Drug abuse prevention programs conducted during junior high school can produce meaningful and durable reductions in tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use if they (1) teach a combination of social resistance skills and general life skills, (2) are properly implemented, and (3) include at least 2 years of booster sessions.

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 singleparent 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. Research and theory on the etiology of problem behavior in childhood and adolescence often focus on the role of the family in the development of antisocial behavior (

Two-year follow-up data (from inner-city, minority adolescents) were collected to test the effectiveness of 2 skills-based substance abuse prevention programs and were compared both with a control condition and with each other. Students were originally recruited from 6 New York City public schools while in 7th grade. Schools were matched and assigned to receive a generic skills training prevention approach, a culturally focused prevention approach, or an information-only control. Students in both prevention approaches had less current alcohol use and had lower intentions to engage in future alcohol use relative to students in the control group. Students in the culturally focused group also engaged less in current alcohol behavior and had lower intentions to drink beer or wine than those in the generic skills group. Both prevention programs influenced several mediating variables in a direction consistent with nondrug use, and these variables also mediated alcohol use.Recent national survey data (Johnston, O'Malley, & Bachman, 1994) showed that substance use is once again on the increase, further underscoring the importance of developing effective prevention approaches. Literature reviews

The authors examined the effectiveness of a school-based prevention program on reducing binge drinking in a sample of minority, inner-city, middle-school students. Rates of binge drinking were compared among youth who received the program beginning in the 7th grade (n = 1,713) and a control group (n = 1,328) that did not. The prevention program had protective effects in terms of binge drinking at the 1-year (8th grade) and 2-year (9th grade) follow-up assessments. The proportion of binge drinkers was over 50% lower in the intervention group relative to the control group at the follow-up assessments. There were also several significant program effects on proximal drinking variables, including drinking knowledge, pro-drinking attitudes, and peer drinking norms. These findings indicate that a school-based drug abuse prevention approach previously found to be effective among White youth significantly reduced binge drinking among urban minority youth.

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.