Preventing substance abuse with children and adolescents.

Abstract

This article reviews recent research on the prevention of tobacco, alcohol, and drug abuse with children and adolescents. The review is organized according to an intervention focus on the agent, environment, and host. An original study describes methods and results of host-oriented skills intervention to prevent cigarette smoking. Based on the reviewed recent past studies, the authors note conceptual and methodological progress in substance abuse prevention research. Suggestions for future research include technological improvements necessary to implement preventive interventions on a wide scale. The authors highlight the importance of careful designs; manipulation checks on independent variables; process data collection; multimodal measures of self-report, behavioral, and physiological variables; and multivariate statistical analyses in studies on interventions to prevent tobacco, alcohol, and drug abuse with children and adolescents.

Preventing adolescent abuse

“…Outcomes of other preventive and interventive studies indicate, however, that changing behavior requires more than just exposure and awareness. Watching, rehearsing, and practicing in home and community settings is time consuming but critical to behavior change (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1986;Schinke & Gilchrist, 1985;Schwartz, 1988). Prevention programs can often influence knowledge, but they rarely achieve behavior change without incorporating practice of skills (Barth, Middleton, & Wagman, 1989;Kirby, 1984).…”

Panel V: Adaptive health behaviors among ethnic minorities.

“…Health problems of Native Americans are often cited in relation to poverty and substance use. According to the Indian Health Service (IHS) 1990 data, over 28% of the Native American population falls below the poverty line, compared with less than 13% of the general population (Schinke, Botvin, & Orlandi, 1991). The percentage of high school and college graduates among Native Americans is lower than among the general population (55% vs. 66%, and 7% vs. 16%, respectively; Schinke et al, 1990).…”

Mounting a community-based alcohol and drug abuse prevention effort in a multicultural urban setting: Challenges and lessons learned

“…Other audiences may see only the unique aspects of the presenter's experience and feel that it has little relevance for them. And if subjected to scare tactics (e.g., "If you don't change your behavior, you'll turn out like me--addicted"), audiences may leave totally unmoved to change their behavior, a common result of such approaches to prevention (Schinke and Gilchrist, 1985).…”