Community-based interventions for young adolescents: The Penn State PRIDE project

The goals of the Penn State PRIDE Project (Policy, Research, and Intervention for Enhancing Development in Early Adolescence) are to build collaborations within the university among researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and between the university and local communities in Pennsylvania. This article focuses on the PRIDE Project's university-community collaboration activities; these have, as a centerpiece, Penn State Cooperative Extension. With local Cooperative Extension agents serving as the bridge between university-based researchers and local community members, our collaborative activities have included: building university-community relationships, carrying out needs assessments, program planning and program evaluation research, and conducting policy seminars at the state and local levels to disseminate research-based knowledge on issues of adolescent development. In addition to describing our activities, we highlight some of the challenges of university-community collaboration; these challenges range from methodological difficulties involved in field evaluation studies to the constraints of outreach scholarship within traditional academic settings.