{"doi":"10.31234/osf.io/s2pcu_v1","title":"Mediating Pathways in Faith-Based Sexual Risk-Reduction for African American Adolescents: Insights from a Church-Based Randomized Controlled Trial","abstract":"African American youth face disproportionate risks for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other sexually transmitted infections, highlighting the need for culturally tailored, evidence-based interventions. This research reports a secondary, exploratory analysis examining the mediation effects of theoretical constructs on the efficacy of sexual risk-reduction interventions promoting abstinence for African American adolescents in church-based settings. The participants are African American adolescents aged 11-14 from 14 churches in Philadelphia, PA (N = 613) who participated in a randomized controlled trial of parent-child faith-based and non-faith-based sexual risk-reduction interventions. Data were collected at baseline, immediate post-intervention, and 3-, 6-, 12-, and 18-month post-intervention. We examined whether the interventions’ effects on the frequency of sexual intercourse in the past three months were mediated through theoretical constructs, including outcome expectancies, subjective norms, self-efficacy, and intention, using a product-of-coefficients approach. We also explored potential moderation effects of sexual experience, church membership, child gender, and parent gender. We found that self-efficacy mediated the effect of the faith-based intervention (α×β×γ product = -0.028, 95% ACI [-0.064, -0.002]). However, no significant mediators were identified for the non-faith-based intervention. Neither intervention had significant moderators, indicating no differences in efficacy among adolescents differing in sexual experience, church membership, gender, and parent’s gender. These findings suggest that parent-child faith-based sexual risk-reduction interventions among African American adolescents in church-based settings could benefit from focusing on boosting self-efficacy.","journal":"Arabixiv (OSF Preprints)","year":2025,"id":564129,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9492,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1467570,"name":"Terri Ann Kelly","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":775884,"name":"Larry D. Icard","orcid":"0000-0002-4205-8150","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":711492,"name":"Jingwen Zhang","orcid":"0000-0003-1733-6857","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1467571,"name":"Loretta Jemmott","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":741959,"name":"John B. Jemmott","orcid":"0000-0003-2831-8240","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":741957,"name":"Soojong Kim","orcid":"0000-0002-1334-5310","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:56:20.933088Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}