Kenneth W. Griffin

Parenting practices as predictors of substance use, delinquency, and aggression among urban minority youth: moderating effects of family structure and gender.

This study examined how parenting factors were associated with adolescent problem behaviors among urban minority youth and to what extent these relationships were moderated by family structure and gender. Sixth-grade students (N = 228) reported how often they use alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or engage in aggressive or delinquent behaviors; a parent or guardian reported their monitoring and other parenting practices. Findings indicated that boys and those from single-parent families engaged in the highest rates of problem behavior. More parental monitoring was associated with less delinquency overall, as well as less drinking in boys only. Eating family dinners together was associated with less aggression overall, as well as less delinquency in youth from single-parent families and in girls. Unsupervised time at home alone was associated with more smoking for girls only. Implications for prevention interventions are discussed.

LIFE SKILLS TRAINING: EMPIRICAL FINDINGS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use are important problems that typically begin during adolescence. Fortunately, substantial progress has been made in developing effective drug abuse prevention programs for youth over the past two decades. The Life Skills Training (LST) program is an effective primary prevention program for adolescent drug abuse that addresses the risk and protective factors associated with drug use initiation and teaches skills related to social resistance and enhancing social and personal competence. This paper provides an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the LST program, along with a description of the programs core components, materials, and methods. Findings from over two decades of evaluation research are reviewed, including results from a series of small scale efficacy studies and large scale effectiveness trials with a variety of adolescent populations. These studies have demonstrated positive behavioral effects of LST on smoking, alcohol, marijuana use as well as the use of multiple substances and illicit drugs, with prevention effects lasting up until the end of high school. Further research is needed to understand the mediating mechanisms through which prevention programs such as LST are effective, and ways to widely disseminate research-based programs into schools.

Drug Abuse Prevention Among Minority Adolescents: Posttest and One-Year Follow-Up of a School-Based Preventive Intervention

Most drug abuse prevention research has been conducted with predominantly White middle-class adolescent populations. The present study tested a school-based drug abuse preventive intervention in a sample of predominantly minority students (N = 3,621) in 29 New York City schools. The prevention program taught drug refusal skills, antidrug norms, personal self-management skills, and general social skills in an effort to provide students with skills and information for resisting drug offers, to decrease motivations to use drugs, and decrease vulnerability to drug use social influences. Results indicated that those who received the program (n = 2,144) reported less smoking, drinking, drunkenness, inhalant use, and polydrug use relative to controls (n = 1,477). The program also had a direct positive effect on several cognitive, attitudinal, and personality variables believed to play a role in adolescent substance use. Mediational analyses showed that prevention effects on some drug use outcomes were mediated in part by risk-taking, behavioral intentions, and peer normative expectations regarding drug use. The findings from this study show that a drug abuse prevention program originally designed for White middle-class adolescent populations is effective in a sample of minority, economically disadvantaged, inner-city adolescents.

Preventing illicit drug use in adolescents: Long-term follow-up data from a randomized control trial of a school population

National survey data indicate that illicit drug use has steadily increased among American adolescents since 1992. This upward trend underscores the need for identifying effective prevention approaches capable of reducing the use of both licit and illicit drugs. The present study examined long-term follow-up data from a large-scale randomized prevention trial to determine the extent to which participation in a cognitive-behavioral skills-training prevention program led to less illicit drug use than for untreated controls. Data were collected by mail from 447 individuals who were contacted after the end of the 12th grade, 6.5 years after the initial pretest. Results indicated that students who received the prevention program (Life Skills Training) during junior high school reported less use of illicit drugs than controls. These results also support the hypothesis that illicit drug use can be prevented by targeting the use of gateway drugs such as tobacco and alcohol.

School-based programmes to prevent alcohol, tobacco and other drug use

Substance use and abuse are important public health problems in the USA and throughout the world. In many developed countries, the initial stages of substance use typically include experimentation with alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana with ones peer group during adolescence. While there have been gradual decreases in the use of these substances in recent years among youth in the USA and other countries, increases have been observed in the use and misuse of other substances, such as the misuse of prescription drugs and over-the-counter cough medications in the USA. From a developmental perspective, data shows that rates of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other illicit drug use typically escalate during adolescence and peak during young adulthood, corresponding with the increased freedom and independence of this time of life. Substance use decreases for most young people as they take on adult responsibilities, although a proportion will continue or increase their use and develop substance use problems. Given what we know about the onset and progression of substance use, implementing preventive interventions during early adolescence is critical. Most drug prevention or education programmes take place in school settings. A variety of theory-based school-based drug prevention programmes have been developed and tested. The most effective programmes are delivered interactively and teach skills to help young people refuse drug offers, resist pro-drug influences, correct misperceptions that drug use is normative, and enhance social and personal competence skills. A key challenge is to identify mechanisms for the wide dissemination of evidence-based drug preventive interventions and ways to train providers to implement programmes effectively and thoroughly.

Preventing Youth Violence and Delinquency through a Universal School-Based Prevention Approach

Violence is an important public health problem among adolescents in the United States. Substance use and violence tend to co-occur among adolescents and appear to have similar etiologies. The present study examined the extent to which a comprehensive prevention approach targeting an array of individual-level risk and protective factors and previously found effective in preventing tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug use is capable of decreasing violence and delinquency. Schools (N=41) were randomly assigned to intervention and control conditions. Participants in the 20 intervention schools received the Life Skills Training prevention program including material focusing on violence and the media, anger management, and conflict resolution skills. Survey data were collected from 4,858 sixth grade students prior to the intervention and three months later after the intervention. Findings showed significant reductions in violence and delinquency for intervention participants relative to controls. Stronger prevention effects were found for students who received at least half of the preventive intervention. These effects include less verbal and physical aggression, fighting, and delinquency. The results of this study indicate that a school-based prevention approach previously found to prevent tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug use can also prevent violence and delinquency.

A Six-Year Follow-Up Study of Determinants of Heavy Cigarette Smoking Among High-School Seniors

Most adult cigarette smokers start smoking during adolescence. Few studies, however, have focused on adolescents that are heavy smokers. The present study examined how several risk and protective factors measured during early adolescence were associated with heavy smoking in a sample of high-school seniors. As part of a school-based survey, seventh-grade students (N=743) reported degrees of experimentation with psychoactive substances and several psychosocial factors deemed to be important in the etiology of smoking. Students were followed-up in the twelfth grade, when 12% (n=88) smoked a pack of cigarettes or more each day. Logistic regression analyses revealed that heavy smoking was predicted by several earlier variables: poor grades, experimentation with cigarettes or alcohol, a mother or many friends that smoked, and high risk-taking in the seventh grade. Antismoking attitudes and those of ones parents and friends predicted less later heavy smoking in girls only. Implications for smoking prevention are discussed.

Preventing Tobacco and Alcohol Use among Elementary School Students through Life Skills Training.

ABSTRACT The present study examined the effectiveness of a substance abuse prevention program in preventing tobacco and alcohol use among elementary school students in grades 3 through 6. The prevention program teaches social resistance skills and general personal and social competence skills. Rates of substance use behavior, attitudes, knowledge, normative expectations, and related variables were examined among students (N = 1090) from 20 schools that were randomly assigned to either receive the prevention program (9 schools, n = 426) or serve as a control group (11 schools, n = 664). Data were analyzed at both the individual-level and school-level. Individual-level analyses controlling for gender, race, and family structure showed that intervention students reported less smoking in the past year, higher anti-drinking attitudes, increased substance use knowledge and skills-related knowledge, lower normative expectations for smoking and alcohol use, and higher self-esteem at the posttest assessment, relative to control students. School-level analyses showed that annual prevalence rate was 61% lower for smoking and 25% lower for alcohol use at the posttest assessment in schools that received the prevention program when compared with control schools. In addition, mean self-esteem scores were higher in intervention schools at the posttest assessment relative to control schools. Findings indicate that a school-based substance abuse prevention approach previously found to be effective among middle school students is also effective for elementary school students.

SOCIAL SKILLS, COMPETENCE, AND DRUG REFUSAL EFFICACY AS PREDICTORS OF ADOLESCENT ALCOHOL USE* †

Numerous alcohol and drug abuse prevention trials have included social resistance training as a strategy for reducing early-stage adolescent alcohol use. Evaluations of these trials has shown them to be moderately effective, although the precise impact of the resistance training in comparison to other programmatic features has not been clearly identified. The current study examined the extent to which assertiveness and related social skills, personal competence (perceived cognitive mastery), and refusal efficacy predict alcohol involvement. Males were at greater risk for poor refusal skills and reported higher alcohol involvement. Cross-sectionally, youth characterized by poor social skill development reported lower refusal efficacy, lower grades, poor competence, and more alcohol use. Poor refusal efficacy was associated with more risk-taking, lower grades, less competence, and more alcohol use. Longitudinally, both poor refusal skills and risk-taking were associated with higher alcohol use. High personal competence was associated with lower alcohol use in both the eighth and tenth grades, but had no long-term effects on alcohol use. Findings highlight the close interplay between perceived competence and refusal skill efficacy, both of which should be included as essential components of school-based prevention strategies.

Dynamic Growth Models of Self-Esteem and Adolescent Alcohol Use

Latent growth modeling was used to test dynamic relations between self-esteem and alcohol use in 740 middle school youth assessed at four time points. Self-esteem was characterized by a negative growth trajectory, whereas alcohol use increased steadily in a linear fashion. An initial simplified model positing bidirectional influences indicated an inverse relation between changes in self-esteem and alcohol use over time, but that initial levels of neither alcohol use nor self-esteem influenced changes in the other construct. With the addition of external covariates (i.e., gender and indices of social skills and competence risk), findings indicated that high initial levels of self-esteem fostered more increases in alcohol use compared to low initial levels of self-esteem. Findings further indicated that youth with poor competence skills advanced more rapidly in their alcohol use and declined more gradually in their self-esteem, and that poor social skills accelerated the rate of decline in self-esteem. Results indicate that self-esteem is part of a dynamic set of etiological forces that instigate early-stage alcohol use.