Feasibility of online parent training to promote parent-adolescent communication

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application proposes to evaluate the feasibility of an online parenting training approach for influencing mother-adolescent communication about drugs. Parent-adolescent communication has consistently emerged as an important deterrent to initiation and progression of drug use. Yet, many parents and adolescents don't communicate about drugs and relatively little is known about parents' and adolescents' perceptions of barriers to such communication and individual, psychosocial, and contextual factors that influence these barriers. Research has shown that parent training programs can be effective in promoting communication that results in reduced drug use. Yet, many programs are time- and resource-intensive and universal in approach, so that widespread dissemination and applicability to a range of parents may be difficult to achieve. The proposed project has two separate, but related, goals to address gaps in the research and practice regarding parent- adolescent communication about drug use: 1) to identify perceived barriers to communication about drug use and the factors associated with them, and 2) to examine the viability of an online parent training approach to promote parent-adolescent communication. A community-based participation research approach will be adopted in concert with two urban prevention coalitions. Focus groups will be conducted with mothers and adolescents to obtain perspectives on topic-specific barriers to communication about drugs, and a measure of perceived barriers to communication will be developed from this work. An online survey that assesses perceived barriers, communication behavior, and factors hypothesized to influence barriers will then be implemented with 300 mother-adolescent dyads, and associations will be analyzed via multilevel modeling techniques. Coalition partner meetings will be conducted to obtain perspectives on community parent outreach needs and barriers to an online training approach within the existing infrastructures. The results of the three activities will inform the content and approach of an online training module that will be developed and piloted tested with 60 mothers to assess potential efficacy and acceptability. The project will form the foundation of a program of research that will extend to an R01 application to examine the efficacy of an online parent training approach for affecting youth drug use behaviors. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Parents can play an important role in preventing adolescent drug use. A cost- and time-effective online resource that could reach thousands of parents with evidence-based targeted training has the potential for broad public health significance.