Project Alliance 1
Understanding and Preventing Adolescent Drug Abuse
Funding period: January 1, 1991–April 30, 2011
Principal Investigator: Dr. Thomas Dishion
Co-Investigators: Dr. Kate Kavanagh, Dr. Bernadette Bullock
Project Director: Dr. Allison Caruthers
Funded by: National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
Project Alliance is the longest running grant-funded research project at CFC. In 1996 the Project Alliance 1 team (Dishion and Kavanagh) received a prestigious NIH Merit Award for this program of research, which provided 10 years of funding. This project has been studying the effectiveness of embedding a family-based intervention in a public middle school context. Specific aims for the remaining years of this project are to evaluate and report the patterns of engagement, mediation, and long-term effectiveness of the family-centered intervention, and to refine and test an ecological model of risk behaviors and psychopathology in young adulthood.
This study reflects the second generation of research on the Adolescent Transitions Program (Dishion & Kavanagh, 2003). The Project Alliance 1 (PAL 1) sample includes 998 young adults and their families who were originally recruited in 1996 or 1998 when they were enrolled in 6th grade at one of three middle schools in Northeast Portland. Upon consent, participating youth were randomly assigned to either a “family resources” group or a “developmental” group. Families who were assigned to the family resources group were offered the opportunity to participate in our family-centered intervention described as an ecological approach to family intervention and treatment (EcoFIT). A cornerstone of EcoFIT is the Family Check-Up (FCU), a brief family intervention designed to motivate and support parents’ monitoring of their youth. For older adolescents, we developed the Teen Check-Up, which adapts motivational interviewing to reduce problem behavior and increase school engagement. These interventions use positive behavior support strategies to promote competence and to reduce problem behavior, and they are described in detail in a recently published book by Dishion and Stormshak (2007).
The PAL 1 project has collected data from all participating youth and families using multiple methods, including face-to-face interviews, diagnostic interviews, self-report surveys, peer nominations, teacher ratings, school records, criminal records, DMV records, and videotaped observations of family and peer interactions. Long-term follow-up of these youth reveals the benefit of integrating family interventions into the school context. To date, we have seen reductions in risk for substance use with an average of five to six sessions during the middle school years for youth in high-risk community contexts. As an added benefit, our program is complementary to other existing, empirically based prevention strategies, both within and outside the schools.
In 2007 we began to publish the long-term effects of the EcoFIT in public middle schools. In one article, we document that engagement in the Family Check-Up in middle schools was more likely among the youth and families experiencing more difficulties and was associated with long-term reductions in the rates of arrests; tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use; and antisocial behavior in general (Connell, Dishion, et al., 2007). In addition, Connell and Dishion (2008) reported that our Family Check-Up was associated with reductions in adolescent depression over a three-year period for the highest risk adolescents. Stormshak, Connell, and Dishion (under review) have also found that our family-centered approach improved school attendance and grades during the high school period. These findings taken together suggest that the EcoFIT model prevents escalations in problem behavior among youth, improves mental health, and increases school engagement, especially in the highest risk settings.
Our intervention model and results have strong implications for policy and public health practices because they contribute to the prevention of adolescent substance use and problem behavior. In addition, our ecological approach to engaging and intervening with families seems to produce moderate to strong effects among high-risk students with relatively few intervention sessions. This finding is noteworthy because of the cost effectiveness of our family-based approach to preventing substance use.
2008 Progress
The Wave 8 survey focuses on the developmental shift from late adolescence to early adulthood. In it, we ask questions about substance use, risky behaviors, life stresses, important relationships, and life competencies (e.g., educational and vocational success, coping, and prosocial behaviors). In July 2008, we completed our Wave 8 data collection for Cohort 1 (N = 676; age 22–23), with survey data from 81% of the original group. We began Wave 8 assessments with Cohort 2 (N = 323; age 21–22) in September 2008, and collected data from 25% of the young adults in this group within the first month. Wave 8 data collection is expected to continue until spring 2009.
The Wave 9 survey continues to focus on adjustment during early adulthood, and this time we are collecting data from parents and young adults. The parent survey assesses parents’ perspectives on their child’s development and the ways in which parents offer support and guidance during early adulthood. We began Wave 9 with Cohort 1 in July 2008 and had collected surveys from 46% of this cohort as of October 2008. Data collection is expected to continue until summer 2009.
2009 Update on Analyses
We continue to examine the impact of the FCU on the development of problem behavior in adolescence. In previous analyses we found that random assignment to the FCU was linked with reduced teacher-reported risk behavior; reduced arrest rates, substance use, and antisocial behavior; and improved school attendance and academic performance. We extended this list of outcome variables to include adolescent depression and high-risk sexual behavior. We found that random assignment to the FCU protected high-risk adolescents from developing clinically significant depression from age 12 through 15. We also found that adolescents whose parents engaged in the FCU were less likely to be involved in high-risk sexual behavior than were those in a latent engager class in the control group. In other recent work, we reanalyzed parent and youth data to consider how specific parenting practices account for variation in the early adolescent emergence of drug use and problem behavior. We found that hours unsupervised increased from early to middle adolescence, as did drug use, and that growth in unsupervised time correlated quite strongly with growth in substance use, friend drug use, and arrests. The data suggest that parents’ efforts to structure the time and activities of young adolescents and to limit unsupervised time with peers is both prognostic of substance use in adolescence and a responsive target of interventions.
We also recently examined the cross-cultural context of parental monitoring and compared effects of parental monitoring on adolescent problem behavior in the United States (using the Project Alliance 1 sample), Italy, Canada, and India. We found effects to be consistent across cultural contexts, with high levels of parental monitoring associated with less adolescent problem behavior. Related research revealed that the “control” aspect of parental monitoring is most predictive of reduced problem behavior.
We are currently extending our ecological model of problem behavior to account for the central role of peer groups in adolescent and young adult sexual activity, and to consider the role of marginalization of youth as an environmental context that encourages adolescents’ involvement in high-risk sexual behavior and procreativity.
2009 Update on Data Collection
We are in the process of collecting Waves 8 and 9 from the Project Alliance sample. The Wave 8 survey focuses on the developmental shift from late adolescence to early adulthood (age 22–23). In it, we ask questions about substance use, risky behaviors, life stresses, important relationships, and life competencies (e.g., educational and vocational success, coping, and prosocial behaviors). We completed Wave 8 with Cohort 1 (n = 675) in 2008 and will have finished collecting data from Cohort 2 (n = 323) in March 2009, with data from more than 80% of participants in each cohort. The Wave 9 survey continues to focus on adjustment during early adulthood (age 23–24), and this time we are also collecting data from parents. The parent survey assesses parents’ perspectives on their child’s development and the ways in which parents offer support and guidance during early adulthood. As of March 2009, we had collected Wave 9 data from more than 70% of the young adults in Cohort 1 and 50% of their parents. Wave 9 data collection with Cohort 2 is expected to begin in fall 2009.
We also completed macro ratings and microsocial coding of peer interaction and family interaction tasks collected in Wave 6 when the youth were 16 years old (n = 710 for peers , n = 650 for families). These data are being analyzed to develop a comprehensive model for the development of problem behavior in adolescence and the processes associated with movement from drug use to abuse.
For more information: Dr. Tom Dishion, 541-346-4805
