- and community-based settings in Philadelphia. The program includes two group-level intervention tracks: 1) five adolescent-focused sessions, and 2) three adult-focused sessions.

Grounded in behavioral change theories and motivational interviewing, the Talking Matters program aims to reduce adolescents' teen pregnancy and STI/HIV risk and strengthen protective factors to improve optimal health.

Project Overview: Urban Strategies is conducting a rigorous evaluation of Project With , literary-based curriculum delivered to justice-involved youth, 15 to 19-years old, who are in probation youth camps in Los Angeles County, California. The primary component of the program is a 12-lesson literary-based curriculum focused on self-regulation, impulse control, planfulness, relationship skills, risky behaviors, and health development.

Lessons include creating student poetry, short stories, and discussions based on excerpts from films and other videos. Other components of the program include shared meals with trained Youth Advocates, monthly follow-up meetings, mentoring, and goal setting that occurs after the program ends and after youth are released from the probation camp.