Friendships and Dating

The Program

The Friendships & Dating Program teaches teens and adults, 16 years old and older, with intellectual and related developmental disabilities, and youth with serious emotional disturbance (SED) how to develop and maintain healthy relationships and prevent interpersonal violence. Friendships & Dating is a train-the-trainer program; community agency personnel facilitate the program to groups of teens and adults  in agency and community settings. Friendships & Dating is a 10-week long program made up of 20 sessions. Sessions are held twice a week and last approximately 1.5 hours each. The first session of each week focuses on participants learning new skills. The second session centers on applying these new skills in a community setting. Over the 10-weeks participants learn about:

  • feelings and emotions
  • types of relationships
  • personal boundaries
  • communication
  • meeting people
  • first impressions
  • planning social activities
  • the dating process
  • personal safety
  • healthy relationships
  • sexual health
  • differences in relationships
  • conflict resolution
  • maintaining relationships
FDP participant outcomes on social network size. Participants’ social network size significantly increased from an average of: 5.4 people at baseline, 7.0 people at the end if the program, and ten weeks later, social network size remained elevated at 6.7 people.
FDP outcomes on interpersonal violence graph shows the average number of incidents of interpersonal violence significantly decreased over the program from: 3.4 at baseline, 1.5 at the end of the program, and 0.7 ten weeks after the program ended.​