The Department of Education awarded a nearly $2 million grant for the “empowerment” of LGBTQ teenagers.
The Institute of Educational Sciences approved the four-year grant to a research team at Boston College. The group will study the Empowerment Program for Individual and Collective Health (EPIC-Health), an intervention program offered to minors who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.
The study – titled “Building EPIC-Health: An Empowerment Program for LGBTQ+ Students in School GSAs” – will receive $1,992,348 from the Department of Education.
“Many LGBTQ+ students contend with unsafe learning environments and report greater school avoidance, poorer report card grades, and lower intentions to complete high school,” reads the purpose of the study. “There are few school-based interventions for LGBTQ+ youth who need tailored interventions to address their specific needs, build upon their strengths, and promote positive social-emotional and academic outcomes.”
The team is led by Paul Poteat, a professor in Boston College’s Department of Counseling, Developmental & Educational Psychology. His research focuses on “school-based experiences of sexual and gender minority youth,” including the benefits of extracurricular clubs like Gender-Sexuality Alliances (GSA) and factors that contribute to bias-based harassment.
This is the third time he has led or been involved in a study on LGBTQ issues that has received over $1 million from the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Education. In total, Poteat has received over $5 million in federal funding for studies related to his field of interest since September 2015.
Poteat told The College Fix that he believes his latest study “align[s] closely with the Catholic Jesuit principles that are best highlighted in the mission statement of our School of Education and Human Development at Boston College” but that he is not Catholic.
“LGBTQ+ youth need tailored interventions to address their specific needs, build upon their strengths, and promote positive social-emotional and academic outcomes,” said Poteat in an email to the outlet.
The study “will develop and refine EPIC-Health in a 2-year iterative process, first with participatory planning groups and then with usability testing groups” before a “1-year pilot study of EPIC-Health using a cluster-randomized controlled trial to determine its acceptability, usability, feasibility, scalability, and potential effectiveness, as well as its cost and cost effectiveness.”
The eight GSAs involved in the study will be located in Massachusetts, New York, and California. Approximately 100 students and 16 adult advisors will partake in the planning phase of the study. Another 220 students and 16 adult GSA advisors will take part in the pilot study.
“The researchers will use semi-structured interview and review protocols to gather qualitative data and feedback from participatory planning groups and usability testing groups during the iterative design and refinement phase of the project,” the grant proposal states. “Participants in the pilot study will complete measures of emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and relational empowerment and academic outcomes (school belonging; school safety; truancy; cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement at school; career volition; and report card grades).”
