This is a four-year study to develop, implement, and evaluate an alcohol prevention program for American Indian fifth, sixth and seventh graders. This research is significant because it is aimed at urban Indian youth while prior prevention research has concentrated on reservation youth. Since only a minority of American Indian people now reside on reservations, it is important to understand how alcohol prevention strategies work with urban Indian youth. This application represents a collaborative effort between The University of Denver - Graduate School of Social Work and The National Center for American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research. The intent of this study is to develop and evaluate an alcohol prevention program that is grounded in social learning theory and that uses a life skills prevention approach. In addition to resistance skills and decision making strategies, the program will incorporate alcohol education, American Indian cultural enhancement, and involvement of parents. A quasi-experimental design will be used to evaluate the program's impact on important mediator variables and on alcohol use. The Denver metropolitan area will be the intervention site with El Paso county, Colorado's second largest urban area, serving as the no-intervention comparison site.
The specific aims of this study are to: 1) Develop and implement an appropriate life skills prevention program for urban American Indian early adolescents; 2) Evaluate the program's impact on variables which act as mediators of alcohol use; 3) Evaluate the program's impact on alcohol use; 4) Conduct a process evaluation which provides explicit documentation of the development and implementation of the project thus enabling replication of this program with other urban Indian populations.
