Using outcome data to evaluate community drug prevention initiatives: Pushing the State-Of-The-Art
✍ Scribed by Robert K. Yin; Angela J. Ware
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 181 KB
- Volume
- 28
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0090-4392
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Community partnerships and related initiatives aim at preventing substance abuse in whole communities. The partnerships seek to engage all sectors and people within a local community, to produce a comprehensive prevention effort. Multiple community organizations and agencies, including the local general purpose government, are expected to collaborate in support of multiple but coordinated prevention initiativesincluding improved local policies, inventive use of the media, and other systems changes that go beyond isolated prevention practices. The interventions are therefore directed at universal, not targeted or indicated populations .
The partnerships' goal is to change substance abuse by changing community norms and prevention systems. The initiatives are therefore different from those aimed at targeted populations, which may include community-based interventions that are nevertheless not intended to be community-wide. Unlike targeted interventions such as high-risk youth programs-which involve a specific client group from which to collect outcome data, the evaluation of the outcomes of community initiatives aimed at universal populations requires community-wide samples or data.
However, until recent years, evaluations of community partnerships and related initiatives in substance abuse prevention have been dominated by process, not outcome studies. Lessons learned, the desirable features of partnerships, and other empirical data have pointed to preferred ways of: organizing partnerships, staffing them, mobilizing their membership and participation, creating their vision and mission, and mounting