An experimental evaluation of community organizing and media to increase parental monitoring and limit setting is proposed. Parental monitoring and limit setting are important influences on the development of early adolescent substance use and most other problem behaviors. Media to encourage parents to monitor what their children are doing and to set and enforce clear rules about their behavior could increase the prevalence of effective levels of these parenting practices, yet such an intervention has not be evaluated. Similarly, community organizing holds promise for assisting communities in implementing programs and policies to increase supervision of youth and parents' monitoring and limit setting. However, systematic empirical studies of such an intervention are lacking. The proposed work involves a multiple baseline design in which repeated assessments of parenting practices and youth behavior are obtained in three communities and the community organizing and media intervention is introduced in one community at a time. Samples of high risk middle school youth and their families will be assessed quarterly through phone interviews. Community leaders and organization representatives will also be assessed quarterly. In addition, data will be obtained from all middle school youth in relevant grade cohorts annually. Data from parents will also be collected at these times. Parenting practices and youth behavior will be assessed via multiple methods and multiple sources in order to form psychometrically appropriate measures of constructs. In addition to providing evidence about the effects of the intervention, the study provides an important opportunity to test a model of the influences of parenting practices on the development of youthful substance use and other problem behaviors, using Latent Growth Modeling and related techniques.
