PREVENTING DRUG ABUSE--PARENTS AND YOUTH IN SCHOOLS

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Parents And Youth with Schools (PAYS) is an indicated drug abuse prevention program for high-risk youth. It is designed to address one of society's most disturbing trends: the co-occurrence of drug use/abuse, aggression, and depression among youth who are at risk for dropping out of high school. Project PAYS is a response to NIDA's recent calls for drug abuse prevention programs through family intervention (PA 96-013) and school-based indicated prevention program for high-risk youth. Initial funding was granted for a 2-year pilot study (1996-98) of the parent intervention component of PAYS. The impressive recruitment and retention rates lend support to our preliminary findings and suggest both the feasibility and acceptability of the program. These results in combination with expected changes in mediators call for the implementation of a full prevention trial of PAYS. Project PAYS augments the efficacious school-based Reconnecting Youth (Ry) program for potential high school dropouts with an innovative parent components. Parents As Partners (PAP) includes home visits and parent group meetings to foster parenting skills and support strategies directed at re-establishing the youth-parent-school bond. Both components are delivered over a full school year, providing an intensive, sustained 'dose" of social network support and life skill training. This approach is designed to reduce known risk factors and enhance protective, mediating factors within individual, family, school and peer contexts. The proposed study is a randomized trial. A 4-group factorial design with 5 repeated measures over 1.5 years is planned. It is hypothesized that the PAYS program will be significantly more effective than RY or PAP alone in reducing high-risk youths' drug involvement, school dropout and aggression/depression. Moreover, all three program conditions- PAYS, RY and PAP-compared to controls will show significantly greater reductions in the 4 outcomes and 4 mediators. The sample will consist of 760 high-risk youth in grades 10-12. The measurement model permits sophisticated assessments of individual students' antecedent, mediating and outcome dimensions, as well as corroborating evidence form parents and teachers. Process measures will assess the full implementation of the parent and school programs including measures of exposure, participation, receptivity and implementation fidelity. Latent growth models will be used to examine variance/co-variance structures and changes in outcomes and to test the hypothesized mediating intervention effects. The proposed analytic strategies permit exploration of key prevention research questions including the identification and outcome evaluation of youth with discrete risk vulnerability (including risk factor interactions) as well as the differential effects of gender. The proposed study is both innovative and significant. It has implications for both theory-testing and prevention science implications. This research should markedly increase our understanding of how family-focused preventive interventions with high-risk youth work to stem the progression of co-occurring drug involvement, aggression, depression and school deviance. Comparing the parent and school components of PAYS furthers our understanding of the relative gains associated with each program component. 1) parent and youth combined, 2) high-risk youth alone, and 3) parents alone.