Prevention and Health Behavior
Adolescent Substance Abuse and Violence Prevention Research
As certain behaviors increase the risk of developing specific diseases, personal and environmental factors may increase one’s risk of engaging in those unhealthy behaviors. As an example, cigarette smoking, the number one preventable cause of annual mortality, is an unhealthy behavior that usually begins during the adolescent years. The Division tries to understand not only the relationship of smoking to heart disease and cancer, but also the factors that put people at risk for smoking. At the same time it works to identify and increase personal characteristics and skills that protect individuals from risk factors for smoking and engaging in other damaging behaviors. Having good skills with self-management, communication, and social relationships has been shown to buffer students from smoking and other substance use, violence, and risky sexual behavior.
Division Chief Gilbert J. Botvin, Ph.D., is the Principal Investigator on several studies funded by NIDA to build upon and enhance implementation of an award-winning substance abuse prevention program for junior high and middle school students, called Life Skills Training (LST), that he originally developed more than 25 years ago. The program consists of 30 sequential classes conducted over three years, which work to prevent future substance use by increasing psychological well-being, reducing the appeal and positive expectations of the social and emotional benefits of smoking and drug use, and increasing assertiveness skills for resisting social influences to engage in the use of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs.
A problem frequently encountered when implementing school-based prevention programs, such as LST, is a lack of adherence to some of the program components. This can occur for a variety of reasons, including difficulties with classroom management and discipline, lack of teacher training, lack of program materials, low levels of funding, decentralized decision making, or lack of program guidance from school district personnel. To address these issues, Dr. Botvin is leading a study to enhance implementation fidelity for the LST program in a variety of school settings. The project is comparing a group of students receiving program enhancements, such as additional support and workshops for teachers, to a control group using the standard LST curriculum. This will help the investigators to determine if these additional training and support activities improve fidelity as well as the knowledge, attitudes, personal skills, and behaviors of the students. Other divisional faculty involved in this project include Kenneth W. Griffin, Ph.D., M.P.H., Professor of Public Health, and Madhuvanti M. Murphy, Dr.P.H., Assistant Professor of Public Health.
Dr. Griffin also is the Principal Investigator of a major grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to examine the long-term effects of a school-based drug abuse prevention program previously delivered to urban minority youth attending New York City middle schools. The study will focus on a sample of approximately 3500 young adults ages 21 to 23 who participated in a randomized prevention trial during their early teens. In addition to testing the long-term effects of the prevention program on alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use among the participants as youth adults, the study will test whether the effects generalize to a variety of sexual risk behaviors.
