APPLICANT'S ABSTRACT The major research objectives of this five year longitudinal study to determine the long range effectiveness of a theory-based, school-focused intervention directed at altering elementary school norms and behavior towards a more caring, school climate to reduce later risk factors for adolescent substance use/misuse. The specific aims are to: 1) assess the contribution (evaluate) the long term impact of the Child Development Project (CDP) elementary school intervention into middle school on the prevention of drug abuse, delinquency, and other problem behaviors, 2) test the theoretical model of CDP in a longitudinal follow-up and assess its hypothesized causal relations between school experiences, risk and resiliency factors, and positive and negative developmental outcomes, including drug use and other problem behaviors; and 3) conduct longitudinal analyses of risk and resiliency factors in order to further understanding of the etiology of drug use and other problem behaviors among a diverse sample of youth from childhood through early adolescence. The study is based on a quasi-experimental, cohort-sequential design involving about 5,000 students in the first four years of data collection (2,500-3,000 in first three years and 1,500 in year four Note: this adds to 4,000 to 4,500 not 5,000) from two intervention and two control schools in each of four school districts in four different regions of the country--West, South, Southeast, and Northeast. The study requests funding for four additional waves of data collection and to analyze these and other data collected. Complete middle school data will be collected on two cohorts and partial on three additional cohorts. The final analyses will be completed and reported in the fifth year. The unit of assignment is the schools--two treatment and two control schools in four school districts. The actual students are recruited through the computerized school roosters. Power analyses were used to determine the final sample sizes based on the preliminary demonstration/evaluation data collection numbers. The initial cohort #1 size was 3,866 or 78% of the total number who returned consent forms, which was 76% of the total number enrolled in grades 3 to 5 in the 16 schools. With annual attrition rates estimated at about 8-12%, they expect to have about 2,500 to 3,000 per cohort. All parents sign active consent forms prior to the posttesting. The data analyses will consist of repeated measures analysis of variance and iterative testing of covariance structure models of risk and resilience and adolescent ATOD use/misuse.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter