This field trial will examine whether the Coping Power prevention program, which has been demonstrated to have preventive effects on youths' substance use and delinquency in prior efficacy and effectiveness studies, can be usefully taken """"""""to scale"""""""" and delivered in an effective manner by existing staff in a range of urban school sites. This study will have substantial policy implications for implementation of prevention programs in real-world settings. The Coping Power program is based on a contextual social-cognitive developmental model, and is designed to be provided to preadolescent children who are at risk for later substance use because of their high levels of aggressive behaviors. The multi-component program impacts mediating processes in the child (social cognitive and self-regulation processes) and family (parenting practices), while working closely with classroom teachers. The Child Component of the Coping Power program is directly derived from an Anger Coping program, which has itself been shown to prevent high levels of adolescent substance use. In this planned field study, existing school staff (school counselors, school psychologists, school social workers, school resource officers) will be trained to use the Coping Power program with high-risk children at the time of transition to middle school in the 5th and 6th grades. This innovative field study will address three primary gaps in the literature: (a) whether this type of prevention program can be taken """"""""to scale"""""""" and produce positive substance use outcomes, good intervention integrity, and sustained use in the years following training; (b) whether the intensity level of training (Coping Power - Intensive Training: CP-IT; versus Coping Power - Basic Training: CP - BT) will impact the intervention outcomes, intervention integrity, and sustained intervention use; and (c) whether organizational and student population characteristics of the schools, and characteristics of the school site staff who will implement the intervention, will impact intervention outcomes, intervention integrity, and sustained intervention use. To address these gaps, this field trial will randomly assign 60 elementary schools to one of three conditions: CP-IT, CP-BT, or Control. Ten children in each school will be screened as being at-risk because of 4th grade teachers' ratings of students' aggressive behaviors, resulting in a total sample of 600 target children (20 schools and 200 children per condition).
Showing the most recent 10 out of 13 publications
