Schools’ Readiness for Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Education: an Overview of Theoretical Models

TL;DR

This paper reviews theoretical models to assess schools' readiness for preventing child sexual abuse and recommends one for further use.

Contribution

The paper identifies and evaluates theoretical models for schools' readiness in CSA prevention and recommends Weiner’s organizational readiness model.

Findings

Three theoretical model groups were identified for assessing readiness in CSA prevention.

Weiner’s organizational readiness for change model was recommended as the most suitable for assessing schools’ readiness.

The use of specific criteria (Birken et al. 2017) proved useful in evaluating theoretical models for implementation research.

Abstract

Schools’ readiness appears an important factor influencing their implementation of violence prevention programs. This review was undertaken to identify, describe, and compare existing theoretical readiness models and their strengths and limitations, and to select an appropriate theoretical model to underpin the study of schools’ readiness for child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention education. This, in turn, would guide development of a new instrument to assess schools’ readiness for CSA prevention. Searches were conducted from September to December 2022 in ERIC, PsychINFO, PubMed, Science Direct, Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, and handsearches were made in academic journals. We included peer-reviewed papers published in English that reported the development, testing, or use of a theoretical readiness model at an organizational level. We identified three candidate groups of theoretical models from 85 papers: the community readiness model, the multidimensional child maltreatment prevention readiness model, and organizational readiness for change theories. These models were appraised using four criteria for selecting implementation science theories and frameworks (Birken et al. 2017). We propose Weiner’s (2009) organizational readiness for change as the most plausible theoretical model with both descriptive and analytical potential for assessing schools’ readiness for child sexual abuse prevention education, and discuss the conceptual and empirical strengths and weaknesses of the identified models. The review has demonstrated the utility of applying criteria (Birken et al. 2017) to appraise and select theoretical readiness models in CSA prevention education and other implementation research areas.

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