PREVENTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR

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DESCRIPTION (Adapted from the Applicant's Abstract): The aim of this proposal research is to test the proximal effects of the Metropolitan Area Child Study (MACS) on indicators of risk for later delinquency, drug use, school failure, and violence. The MACS compares three complementary, multi-year preventative interventions for over 4,000 high risk, primarily minority, urban youth comprising eight cohorts. These intervention programs, firmly grounded in a cognitive-ecological theory of risk (Tolan, Guerra, and Kendall, 1996), reflect the view that only multi-context, long-term interventions are likely to be effective in preventing these problems of antisocial behavior. In addition, the program design and evaluation are based in the perspective that prevention effects are best understood as an interaction with development. Each succeeding intervention condition represented a more intense and comprehensive level of intervention: Level A: A social problem-solving curriculum combined with an extensive teacher training program; Level B: The same treatments as in Level A plus small group social problem-solving and peer-relationship training for high risk children; and Level C. The same treatments as in level B plus a family intervention for the high-risk children and their families. Another major design feature was the comparison of early (2nd vs. 3rd grade) and later (5th and 6th grade) intervention timing. The project was carried out in two urban centers, in the poorer neighborhoods, and included 16 schools randomly assigned at the outset. Over the course of the intervention, circumstances resulted in requiring a quasi-experimental approach to analysis. With the advances in imputation of missing data and hierarchical models for intervention evaluation, we have applied a complex but sensitive method to examine the proximal effects. Thus, within this approach we can estimate effects of three increasingly complex theoretically-driven interventions on behavior and cognitive and ecological risk factors, the dependency of these effects on timing, school/residence location, gender, and ethnicity. We are requesting support to conduct these needed analyses to indicate the specific effects of the MACS and to determine the promise of this preventive intervention for long-term effects. The principal investigator and co-investigators have collaborated for the last 8 years on the development, assessment, and preliminary analyses of data related to this intervention. In addition to reports out of this project pertinent to development and risk, preliminary analyses suggest significant and broad effects of the intervention, with the most consistent and strongest effects for the full condition, delivered earlier, and when the intervention school is not in one of the poorest inner-city areas. We fully expect that the results of this study will contribute significantly to the general understanding of prevention (e.g., methods of evaluation, efficacy of different components, timing of intervention) and to specific effects for high risk youth living in the highest risk communities.