Effects of Communities That Care on Prevention Services Systems: Findings From the Community Youth Development Study at 1.5 Years

Abstract

The Community Youth Development Study (CYDS) is a community-randomized trial of the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system. Using data from 2001 and 2004 administrations of the Community Key Informant Survey, this study reports changes in three community-level outcomes 1.5 years after implementing CTC in 12 communities. Respondents consisted of 534 community leaders in 24 communities representing multiple sectors within each community. Results of multilevel analyses controlling for respondent and community characteristics indicated that (a) CTC and control communities had comparable baseline levels of adopting a science-based approach to prevention, collaboration across community sectors, and collaboration regarding specific prevention activities; and (b) CTC communities exhibited significantly greater increases in these outcomes between 2001 and 2004 relative to control communities. These results suggest that CTC was successful in changing proximal system outcomes theorized to lead to more effective prevention services and, ultimately, reduced risk, enhanced protection, and improved adolescent health and behavior outcomes.

Testing Communities That Care: The Rationale, Design and Behavioral Baseline Equivalence of the Community Youth Development Study

“…Analyses show few differences between the two study conditions across three grades over three waves of baseline data. These results, combined with findings showing comparable levels of adoption of a science-based approach to prevention and collaboration on prevention issues in 2001 (Brown et al 2007), indicate baseline comparability on primary outcome variables between intervention and control communities in the CYDS.…”

“…Findings reported elsewhere (Brown et al 2007) have documented that intervention and control communities had comparable levels of adoption of a science-based prevention approach and prevention collaboration in 2001. To evaluate the success of random assignment in creating baseline equivalence in student outcomes across the intervention and control communities, trends and levels of demographic characteristics and adolescent drug use and antisocial behavior reported on the CTCYS from 1998 to 2002 were assessed.…”

“…2) assesses the degree to which 10 positional community leaders and the 5 prevention leaders most frequently nominated by these positional leaders as knowledgeable about prevention report the use of epidemiological data to guide prevention planning and resource allocation decisions; the selection and use of tested, effective programs; and ongoing monitoring of implementation and changes in risk, protection, and youth outcomes. Evaluation of CTC's impact on community prevention systems includes comparisons between the intervention and control communities on measures of adoption of a science-based prevention approach (see Arthur et al 2005;Brown et al 2007) and prevention collaboration (Brown et al 2007(Brown et al , 2008 from the CKI interview. Major changes or events in the community that might affect prevention efforts (e.g., changes in community policies, layoffs by a major employer) also are documented in the CKI.…”

Promoting Community Coalition Functioning: Effects of Project STEP

“…One-tailed tests of significant effects were conducted after covarying for community and baseline community empowerment. *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001 Several prevention diffusion trials using randomized designs are either underway or are planned and should have the capability of evaluating the effectiveness of coalition functioning, thus potentially replicating the results found in this study (Brown et al 2007;Feinberg et al 2007;Spoth et al 2004). However, the relative dearth of experimental research in this area may reflect the inherent difficulties of conducting such research including cost, small sample sizes when experimental assignment and analysis is conducted at the level of community, and lack of researcher control over the naturalistic course of community and community coalition functioning (Pentz 1995).…”

Using social marketing to create communities for our children and adolescents that do not model and encourage drinking

“…This resulted in the identification of a further six articles that appeared to meet the inclusion criteria (Hawkins et al, 2012;Brown et al, 2007;Fagan et al, 2009;Wagenaar et al, 2000aWagenaar et al, , 2000bWest et al, 2008).…”