Blueprints
Promising Programs
Program
Overview:
Project Northland is a community-wide intervention designed to reduce adolescent
alcohol use. The program includes six years of programming spanning seven academic
years and is multi-level, involving individual students, parents, peers, and
community members, businesses, and organizations.
Program Targets:
Project Northland is a universal intervention
designed for sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh
and twelfth grade students. No programming is delivered
in the tenth grade. It has been successfully implemented
in rural, lower-middle class to middle class communities.
Program Content:
The success of this program lies in its comprehensive
and long-term design. Each of the six years has
a specific theme and incorporates individual,
parent, peer, and community training.
- In sixth grade, student and parent communication
is targeted by requiring parents and children to
complete homework assignments together that describe
adolescent alcohol use. Group discussions regarding
this topic are held in school, and a community-wide
task force is also created to address young adult
alcohol use.
- In seventh grade,
a peer- and teacher-led classroom curriculum focuses
on resistance skills and normative expectations
regarding teen alcohol use and is implemented using
discussions, games, problem-solving, and role plays.
A peer participant program also creates alternative
alcohol-free activities, and parent involvement
continues. The community task force discusses alcohol-related
ordinances, and businesses provide discounts
for those adolescents who pledge to be alcohol
and drug free.
- In eighth grade,
students are encouraged to become active citizens.
They interview influential community members about
their beliefs and activities concerning adolescent
drinking and conduct town meetings to make recommendations
for the community's help in preventing alcohol
use.
- In ninth grade, the curriculum addresses
pressures to drink and drive, or to ride with
a drinking driver, the influences and tactics of
alcohol advertising, and ways to deal with those
influences.
- No programming is delivered in tenth
grade.
- In the eleventh and twelfth grades, the
intervention builds upon the early adolescent
program components with new strategies for the
students' last years in high school while emphasizing
changes in the social environment of young people.
The curriculum is based on the social influences
theory of behavior change, where students are asked
to debate and discuss the social influences to
use alcohol and the negative consequences those
influences have not only on the individual teen,
but on the community as a whole. Through these
debates and discussions, students are able to change
the social norms surrounding alcohol use and convert
negative peer pressure into positive peer pressure.
Using an innovative, civil-trial approach, the
curriculum challenges high-school students to examine
the real-world consequences, both legal and social,
of teen alcohol use. The program is peer-led
and uses interactive methods to accomplish its
instructional goals.
Program Outcomes:
An evaluation conducted at the end of the third year of intervention found significant
benefits for intervention students, compared to control students:
- Lower scores on the tendency to use alcohol,
- Less use of alcohol in both the past week and
the past month,
- Lower
frequency of the combination of alcohol and cigarette
use,
- Lower scores on the peer influence scale, and
- Increased
communication with parents about the consequences
of drinking.
Students who were nonusers of alcohol at the beginning
of the intervention demonstrated:
- Decreased tendencies to use alcohol,
- Less alcohol use in the past week and past month,
and
- Less cigarette and marijuana use.
An evaluation conducted at the end of the sixth
year of intervention indicated the following significant
outcomes for intervention students, compared to
control students:
- Less likely to increase their Tendency
to Use Alcohol and binge drinking, and marginally
less likely to increase past month alcohol use.
- Reduced the ability to purchase alcohol in off-sale
outlets.
- Parents in intervention communities as compared
to parents in the control communities had less
permissive norms regarding teen alcohol use.
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