Alcohol abuse among adolescents is a pressing health concern with serious consequences for the drinking youth and society, including juvenile delinquency, school dropout, traffic injuries, and fatalities, violence, suicide, and AIDS risk behaviors. Although the magnitude of the problem has stimulated a dramatic increase in research attention in recent years, the field of adolescent alcohol abuse is characterized by an absence of controlled clinical trails of intervention programs, and few efficacious, replicable, and enduring treatment strategies have been identified. Moreover, there continues to be a gap in the treatment literature integrating theoretical treatment formulations and empirically derived correlates of alcohol and substance abuse behaviors, such as the host of risk and protective factors thought to either increase the risk for offer protective benefits against the development of adolescent alcohol and other substance abuse problems. The proposed randomized clinical trial for adolescent problem drinking is designed to examine treatment outcomes for four intervention approaches, individual cognitive-behavioral therapy, family therapy, an integrative treatment approach that combines individual and family therapy interventions, and a skills-focused psycho-educational group intervention. Each of these treatment approaches has strong theoretical and empirical bases and suggests distinct sets of risk and protective factors. An evaluation of outcomes across the four conditions will provide a clearer understanding of which treatment approaches have the greatest benefit for the drinking adolescent, the drinker's parents and siblings, the family system functioning relative to the associated costs of drinker's parents and siblings, and the family system functioning relative to the associated costs of treatment. Moreover, by testing hypotheses linking specific risk and protective factors directly to theoretical treatment formulations, examining selected client-treatment matching variables, and examining therapy process in relation to outcome, the mechanism and action of factors associated with adolescent problem drinking and the change process can be explicated, enhancing the theoretical understanding of the problem and guiding the development of effective treatments.
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| Flicker, Sharon M; Waldron, Holly Barrett; Turner, Charles W et al. (2008) Ethnic matching and treatment outcome with Hispanic and Anglo substance-abusing adolescents in family therapy. J Fam Psychol 22:439-47 |
| Flicker, Sharon M; Turner, Charles W; Waldron, Holly B et al. (2008) Ethnic background, therapeutic alliance, and treatment retention in functional family therapy with adolescents who abuse substances. J Fam Psychol 22:167-70 |
| Waldron, Holly Barrett; Turner, Charles W; Ozechowski, Timothy J (2005) Profiles of drug use behavior change for adolescents in treatment. Addict Behav 30:1775-96 |
| Brody, J L; Waldron, H B (2000) Ethical issues in research on the treatment of adolescent substance abuse disorders. Addict Behav 25:217-28 |
