Journal of Adolescence 1999, 22, 555±566

Article No. jado.1999.0248, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

De®ning peer education

MICHAEL SHINER

Although popular, peer education is surrounded by considerable ambiguity. To

encourage greater clarity an operational framework for de®ning and interpreting peer
interventions is presented in this article. The author recommends that consideration
should be given to what it is that constitutes ``peerness'', the aims and methods of an
intervention and the way in which peer educators are involved. Re¯ecting a gap in the
existing literature, particular attention is paid to the nature of peer involvement. A key
distinction is posited between ``peer development'' and ``peer delivery'' and it is
suggested that there is a ``®t'' between location, approach and client group.
# 1999 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents

Introduction

Since the 1960s the popularity of peer education has ¯ourished to such an extent that it has
become well established within schools and the youth service (Milburn, 1995; Miller and
MacGilchrist, 1996). Strongly associated with social welfare issues such as drug use, much of
peer education's appeal rests on the view that it is rooted in a naturally occurring process
whereby young people learn a lot from one another as part of their everyday lives (Carr et al.,
1994; Milburn, 1995; Shiner and Newburn, 1996; Ward et al., 1997; British Youth Council,
1998a,b). Despite the popularity and common sense appeal of this approach, it continues to
be associated with a number of dif®culties. First, due to a lack of formal evaluation there is a
lack of ®rm evidence relating to its ef®cacy (Ward et al., 1997). Second, the vocabulary that
surrounds peer education has been insuf®ciently developed. Consequently clear de®nitions
have remained elusive. It is this gap that provides the key focus for this article as it presents
an attempt to develop an operational framework that distinguishes between a variety of peer
approaches and offers greater de®nitional clarity than is currently available.
The need for tighter de®nitions is clear. The term peer education is primarily used to
describe education of young people by young people, and the work of Tobler (1986, 1992) is
often cited in support of such an approach (see, for example, Dorn and Murji, 1992). Closer
inspection, however, reveals that what Tobler (1992, p. 15) described as ``peer programs''
were actually delivered by ``mental health professionals'', ``teachers'' and ``health education
specialists'' as well as ``peer leaders''. The ``peer'' element in these programmes was their focus
on peer resistance skills. Developing tighter de®nitions will encourage greater consistency in
the use of key terms. It will also help to ensure that workers involved in peer education
projects have a clear idea of what it is they are supposed to be implementing, and that those
who fund peer education projects know exactly what it is that they are supporting. Greater
de®nitional clarity may also increase the ability of evaluators to identify what works.
Currently the range of approaches that may simply be de®ned as peer education means that
effective and ineffective approaches may be being con¯ated.
The research on which this article draws is currently being conducted as part of the Home
Of®ce's Drugs Prevention Initiative (DPI). One of the key themes of the DPI is peer

Reprint requests and correspondence should be addressed to M. Shiner, Department of Social Policy and Politics,
Goldsmiths College, Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW, U.K.

0140-1971/99/040555+12 $30
00/0 # 1999 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents
556 M. Shiner

education and, as part of the initiative's second phase, it has supported eight projects
working under three Drug Prevention Teams (DPTs).

West Yorkshire DPT

Run by the local Social Services Department, The Bradford and Keighley Schools Peer
Education Project involved 17 secondary schools. Trained in two intakes during the summers
of 1996 and 1997, peer educators from each school were trained to deliver sessions during
their lower sixth year. The Allerton Young People's Peer Education Project was located in a
socially and economically deprived part of Bradford and targeted young people aged 14±21
who were not using mainstream youth services. As well as covering drug awareness, the
project focused on issues such as sex and sexuality, race and racism and mental health. The
Young Working Women's Peer Education Project focused on the needs of women aged 14±21
and was located within Bradford Working Women's Project (BWWP), a community health
project working with women involved in prostitution.

Sussex DPT
Co-ordinated by the Personal and Social Education Advisory Team, the East Sussex project
took the form of a school-based initiative although it also involved the Youth Service.
Volunteers were trained in their lower sixth year to work as drugs peer educators. Two schools
were involved in the ®rst year of the project and although one did not continue its
involvement into the second year another school replaced it. In West Sussex, the Health
Promotion Unit developed a ``cascade'' approach whereby teachers, youth workers and a
police liaison of®cer were trained as ``peer tutors'' and encouraged to establish peer education
projects in their host organisations.

East Midlands DPT

Focusing on the needs of young people aged 16±25 from minority ethnic groups, separate
projects were established in Leicester, Derby and Nottingham. The Leicester project was
based in the local Drugs Advice Centre, the Nottingham project was located in a Black-
speci®c voluntary organization and the Derby project was located within a health promotion
unit.

Methodology

The evaluative research on which this article is based aims to assess the value of peer-led
approaches as a means of delivering drugs prevention. It has two levels. The ®rst includes all
of the projects described above and seeks to map out the key elements of the strategies and
approaches developed, highlighting similarities and differences. The second level is made up
of a series of detailed case studies and includes the Allerton Project, the Working Women's
Project, the Bradford and Keighley Schools' Project, the East Sussex Project and the
Leicester Project.
A range of research methods was used. A comprehensive review of the peer education
literature was conducted (Newburn, 1997). Focusing primarily, but not exclusively on drug
interventions, searches were conducted at the libraries of the Health Education Authority,
the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence and the National Institute for Social Work.
A bibliographic database known as Socio®le was also used.
 De®ning peer education 557

The ®eld work for the evaluation was primarily qualitative in nature and continued
throughout 1997 until the autumn of 1998. Training and delivery sessions were observed at
the case study projects and in-depth interviews were conducted with workers in each of the
projects and with members of the relevant Drug Prevention Teams. Additionally, for the case
study projects, interviews were conducted with peer educators, people who attended peer
education sessions and with representatives of relevant organizations such as schools, social
services departments and drugs agencies. For all of these interviews a semi-structured
approach was adopted in order to encourage respondents to talk freely and to raise issues that
were important to them. They were all tape-recorded and fully transcribed.
The study is due to be completed by the spring of 1999. Although the discussion below
should not be viewed as presenting ®nal conclusions it is based on a comprehensive literature
review, careful re¯ection over 18 months of intensive ®eldwork and preliminary analysis. The
emergence of explanatory hypotheses or schemas is a key part of qualitative ®eldwork (Glaser
and Strauss, 1968; Burgess, 1984; Agar, 1986). During this study the hypotheses and ideas
that emerged during the ®eldwork were repeatedly tested and re®ned. Formal analysis, based
on analytical grids, is being conducted according to the approach outlined by Agar (1986).

Working towards better de®nitions

Peer education can best be viewed as an umbrella term covering a range of different
approaches. In order to distinguish adequately between the variety of approaches that may be
included under the general rubric of peer education, explicit consideration should be given to
the following: (i) what it is that is believed to constitute ``peerness''; (ii) the aims of the
intervention and the methods by which it is expected to work; and (iii) the nature of ``peer
involvement'' in the intervention. The term ``peer involvement'' is used to describe the way
in which the role of the peer educators is de®ned.

De®ning ``peerness''
Although, at an abstract level, peer education may be de®ned straightforwardly as ``sharing
our experiences and learning from others like us'' (Robins, 1994, p. 2), attempts to translate
peer education theory into practice make it clear that this simplicity is illusory. There is, for
example, no consensus about what the term ``peer'' describes. Coleman and Hendry (1990)
have, for example, noted that it is unclear from the literature whether the term peer
describes close friends, habitual associates or relative strangers who just happen to be
involved in the same activity in the same setting. Even if we accept the most general view of
what constitutes a ``peer'', the question remains what makes somebody like us?
In relation to peer education theory the unequivocal answer to this question is age. With
an image of adults as distant authority ®gures who lack credibility, this approach tends
towards a subcultural view of youth (Carr et al., 1994; Shiner and Newburn, 1996). Without
wishing to question the view that the peer group becomes a key reference point during
adolescence and provides a source of independence, identity and recognition (Coleman and
Hendry, 1990), it is worth highlighting the mechanistic nature of much peer education
theory. The notion of peer is tied to that of identity which, as Gilroy (1997, p. 302) has
noted, ``can help us to comprehend the formation of that fateful pronoun ``we'' and to reckon
with the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that it cannot but help to create''.
558 M. Shiner

In the contemporary world identities derive from a multiplicity of sources including roles
that social actors take on (such as being a mother or a father), group categories that they feel
they belong to (such as those based on ethnicity) and experiences that they have (such as
having taken drugs). There may be con¯ict between sources in the construction of identity
positions and consequently contradictory and fragmented identities may be produced. The
key point in relation to peer education is that, although potentially important, age does not
constitute a master status that overrides all other possible sources of identity (Goffman,
1959, 1963; Becker, 1963; Woodward, 1997).
The implications of the previous discussion for group formation and for peer education
were evident in the experiences of the projects included in the evaluation. Tension and/or
con¯ict was evident among the peer educators or between the peer educators and those they
were seeking to educate on the basis of ethnicity, sexuality, social class and sex. It should also
be noted that, in identifying groups of peer educators, the projects included in the study took
account of more than just age (for a similar point see British Youth Council, 1998a). Thus,
for example, the Midlands' projects took account of ethnicity, the Working Women's Project
took account of sex and life-style (all of the peer educators were women who were or had
been involved in prostitution) and the schools projects took account of educational
experiences (they only recruited sixth formers). In short, it should not be assumed that age
constitutes a suf®cient basis for identi®cation between people, and projects that take account
of other factors in an attempt to construct peer groups should make this explicit.

Aims and methods

Peer education poses an alternative to the ``expert'' status of the professional (Cripps, 1997b).
A common theme that united the projects included in the evaluation was an emphasis on
the validity of lay experience and attitudes. This was translated into a rejection of didactic
methods and an emphasis on learning that was both interactive and participative (for a
similar point see British Youth Council, 1998b). Re¯ecting this orientation the project
workers and teachers involved in the projects frequently voiced a concern that they did not
want to set the peer educators up as ``little teachers''.
Although peer education has a distinctive ¯avour it is not wedded to any particular set of
aims or methods. Early peer interventions were rooted in behavioural psychology and, in
relation to drugs, were explicitly about primary prevention.1 They often sought to involve
attractive role models and focused on modelling appropriate behaviour, rehearsing possible
roles and providing arguments and facts that could be used to counter peer pressure (Tobler,
1986, 1992; Dorn and Murji, 1992; Milburn, 1995).
More recently, however, peer interventions have developed a more cognitive orientation
and have embraced more ``neutral'' approaches to drugs prevention (Power, 1994; Bottomley
et al., 1995; Klee and Reid, 1995; Ward et al., 1997). The emphasis of the Youth Awareness
Programme (YAP) on giving young people the ``facts'' about drugs and telling them the
``truth'' has a clear cognitive ring to it. In this context, employing peer educators is seen as
having the advantage that they will be perceived as offering more credible, less biased
information than other potential sources (Shiner and Newburn, 1996). While harm
reduction and secondary prevention can clearly have a cognitive focus (Ward et al., 1997),
they may also have a basis in behaviourism. Peer educators, particularly if they take on the
1
The term ``primary prevention'' is used to describe interventions that aim to discourage people from using drugs in
the ®rst place.
 De®ning peer education 559

role of ``indigenous advocates'', may act as models of alternative behaviour such as using full-
strength bleach for syringe hygiene (Power, 1994, p. 15).
Given the ¯exibility of peer education and the range of uses to which it has been
put, adequate de®nition requires explicit consideration of the aims and methods of an
intervention. In relation to drug education, Dorn and Murji (1992) and Tobler (1986, 1992)
provide a useful analysis of the aims and methodological assumptions of various approaches.
Furthermore, and as already indicated, on-going debates about primary prevention,
secondary prevention and harm reduction (see, for example, Newcombe, 1987; Noble
et al., 1988; O'Connor and Saunders, 1992; Duncan et al., 1994) are clearly relevant to the
de®nition of peer interventions within the drugs ®eld.
While reasonably detailed outlines of the theoretical origins of peer education and the
aims, methods and assumptions of a variety of approaches to drugs work are available,
interventions are not routinely grounded in this literature. According to Milburn (1995,
p. 408):

this theoretical pedigree may also be viewed as simply providing a very generalized framework of
justi¢cation. . . Such con£ation of basic theory, working hypotheses and intuitively appealing
concepts are characteristic of peer education.2

The nature of peer involvement

Peer education is primarily viewed as a method of delivery (Dorn and Murji, 1992; Power,
1994; Milburn, 1995; Shiner and Newburn, 1996) and this is re¯ected in the discourse that
surrounds the approach. Peer workers are variously described as peer educators, peer trainers,
peer facilitators, peer counsellors, peer tutors, peer leaders or peer helpers. Given that these
roles may co-exist, Milburn (1995) is right to suggest that projects should be explicit about
the emphasis they place on each. Nevertheless, we should not be blind to the point that
current discourse primarily de®nes peer workers in relation to what it is that a project delivers
and as such is limited. Terms such as ``teacher'' and ``counsellor'' tell us little about the
nature of the relationship that peers may have with a project. De®ning methods and styles of
implementation is just as important as de®ning methods and styles of delivery, for, as Milburn
(1995, p. 408) has noted:

It is important to re£ect on these theories and their applications as they raise basic questions
about the nature and purposes of peer education. For example, peer education aims to tap into
what is known about existing social processes and to harness this power, but to whose ends? How
does this approach relate to other ideas current in health promotion (and stressed by many ad-
vocates of peer education) about empowerment, trust and anti-discriminatory practices?

Although issues related to implementation are considered in the peer education literature
they are rarely placed within any conceptual framework and, as a consequence, have not
become a core part of the way that we de®ne peer education. One of the key implementation
issues often identi®ed in relation to peer education is the notion of ``ownership''. Bottomley
et al. (1995, p. 12), for example, noted that the involvement of drug users as volunteers at all
stages of the programme ``generated a real sense of ownership and commitment''. Barnard
and McKeganey (1996) suggested that the degree to which prostitute peer educators feel
that they own a project may be closely related to the extent to which they feel they are
2
Although originally applied to sexual health initiatives this quotation applies equally to the drugs ®eld.
560 M. Shiner

rewarded, either ®nancially or otherwise. Similarly, although Milburn (1995, p. 411) noted
that ``many of those working in peer health education can justi®ably claim to be working
alongside young people rather than imposing programmes on them'', she also highlighted the
potential for manipulation within peer interventions:

Fundamental questions arise about whose agendas are best served by such interventions and
whether `adultist' de¢nitions of what is good for health are necessarily appropriate or relevant
for the younger sectors of society.

The importance of ownership was also re¯ected in Dayton's (1987) classi®cation which
distinguished between positive peer in¯uence programmes, peer teaching groups, peer
counselling programmes and peer participation groups. Peer participation groups were
characterized by an emphasis on participants being given decision-making power and
responsibilities placing them on a par with adults. Somewhat problematically, the categories
on which this typology is based seek to classify different dimensions. While, as already noted,
terms such as teaching and counselling describe the delivery-related function of the peer
workers, the term peer participation describes their role in relation to implementation. The
inclusion of delivery and implementation in the typology means that the resulting categories
are not mutually exclusive. A project may, for example, simultaneously form a peer teaching
group and a peer participation group. Nevertheless, Dayton's (1987) work remains important
as it is a rare attempt to include implementation within the conceptual framework of peer
education. It is an attempt that the rest of this article will seek to build on.
In seeking to fully de®ne the nature of peer involvement in a project a useful distinction
can be made between the themes of peer development and peer delivery. Peer development
describes the extent to which the personal development of the peer educators provides the
focus of an intervention. Peer delivery refers to the emphasis placed on the delivery of formal
sessions3 by the peer educators. Interventions should be de®ned in relation to both themes
and it should be recognized that, within a project, the balance between them may change
over time. In describing different orientations to peer development and peer delivery it will
be argued that the projects involved in the evaluation point to a ``®t'' between approach,
setting and client group.
A strong emphasis on peer development was one of the de®ning characteristics of those
projects included in the evaluation that were located within youth and community settings.
Although peer educators from the Working Women's Project and the Allerton Project had
made formal presentations to committees and conferences, the core of these projects was
provided by peer development. This was evident in an emphasis on the following.

Empowerment. In both the Allerton Project and the Working Women's Project the peer
educators were actively involved in formal decision-making either through attendance at
steering group meetings or at ``away days''. In both projects peer educators were encouraged
to de®ne their own needs and interests. The Allerton Project adopted a social action or self-
directed group work approach which emphasizes the sharing of power between workers and
participants and focuses on ``empowering service users to de®ne their own needs and
facilitating them to shape their own environment'' (Fleming and Ward, forthcoming). The
3
The term ``formal sessions'' has been used to distinguish this type of delivery from informal work that may be
conducted with friends and acquaintances. In regards to delivery this article is exclusively concerned with formal
work.
 De®ning peer education 561

peer educators in this project were encouraged to identify their own training needs, to
negotiate with external trainers and to de®ne the nature of the project's activity once the
initial training had been completed. The Working Women's Project had a more
individualistic orientation. Recruitment was not conducted at set times but was an ongoing
process, training needs were de®ned at the individual rather than group level and peer
educators were encouraged to identify and implement pieces of work that interested them.
One of the women, for example, established a needle exchange in a cafe that she frequented
and distributed harm reduction information about hepatitis to a group of drug users who had
had little contact with mainstream services.
Intensive work. Eighteen peer educators were involved in the Allerton Project in
two separate in-takes over a period of 2.5 years. The core training programme involved
20 3-h sessions and a weekend residential. In addition, the peer educators met
twice a week, once for volunteer support and once for planning and evaluation. At the
Working Women's Project eight peer educators were involved in the project during its
2 years. Although the degree of their contact with the project varied, for some regular
contact of up to three or four times a week was sustained throughout the lifetime of the
project.
Personal support. The Allerton Project was frequently identi®ed as an important source
of personal support by the peer educators who lived in a deprived area and had to face the
multiple forms of disadvantage that this implies, such as poor employment prospects, bene®t
dependency and low income. The emphasis on support, however, was particularly evident
within the Working Women's Project which offered peer educators advice and assistance in
relation to issues such as housing, bene®ts and access to health services. Project workers
helped women to make appointments, accompanied them to meetings/appointments and, on
occasion, took on the role of advocates. They also provided transport and childcare so peer
educators could attend training sessions and conferences.
Skills acquisition/career development. The Allerton peer education programme
included work towards a National Vocational Quali®cation (level 2) in Community Work
Training for Volunteers. Similarly, the Working Women's Project paid course and conference
fees for the peer educators and offered 6-month work placements to the women so that they
could develop work skills such as word processing. It also supported one of the women in her
attempt to complete a law degree access course and another in her application for a job as a
female prostitution liaison/outreach worker with an agency in a nearby city.
Material incentives. Although personal support and opportunities to de®ne and ful®l
one's own goals and to develop new skills may encourage participation, material incentives
are important as they communicate a clear message that a project values the time of its peer
workers. Both the Allerton Project and the Working Women's Project reimbursed their peer
educators for out-of-pocket expenses.
Within the Leicester-based Asian, Afrikan and Caribbean Peer Education Project an
emphasis on peer development was evident in a number of ways. The training was designed
to offer peer educators opportunities to explore their personal beliefs, to raise their awareness
of the issues involved and to develop con®dence (Sangster, 1997, p. 2). The course was
accredited by the Open College Network and, during the delivery phase, peer educators were
paid expenses and encouraged to work in areas of particular interest to them. One of the peer
educators who had spent time in a young offender's institution, for example, carried out work
562 M. Shiner

with a group of young men on probation orders. A focus on empowerment was also evident in
the emphasis that was placed on working with the trained peer educators to recruit, select
and train others thus ensuring that ``the project remains relevant to and controlled by young
people themselves'' (Sangster, 1997, p. 3). Compared with the other youth and community
projects included in the evaluation, however, the Leicester project had a somewhat weaker
focus on peer development and a correspondingly stronger focus on peer delivery. The
programme was designed by the project workers to include a relatively structured training
course (made up of a residential weekend and 10 weekly, 3-h sessions) and a delivery phase.
On completing their training, peer educators were encouraged to devise, develop and deliver
drug awareness sessions ``speci®cally for but not exclusively to other black young people''
(Sangster, 1997, p. 3).
In school-based projects the balance between peer development and peer delivery differed
from that evident in youth and community settings. Peer educator involvement in the
school-based projects was based around relatively structured training courses and was
explicitly geared towards delivery. Nevertheless there was some emphasis on peer
development in these projects. While the Bradford and Keighley Schools Project aimed
``to provide personal development for the educators through the training'' (Lal, 1997, p. 5), a
somewhat stronger emphasis on development was evident in the aim of the East Sussex
Project ``to establish a school based programme of peer led drug education and to support the
peer trainers in establishing their own needs and the needs of their peer group'' (Foyster,
1998). The development focus of the East Sussex Project was evident in the employment of
youth workers to run the programme in each of the schools, in the attendance of peer
educators at steering group meetings and in the involvement of peer educators in recruiting
and training subsequent in-takes.
Although the school-based projects included an emphasis on peer development, the
extent to which the peer educators owned these projects was clearly limited. They had little
in¯uence over key decisions and, in part, this re¯ected school culture for, as Cripps (1997a,
p. 28) has noted:

in day-to-day schooling, young people get few chances to make decisions Ð about their educa-
tion, their dress, their language, their behaviour Ð but plenty of opportunity to learn about
doing what you're told. This is not surprising because it is an important part of what schools are
about. They are institutions of social control designed to ¢t people into a society in which they
will also have only limited choices about what will a¡ect the circumstances of their lives.

Although school-based peer educators largely de®ned the content and style of the sessions
they delivered they typically had little in¯uence over whom they worked with and when they
worked. These decisions were largely decided by the restrictions imposed by school
timetables. School link teachers had a clear role as ``gatekeepers'' and, in one of the schools,
exam and timetable restrictions meant that plans for the peer educators to deliver sessions
were aborted. The teachers involved in the projects tended to emphasize the needs of the
school and this generally meant, for instance, that teachers remained present during the peer
education sessions.
Having pointed to a ®t between approach and setting I now wish to suggest that there is a
further ®t between approach, setting and client group. The projects located within youth and
community settings tended to work with people living in disadvantaged and marginalized
circumstances. The strong emphasis of these projects on peer development was appropriate
 De®ning peer education 563

to their client group. Hence the project workers and peer educators in both the Allerton
Project and the Working Women's Project identi®ed the emphasis on facilitation and
empowerment as a key ingredient for the projects' success. The suggestion that a strong
development focus is particularly appropriate for work with peer educators from
disadvantaged and marginalized settings is pertinent in light of the view that it is the
educators rather than the educated who bene®t most from peer interventions (Resnik and
Gibbs, 1988; Dorn and Murji, 1992).
In contrast to the youth and community projects, those based in schools drew from a
relatively advantaged section of the community. It seems likely that by recruiting exclusively
from the sixth form, the school-based projects excluded the more marginalized and alienated
elements of the student population. This tendency was often reinforced by a process of
selection whereby link teachers took on the role of ``gatekeepers'' and targeted students who
they thought would be ``suitable'' and discouraged those deemed ``unsuitable''. In general the
school-based peer educators ®tted in with the needs of the schools.4 Furthermore, while the
peer educators involved in the Bradford and Keighley Project were happy to work within a
well-de®ned structure, those involved in East Sussex Project were less comfortable with the
empowerment-focus of their project. This was evident in the preference expressed by peer
educators in one of the schools for a more traditional, structured way of learning and for a
stronger focus on knowledge rather than skills. The East Sussex project workers have
concluded that more training is required in order to make the peer educators feel
comfortable with the approach of the project.
In suggesting that there is a ®t between approach and client group, the experience of the
Leicester project is also illuminating. The second intake of peer educators for this project was
very heterogeneous. While some of those involved worked in areas such as health promotion
and had an interest in the project that could reasonably be described as ``professional'', for
others their life experiences included unemployment, homelessness, living in the looked-after
system and contact with the youth justice system. Among those with a professional
background there was a feeling that some of the peer educators had not been committed to
the project and frustration was expressed at the way these individuals were allowed to ``mess
about'' by the project workers.
The implications for practice are clear. Careful thought should be given to the extent to
which a particular approach ®ts the location and the needs and orientations of the people
involved. The projects included in the evaluation indicate that a school environment limits
the extent to which a strong peer development focus can be realized. They also point to a
situation whereby young people with a reasonably academic or professional focus are happy
to work in a relatively structured way according to the traditional methods of learning that
have served them well. For disadvantaged and marginalized young people with a less
academic or professional orientation a strong emphasis on peer development is more
appropriate. Such an emphasis, it has been suggested, can be more fully realized in a youth
and community setting.

4
It should be noted, however, that in East Sussex one school ceased to be involved in the initiative after the ®rst
year and issues around control and ``ownership'' were key. Although the peer educators were involved in the process
by which the youth worker was appointed they felt that their views had been disregarded and this contributed to the
undermining of the project in this school. The dissatisfaction of these peer educators focused on the perceived
mismatch between the rhetoric and reality of peer education and on a feeling that they had been ``duped''.
564 M. Shiner

Conclusion

Although peer education has become a popular way of responding to a variety of social
welfare issues including drugs and drug use, it is surrounded by a lack of de®nitional clarity.
It can most appropriately be viewed as an umbrella term used to describe a range of
interventions where the educators and the educated are seen to share something that
creates an af®nity between them (such as a characteristic like age or an experience
like working as a prostitute). Peer education poses an alternative to notions of
professional credibility and is further characterized by an emphasis on learning that
is both interactive and participative. Historically grounded in the assumptions of
behaviourism and primary prevention, more recently peer interventions have emerged with
a cognitive focus and with an emphasis on harm reduction and secondary prevention. Given
this diversity, the description of an intervention as a ``peer education'' tells us little about its
aims and methods.
There is also considerable ambiguity about what it is that constitutes a peer. Within
the literature the term is applied to describe close friends, habitual associates or
relative strangers who just happen to be involved in the same activity in the same setting.
Even if we accept the most general de®nition certain problems persist. In the context of peer
education, peer is de®ned primarily in terms of age and there is a danger that such de®nitions
may be mechanistic and simplistic. Individuals construct identities in relation to a
multiplicity of characteristics, some of which may con¯ict. While age may be important it
does not constitute a master status that overrides all other possible sources identity such as
ethnicity, sexuality, social class and sex. It should not be assumed that age constitutes a
suf®cient basis for identi®cation between people. In seeking to construct peer groups, projects
frequently take account of other factors. Where they do so, they should be explicit about
this.
The lack of clarity that surrounds peer education brings with it a number of potential
problems. Project workers and peer educators may be unclear about what exactly it is that
they should be doing and funders may be unclear about what it is they are supporting.
Furthermore, in combining a range of different approaches under the title of peer education,
evaluators may be failing to distinguish effective approaches from ineffective ones. Clearer
de®nitions will help to eliminate such ambiguity.
In order to be comprehensive, de®nitions of peer interventions should consider the
following: (i) what it is that is believed to constitute ``peerness'', (ii) the aims of the
intervention and the methods by which it is expected to work; and (iii) the nature of ``peer
involvement'' in the intervention. The term ``peer involvement'' is used to describe the way
in which the role of the peer educators is de®ned.
Existing literature is particularly thin in relation to the third of these areas. It
has been suggested in this article that, in de®ning the role of peer educators, a key
distinction lies between ``peer development'' and ``peer delivery''. Peer delivery refers to the
extent to which formal sessions delivered by the peer workers provide the focus for a
project. Peer development, on the other hand, describes the extent to which a project focuses
on the personal development of the peer educators. It incorporates a number of key
implementation issues into the way that we conceptualize peer interventions. A strong
emphasis on peer development is characterized by intensive work with a small number of
people over an extended period of time, an emphasis on empowerment and peer educator
``ownership'' of the project and the central involvement of peer educators in the
 De®ning peer education 565

decision-making process. The provision of material incentives and a focus on providing

personal support and skills acquisition are also key elements of this approach. It has
been noted that an emphasis on peer development does not necessarily preclude an
emphasis on peer delivery and vice versa. It has also been recognized that the orientation
of an intervention towards these concepts may change over time. Peer development and
peer delivery should be viewed as themes, and projects should be de®ned in relation to
both.
The projects included in the evaluation on which this article is based indicate
that, in relation to the nature of peer involvement, there is a ``®t'' between location,
approach and client group. Those projects that were located within youth and
community settings had a stronger emphasis on peer development than those based
in schools and a weaker emphasis on peer delivery. In part this re¯ected cultural
differences between these different locations. Project workers with youth and
community work backgrounds emphasized the importance of empowerment, facilitation
and peer ownership. By contrast, teachers involved in the projects tended to
emphasize the interests of the school and frequently took on the role of ``gatekeepers''.
Furthermore, the structured nature of the school environment limited the extent to
which peer educators in these settings could in¯uence key decisions. While peer educators
with a relatively academic or professional orientation were happy to work in relatively
structured environments, a strong emphasis on peer development was particularly
appropriate in projects working with more marginalized and disadvantaged young people.
Good practice in relation to peer education involves careful consideration of the extent to
which the approach used ®ts with the location and the needs and circumstances of the
people involved.

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