You have been asked to design a substance abuse prevention program for a high school in your community. What do you think should be the primary components of such a program?
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) indicate five basic components of substance abuse prevention program – assessment, capacity, planning, implementation, evaluation.
Dusenbury and Falco (1995) defined 11components which are necessary elements of successful drug-use preventive programs. Authors indicated that effective prevention program have to be theory driven (based on findings of current researches), developmentally appropriate (suitable for a particular age groups).
Also, according to authors effective prevention program must includes interactive teaching methods (role-play), teacher trainings and support, social resistance skills trainings or trainings of wide range of social skills such as stress management, skills of effective decision-making, etc.
While social resisting skills can help an adolescent to confront friends or peers pressure to drink alcohol or use drugs, other social skills can help a person to manage own problems without use of substances.
Dusenbury and Falco (1995) also indicate that effective prevention program has to take into account cultural, ethnical differences of students, long-term effect of a program, and evaluation of a prevention program.
The first challenge in evaluating the prevention program is problem of evaluation of primary prevention program. Lewis, Dana, & Blevins (2014) indicate that primary prevention directed to populations of people who are not substance addicts. Therefore, it is hard to define if people who are exposed to primary preventive programs do not become drug or alcohol abusers as result of the prevention program or because of other reasons such as positive family, school environment, etc.
Another issue of evaluation of substance abuse prevention programs is that desired, intended and achieved results of a program can be different (Lewis, Dana, & Blevins, 2014). For example, the desired result of the prevention activities can be overcoming the problem of drug use among adolescents or desired result can be – to assure teenagers not trying alcohol beverages or drugs. The intended goal of particular program can be directed to decreasing of mortality rate among drunken teen-drivers. And achieved result can be decrease of number of drunk drivers, etc.
One more evaluation challenge which can arise is the possible differences between immediate and long-term effect of a program (Lewis, Dana, & Blevins, 2014). A prevention program can demonstrate no significant immediate results but influence behavior of targeted population over time, and vice versa – if a program have incredible immediate effects on behavior of targeted populations it does not mean that this effect will nor erode in several years.
Also, the problem of evaluation of effectiveness of prevention program can be associated with disagreement about success or failure of program among prevention programs developers, program evaluators, school community, parents, etc. For example, community can express opinion that program was ineffective, while program evaluating team can collect objective data that the purpose of the program was achieved.
How would you get the support of the various groups affected by the program?
Also, if we want to get a support from various group affected by a program we can involve adolescents, their parents (or other people who will be exposed to a program) in the process of the elaboration and developing of the program.
Another way of getting support is constant evaluation, analyzing and development of existing substance abuse prevention programs. We need to improve existing programs, analyze mistakes of previous programs.
Also, there are some advices, listed by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, of how effectively involve adolescents in active participations in prevention programs (2002). First of all, it can be helpful to learn what activities can be interesting and attractive for a targeted population, what young people in targeted community are doing at current times, how they spend their time and what drug culture is presented in targeted community.
Also, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2002) advice to find young people who are ready to work on substance abuse prevention program. These people can be especially helpful because they know about drug culture of their peers. They also can be highly concerned about the problem of drug use among their friends. Young people also can have good communication, organizational, leadership skills and contribute to prevention program being in roles of managers, etc.
If you were to implement such a program, how would you go about making sure that you had broad agreement on the goals of the program?
Reference
Dusenbury, L., & Falco, M. (1995). Eleven components of effective drug abuse prevention curricula. Journal of school health, 65(10), 420-425.
Lewis, J. A., Dana, R. Q., & Blevins, G. A. (2014). Substance abuse counseling. Cengage Learning.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Vienna International Ctr, & Austria. (2002). Participatory Handbook for Youth Drug Abuse Prevention Programmes: A Guide for Development and Improvement.
