PS375 Unit 6 Youth Prevention Paper Example

An Assembly or Fifteen Lessons: A PS375 Unit 6 Prevention Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS375: Psychology of Addiction

Unit 6 Prevention Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the program, the school and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

The Request

In January, the counselor at a Tulsa middle school called our outpatient program. Several eighth graders had been caught vaping, one with cannabis, and the principal wanted "something strong" before spring. The counselor's plan was a one-hour assembly in the gym: a car wrecked by an impaired driver on display outside, and a speaker in recovery describing how drugs had ruined his life. She asked whether our program could supply the speaker. As intake coordinator, I handle many community calls, and my supervisor asked me to review the evidence before we answered.

Why Early Adolescence Matters

Volkow et al. (2016) describe adolescence as a period of heightened vulnerability to addiction. The brain's reward systems are highly responsive while the prefrontal systems that support self-control are still maturing, and starting to use young predicts more trouble later. Prevention that reaches students before use becomes established, often in late elementary or middle school, has the most room to help.

At our program, the pattern is familiar. Marcus, a sixteen-year-old now in treatment for cannabis use disorder, told his counselor he first vaped at thirteen, in seventh grade.

Risk and Protective Factors

Hawkins et al. (1992) reviewed research on risk and protective factors for adolescent alcohol and drug problems. They identified risk factors at the community, family, school and individual and peer levels, such as availability of substances, family conflict, academic failure, early problem behavior and friends who use. They argued that effective prevention reduces these risks and strengthens protective factors, such as bonds to family and school, clear norms against use and skills for resisting pressure.

Their framework offers a test for any program: which risk or protective factors does it change? The assembly would deliver information and fear. It would not teach skills, change norms over time or strengthen bonds to school.

A wrecked car can frighten a thirteen-year-old for an afternoon; it cannot teach her what to say at a party.

Evidence for a Skills Program

Botvin et al. (1995) reported long-term results of a randomized trial of a school-based prevention program in which schools were assigned to deliver a life skills curriculum, beginning in seventh grade with booster sessions in later grades, or to serve as controls. Lessons built everyday social and self-management skills, including making decisions, handling anxiety and speaking up for oneself, along with skills for resisting social influences to use drugs and correcting misperceptions about how many peers use. At the end of twelfth grade, students in the intervention schools reported lower rates of drug and polydrug use than those in control schools, and effects were strongest among students who received more of the program as intended.

The program differs from the assembly in every way that matters by Hawkins and colleagues' test. It runs across many sessions and years, teaches skills students practice, addresses norms, and is delivered by trained teachers.

Will It Work Here?

The trial's title names a limit worth taking seriously: its schools served a mostly white, middle-class population in New York State in the 1980s. The middle school in Tulsa is more diverse, with Black, Hispanic, Native American and white students and many families with low incomes, and vaping did not exist when the trial began. Evidence from one population does not automatically transfer to another. Two considerations made us willing to recommend the curriculum anyway. The skills it teaches, such as refusing offers and correcting beliefs that everyone uses, address risk factors that Hawkins and colleagues found across many groups. And the school can adapt examples and role plays to its students without changing the core sessions. We advised the school to keep the core sessions intact, since effects were strongest with faithful delivery, and to adapt only the examples.

What About Fear?

Fear-based messages are popular because they feel strong. But a single frightening event offers no practice and no skills, and students often see dramatic stories as exceptions that do not apply to them. Speakers who describe their past use in detail can also unintentionally make drugs seem exciting. Our program decided not to supply a speaker for a stand-alone assembly, while offering staff time to support a fuller plan if the school wanted one.

The Recommendation

My supervisor and I recommended three steps to the school. First, adopt an evidence-based life skills curriculum for seventh and eighth grade, delivered by trained teachers with booster sessions, and use the existing advisory period to fit the schedule. Second, strengthen protective factors already present, including after-school activities and family nights that teach parents to talk about vaping. Third, screen students referred for vaping with a brief adolescent screen and offer a brief intervention, with referral when needed.

The counselor agreed to pilot the curriculum in eighth grade in the fall and asked our program to train two teachers and the school nurse in screening and brief intervention before the school year begins.

Fitting Prevention to the School

The school's population raised practical questions. Many students ride buses from rural areas and cannot attend evening family nights, so the school chose to record short videos for parents and send them home. About a fifth of students speak Spanish at home, so family materials will be translated. And because vaping was the most common concern, the teachers adding vaping-specific lessons to the curriculum will tie them to the skills already taught.

Measuring the Pilot

The school will survey eighth graders about use and attitudes before and after the curriculum, and track vaping referrals across the full school year, comparing them with the previous year's numbers. A single school without a comparison group cannot prove the curriculum works, but data will show whether it is delivered well and whether trends move in the right direction. Teachers will also log which sessions they completed, since a curriculum delivered in half its sessions is a different program, and the counselor will review the logs each quarter with the principal.

Conclusion

A one-hour fear-based assembly would change few of the risk and protective factors Hawkins and colleagues identified. A multi-session life skills program, supported by Botvin and colleagues' long-term trial, teaches skills, shifts norms and reaches students early, when Volkow and colleagues' account suggests prevention matters most. The school chose to pilot the curriculum and add screening rather than hold the assembly.

References

Botvin, G. J., Baker, E., Dusenbury, L., Botvin, E. M., & Diaz, T. (1995). Long-term follow-up results of a randomized drug abuse prevention trial in a white middle-class population. JAMA, 273(14), 1106-1112. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1995.03520380042033

Hawkins, J. D., Catalano, R. F., & Miller, J. Y. (1992). Risk and protective factors for alcohol and other drug problems in adolescence and early adulthood: Implications for substance abuse prevention. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 64-105. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.64

Volkow, N. D., Koob, G. F., & McLellan, A. T. (2016). Neurobiologic advances from the brain disease model of addiction. New England Journal of Medicine, 374(4), 363-371. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMra1511480