Voluntary Afterschool Program Curbs Middle School Substance Use for Both Participants and Entire School
Middle school is when many young people first try alcohol and marijuana. School-based interventions have had success targeting middle school substance use, but these programs are mandatory and take place during class time. Little is known about how well a voluntary afterschool program might work. To find out, RAND developed a brief intervention called Project CHOICE and pilot-tested it at two Southern California middle schools. Participants could choose to attend any of five sessions given throughout the school year. The Project CHOICE curriculum included components known to be successful with teens, for example, providing normative feedback, challenging unrealistic positive expectancies, and using role play to teach adolescents how to resist pressure to use substances.
By the end of the 2-year pilot, Project CHOICE students (n=64) reported significantly lower rates of past-month alcohol use as well as significantly lower perceptions of friends' marijuana use and of schoolmates' use of alcohol or marijuana, compared with a matched control sample (n=264). Furthermore, similar effects were documented for the intervention school as a whole (n=270) compared with the control school (n=178), possibly because advertisements for Project CHOICE raised student-body awareness of healthy alternatives to substance use and because of peer influence from participating students.
This small pilot study is the first to suggest that a brief, voluntary intervention can beneficially affect younger adolescents' alcohol and marijuana use rates and perception of peer substance use, and that such an intervention can work at both individual and school-wide levels.
Source:
"Pilot Test of Project CHOICE: A Voluntary Afterschool Intervention for Middle School Youth," in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, D'Amico EJ, Edelen MO
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