A Family Intervention for Adolescent Problem Behavior (AKA Project Alliance 2)

Study Summary

The goal of this project is to empirically refine and improve a comprehensive family-centered prevention strategy for reducing and preventing adolescent substance use and other problem behaviors. This project builds on 15 years of programmatic research underlying the development of the Family Check-up model (FCU), originally referred to as the Adolescent Transitions Program (ATP; Dishion \& Kavanagh, 2003), but later expanded as a general approach to mental health treatment for children from ages 2 through 17 (Dishion \& Stormshak, 2007). The FCU model is a multilevel, family-centered strategy delivered within the context of a public school setting that comprehensively links universal, selected, and indicated family interventions. Previous research and the investigators' practical experience working in school settings indicate that the intervention strategy needs improvement in 3 critical areas to build on previous significant effects and to enhance the potential for future dissemination and large-scale implementation:(a) improve the feasibility of both the universal level and the indicated level of the intervention by broadening the intervention components and systematically embedding these components into the current behavioral support systems in the schools; (b) address the transition from middle school to high school, with special attention to academic engagement and reduction of deviant peer clustering; and (c) explicitly incorporate principals of successful interventions with families and young adolescents of diverse ethnic groups into both the universal and indicated models. An additional general goal of this study is to develop, test, and refine a set of research-based instruments that facilitate evaluation, training, implementation, and monitoring of intervention fidelity to maximize the potential success of implementation and large-scale dissemination. Participants include 593 youth and their families recruited from the 6th grade in three public middle sc

Primary Outcome

The Student Survey was collected from all youth, regardless of treatment condition, annually across 6th-10th grades. It includes 6 questions about the frequency with which the adolescent used 5 substances in the last month: cigarettes, chewing tobacco or snuff, alcohol (overall quantity and most at one time), marijuana or hashish, and other hard drugs. Growth curve modeling will be used to represent change in substance use across time.

Interventions

• BEHAVIORAL Family Check-Up