Blueprints
Promising Programs Fact Sheets
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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