Deborah Gorman-Smith, Patrick Tolan, David Henry, and Michael Schoeny, Principal Investigators
2009

Schools and Families Educating Children (SAFE Children) applies knowledge developed from the Chicago Youth Development Study to test, for families living in inner-city Chicago with children entering first grade, the effects of a family-based comprehensive preventive intervention targeting key risk markers for later drug and other substance use. A second phase of the study was designed to test for additional benefits of a booster intervention (randomly assigning half of the participating intervention families) delivered during the latter part of the elementary school years.

The current study is a long-term follow-up, designed to determine the magnitude and persistence of benefits accumulated from both phases of preventive intervention and differentiate the effects specifically due to the second-phase intervention (a “booster”) from those from the first-phase intervention. This study has an unprecedented capability to differentiate these preventive effects due to the measurement strategy (nine assessments over the two phases) and use of a developmental modeling approach to intervention evaluation. This approach can incorporate normal developmental patterns, whether ones of stability or growth and whether that growth is linear or non-linear. Because intervention effects are modeled as interaction with developmental trajectories, this study can reliably differentiate benefits of the second-phase intervention from long-term impact of the first-phase intervention and each of these from normal development. Thus, this evaluation will provide needed information about substance abuse prevention for an ethnically diverse, high-risk population and advance understanding about the importance of a “booster” or second-phase of intervention.

Two waves of data are being collected from youth and their families during 11th grade and as youth transition out of high school (all youth were followed whether in or out of school).