Adaptation Processes in School-based Substance Abuse Prevention

The goals of the proposed study are to conduct an effectiveness trial of the keepin' it REAL
(refuse, explain, avoid, leave) middle school substance use prevention curriculum among a
new target audience in rural Pennsylvania and Ohio, describe how teachers adapt the
curriculum when they present it, and develop, implement, and evaluate a
Pennsylvania/Ohio-version of the curriculum to test whether an evidence-based universal
curriculum can be improved by adapting it to local cultures. keepin' it REAL is recognized
as a "model program" by SAMHSA's (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration's) National Registry of Effective programs and is one of the few that are
multicultural. The study will evaluate the effectiveness of the original curriculum,
grounded in the cultures of the southwest and compare that to a new version, "re-grounded"
in the rural culture of Pennsylvania and Ohio, while studying how teachers adapt both
versions. This proposal responds to NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse) PA-05-118
(Program Announcement), Drug Abuse Prevention Intervention Research that calls for
investigations addressing, "1) the development of novel drug abuse prevention approaches; 2)
the efficacy and effectiveness of newly developed and/or modified prevention programs; 3)
the processes associated with the selection, adoption, adaptation, implementation,
sustainability, and financing of empirically validated interventions." This proposal
addresses all three points.

A randomized control trial will be conducted in middle schools to accomplish these goals.
First, formative research will be conducted to develop a rural Pennsylvania/Ohio-version of
the curriculum. Second, 39 rural schools will be randomly assigned to one of three
conditions: teacher adaptation in which the original keepin' it REAL curriculum is
implemented; researcher adaptation in which a new Pennsylvania-version of the curriculum is
implemented, and a control group. We hypothesized the participation in either form of the
curriculum will reduce drug use and that the researcher adaptation will produce better
outcomes and less teacher adaptation than the teacher adaptation. A pretest will be
administered followed by post-tests in 7-9th grades. Adaptation and fidelity will be
measured in 3 ways: teachers completing a Program Quality and Adaptation online measure
after each lesson, videotaped lessons, and attendance. The major hypothesis tests will be
conducted using variants of the general linear model, taking into account the multilevel
structure of the data, test of a mediation model, and growth modeling.

Inclusion Criteria:

- all 7th grade students in implementation middle

Exclusion Criteria:

- lack of parental consent

- lack of student assent