Jesse F. Marquette

Implementation fidelity: the experience of the Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention Study

While researchers have developed more effective programs and strategies to prevent the initiation of substance use and increasingly communities are delivering these interventions, determining the degree to which they are delivered as they were designed remains a significant research challenge. In the past several years, more attention has been given to implementation issues during the various stages of program development and diffusion. This paper presents the findings from a substudy of an evaluation of a newly designed middle and high school substance abuse prevention program, Take Charge of Your Life delivered by local Drug Abuse Resistance Education officer instructors. A key aspect of the study was to determine the extent to which implementation fidelity, using the measures of content coverage and appropriate instructional strategy, was associated with improvement in the program mediators of realistic normative beliefs, understanding the harmful effects of substance use and the acquisition of decision-making and resistance skills. Although it was found that higher fidelity was associated with better scores on some of the mediators, this was not a consistent finding. The mixed results are discussed within the context of the lesson activities themselves.

Views through a Kaleidoscope: the Dimensions of State Welfare Policy Measures

Q JUITE UNDERSTANDABLY, studies on variable measurement are not among the most popular forms of political science literature. To all but the devoted, they often appear boring, nitpicking and even slightly pompous. Like supply lines for an army, they lack glory; the real action is at the front, not at the depot. And yet, like these same supply lines, appropriate measurements are central to success. Poor measurement, poor results. In fact, some of the most energetic quarrels in the discipline essentially revolve around measurement questions. So it behooves researchers occasionally to provide a detailed scouting report on the different measures that can be used in an area, how choices among them will lead to different conclusions, and what these can tell us about political behavior and outcomes. We propose to do this for one area which has been the target of fairly extensive research, state welfare policy.

Social Change and Political Mobilization in the United States: 1870–1960.

The central problem of the general search for explanations of political change has been the lack of adequate explanations of the relationship between social change and political change. This research proposes and tests a six-variable causal model of the process of social change and political mobilization in the United States during the period 1870 to 1960. The variables used are based on previous theoretical efforts which have indicated that the process of social and political change is a syndrome. From these previous efforts a new model is synthesized. The model is found to operate as proposed during the period 1870 to 1910, and a simplified version in four variables is identified for the period 1920 to 1960. One of the central questions explored by this research is the degree to which the pattern of social change alters as the process of change proceeds through time. The transition in the United States is explained by reference to the threshold effect of two social infrastructures—urbanization and government activity in education. In light of the identification of the model, an attempt is then made at revising certain aspects of modernization theory.

A logistic diffusion model of political mobilization

Some useful simplification of the theory of political mobilization is achieved by treating the ideology of a mobilizing agent as an innovation. The process of political mobilization is then treated as a process of innovation diffusion. This perspective allows the development of the necessary linkage between the micro and macro level components of the process. The theory is tested using extended time series for seven societies: the United States, Britain, Sweden, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China.

Democracy and Alienation in North India

v Revised version of a paper presented at the Southern Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia, November 2-4, 1972. The authors would like to thank S. M. Sud, Ram Pal Vidyalankar, and R. C. Chaudhary for their valuable assistance in administering the questionnaires in their colleges. We would also like to thank Arnold J. Heidenheimer for his helpful comments and Paul A. Weidner for his continuing co-operation in completing this project.