General AFL goals include emphasis on the importance of family involvement in the delivery of services; promotion of adolescent premarital sexual abstinence; adoption as a positive alternative to early parenting; and comprehensive health, education, and social services designed to help the mother to have a healthy baby and to improve subsequent life prospects for both infant and mother.

The AFL Demonstration Program was enacted to provide local communities and institutions with workable models of prevention programs that discourage premarital adolescent sexual relations, and care programs that reduce the negative consequences of adolescent pregnancy. To develop these models, AFL authorized grants for three types of demonstrations: (1) projects which provide "care services" only (e.g., services for the provision of comprehensive services to pregnant adolescents, adolescent parents, and their families); (2) projects which provide "prevention services" only (e.g., services to promote abstinence from adolescent premarital sexual relations); and (3) projects which provide a combination of care and prevention services. The demonstration projects were multi-year projects (3-5 years), renewable annually. As of March 1988, 97 demonstration projects had been funded.

Human Sexuality: Values and Choices is a 15-session, values-based, parent-involved, video-assisted school curriculum for seventh and eighth graders. The course is designed and sponsored by Search Institute, a not-for-profit research institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Field test sites were located in public schools in Denver, Colorado; Detroit, Michigan; Minneapolis and Grand Rapids, Minnesota; and the San Francisco Bay area of California. The curriculum began implementation in 1983 with AFL funding; the field test began in the fall of 1985 and concluded in the spring of 1986.

The curriculum's goals were to decrease the intention to engage in intercourse "while I am a teenager," to instill values supporting sexual restraint in adolescence, and to increase the amount of parent-child communication concerning sexuality and its expression. Parents are invited to attend a three-session course introducing them to the curriculum and materials.

Seven values were used in the curriculum as a basis for teaching about human relationships in general and sexuality in particular: (1) equality, (2) honesty, (3) respect, (4) responsibility, (5) promise-keeping, (6) self-control, and (7) social justice.

A pretest/posttest/delayed posttest design with a control group was employed to assess the effectiveness of the course. A 100-item questionnaire was administered immediately before (September 1985), immediately after (November 1985), and three to four months after completion of the course (March 1986). The questionnaire was administered both to students who took the course and to students in the same school and grade who did not take it. (Control students received the course after the treatment group completed the delayed posttest.)

The field test was designed to test the following hypotheses:

The last hypothesis was included in order to examine whether a course emphasizing abstinence might result in more negative or repressed attitudes toward sexuality. Hypotheses (1) through (5) and hypothesis (9) were tested using scales constructed from two to eight items each, with internal consistencies between .54 and .86. (See Appendix B for information on how these scales are constructed.) Hypotheses (6) and (7) were tested with single items. Hypothesis (8), or behavioral intention to engage in intercourse, was tested using the indices specified by the theory of reasoned action F(tihseh bein model).