Preventive Intervention for Mexican American Adolescents

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Research has shown increased risk for interrelated problems of poor mental health and school dropout for Mexican American adolescents yet there is currently a lack of interventions specifically designed to address this risk. The proposed project is a multi-cohort, experimental field trial of a culturally competent intervention to prevent mental health disorders for low-income Mexican American adolescents. The program will be evaluated with a sample of 480 adolescents recruited over the course of 3 years from 4 inner-city schools. Adolescent from each of these four schools will be randomly assigned to participate with their parents in the intervention or a low-dose workshop condition, with equal numbers of Spanish-dominant and English-dominant families assigned to the two conditions. The two intervention conditions will be implemented for 3 consecutive years with 3 independent cohorts (160 per cohort) of adolescents receiving either the program or workshop at their respective schools. The multi-component intervention includes an adolescent group, a parenting group, a combined (parent-adolescent) family group and a school liaison. The 3 group-based components will take place over the course of 11 weeks (9 weekly sessions plus 2 home visits) during the fall semester of 7th grade. The school liaison will intervene with families during this period and until the end of 7th grade. The program targets 4 empirically supported mediators, including adolescent coping skills, parenting practices, family cohesion and parental support for education. The theory underlying the program proposes that change in these mediators will lead to increased school engagement and decreased association with deviant peers which will lead, in turn, to fewer mental health problems. The evaluation includes multiple-measure, multiple-informant assessment on the mediators and outcome variables at pretest, immediate posttest, 5-month follow-up and 23-month follow-up (9th grade). Adolescent, parent, teacher and school archival data will be included. The project has 3 specific aims: 1. To evaluate the efficacy of the program to change trajectories toward externalizing and internalizing problems following the transition to junior high school and reduce rates of mental health disorder and school drop-out following the transition to high school. 2. To test the theory of the intervention by assessing the "mediated effect" of the program on subsequent mental health and academic outcomes through the putative mediators targeted in the program. 3. To assess any differential effect of the program as a function of adolescent gender, higher initial levels of symptomatology, and language of program delivery.