Arizona State University and the 43 middle schools of Phoenix, AZ. seek funds for a full implementation of the Drug Resistance Strategies Project to understand ethnic differences in drug resistance, develop, and test ethnically-sensitive prevention programs, compare skills training alone and in combination with normative training, and test a mediational model of prevention on an ethnically diverse middle schools population. The preliminary research will involve over 6,000 subjects and an evaluation study will involve a similar number, for a total of 12,000. If successful, the intervention will be used in every 7th grade class in the 9th largest U.S. city. The proposed continuation will be conducted in 3 phases. Phase I will investigate how youths resist drugs, comparing Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Europe Americans. Sixty interviews will be conducted with members of each ethnic group (2 schools, 180 interviews total), and surveys will be conducted in a random sample of the other schools (N=1,500). Analyses of the interviews and surveys will make ethnic comparisons for resistance strategies include alterative leisure activities and other avoidance techniques, implicit and explicit pressure and norms, and responses to continued pressure. Focus groups will be conducted to validate and extend the findings. In Phase II the Phase I findings will be used to create refusal skills programs, conservative normative program and booster and assessment instruments for Mexican Americans and European Americans. Each intervention program will consist of four 6-minute refusal skills video tapes, 4 roles plays, 4 guided discussions, one minute normative video and guided discussion. In Phase III the interventions will be presented in middle schools to over 6,000 7th graders. A pretest/posttest design will be used, with repeated posttests and boosters during an 18-month period following the intervention. After a school-level analysis for overall program effect, individual-level analyses will include regression techniques to compare the effectiveness of Mexican American and European American refusal skills programs with and without nonnative intervention for each ethnic group and structural equations modeling (LISREL) for each ethnic group to test a mediational model.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 53 publications
