This application is in response to the drug abuse prevention through family intervention announcement (PA-96-013). The goal of the project is to examine the efficacy of two different family interventions: a family self-administered program with telephone follow-up, and a family self-administered program plus parent and adolescent group meetings. The intervention content is based on Parents Who Care (PWC), a theory-based drug prevention intervention for families with teenage children. The program was developed and field-tested under a NIDA SBIR grant (DA07435). Based on the social development model (Catalano & Hawkins, 1996; Catalano, Kosterman et al., 1996), the intervention utilizes principles of social learning and attachment theory. The elements of family style (family affect, patterns of involvement and bonding) and family processes (parenting practices) have both been incorporated into the social development theory (Darling and Steinberg, 1993).
Specific aims of this project are: 1) to compare the efficacy of Parents Who Care family skills training curriculum using two different interventions; outcomes examined will include immediate (session by session), proximal (risk and protective factors) and distal outcomes (substance abuse and other problem behavior), 2) to model the impact of the different modes of intervention and risk status of families on hypothesized micro processes of change and 3) to conduct a benefit-cost analysis of the different modes of delivery of the program.
