December 4, 2003
UW to evaluate national youth program
The UW’s Social Development Research Group (SDRG) has been awarded $19.9 million by five federal agencies to determine the effectiveness of its Communities That Care system. The program was developed by UW researchers to promote positive youth development and to reduce drug abuse, delinquency and other problem behaviors.
The grant will enable the SDRG to evaluate the intervention in 24 communities in seven states — Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Oregon, Utah and Washington — over a five-year period beginning this year.
The Community Youth Development Study is headed by J. David Hawkins, director of the SDRG and professor of social work, working in collaboration with Richard Catalano, associate director of the SDRG and professor of social work, and Michael Arthur, a research associate professor with the SDRG.
Hawkins and Catalano are the chief architects of Communities That Care, which is now being used in more than 500 communities in the United States, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia. The funding will allow the UW researchers to test the program’s effectiveness in a randomized, controlled study.
In the study, 12 communities have been paired up with another participating town in the same state. The towns have been matched by size, economics, minority population and crime rate and have been randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. One town in each pair will implement the Communities That Care program while the other continues existing programs, if any, to counter anti-social behaviors. All of the participating towns are small to middle size with populations of less than 80,000 and are self-contained communities rather than suburbs of bigger cities.
The program is tailored to the individual needs of a community. The first step is to assess a community’s risk and protective factors. Then a specific program will be designed to address that community’s profile of risk and protection with policies and programs that have been tested and shown to be effective, according to Hawkins. To implement the intervention system in the 12 towns receiving it, community boards of key leaders from each town have been established. The boards are developing and implementing youth development and health and behavior prevention plans using the Communities That Care system.
“This is not a single cure-all for everyone. Rather, it is based on identifying and addressing each community’s problems and needs and building on each community’s unique strengths,” said Hawkins. “We think it is an investment that can pay off in measurable better outcomes for children.”
The researchers already have collected baseline data on all students in the sixth, eighth, 10th and 12th grades in each participating town in 1998, 2000 and 2002. This has enabled the UW researchers and local leaders to identify each community’s risk and protective factors. Starting in the spring, tested prevention programs chosen by community leaders in the intervention towns will be initiated and their effects will be tracked on 200 fifth-grade students for five years. A total of 4,800 students in the 12 intervention cities and the 12 control cities will be followed. In addition, all sixth-, eighth-, 10th- and 12th-grade students in the 24 towns will be surveyed in 2004, 2006, 2008.
“We want to know if it is possible to promote healthy youth development and decrease levels of youth drug use, violence, delinquency, teenage pregnancy and school dropout rates, by empowering local leaders to use recent advances in prevention science tailored to the community level” said Hawkins.
The seven participating states were selected for the study because they are among the leaders in supporting science-based prevention programs, he added.
The study is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Child Health and Human Development and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
