The proposed application is designed to extend work conducted previously which assessed the effectiveness of a promising school-based drug abuse prevention approach with inner-city, minority youth. During the planned follow-up, data would be collected from a cohort of indivuduals who began participation in this longitudinal study in the fall of 1993 when they were 7th graders. Schools (N=29) were randomly assigned to either treatment or control conditions. Individuals in the treatment group received a 13-session prevention program in grade 7 and a 9-session booster intervention in grade 8. All participants were pretested and posttested by questionnaire in grade 7 and assessed annually in grades 8 and 0. Included were items concerning self-reported tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use as well as items/scales assessing drug-related knowledge, attitudes, norms, and resistance skills; personal and social skills; and an array of psychosocial varialbes (e.g., self-esteem, self-efficacy). During the continuation period, data would be collected annually, in the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades, to determine the long-term effectiveness of the preventive intervention on illicit drug use, hypothesized mediating variables, and psychosocial functioning. The work proposed offers the potential of significantly increasing our understanding of the durability of a promising prevention approach and its mediating mechanisms, and providing further information concerning the etiology of drug use over a critical period ranging from early adolescence through high school.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 35 publications
