Abstract
In order to deal with the serious problems of drug use, delinquency, and mental health problems in this country, policy makers, communities, practitioners, and advocates need to identify prevention programs that have empirical support and at the same time meet their own community needs regarding acceptability, cost, and training, and supervision. An 'evidence-based' approach to prevention, one that identifies the scientific knowledge about what prevention programs work, for whom, and under what circumstances, should play a critical part in this process. The premise of this evidence-based approach is that the wide adoption of prevention programs that have been found to be successful in rigorous evaluations, will lead to successful population-based prevention strategies. A web-based registry, or database that describes the available scientific information on individual preventive trials, would be of high potential use to policy makers engaged in prevention planning for their communities. This presentation describes a model registry based on descriptions of 167 preventive trials aimed at children aged 0-6. Empirical findings are presented regarding two critical components of the registry, the measurement of the quality of the trial and the strength of evidence for a beneficial effect produced by each intervention. Implications for the use of such a registry are also discussed. Copyright (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 955-964 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Addictive Behaviors |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 2000 |
Funding
The authors wish to thank Drs. Patricia Mrazek, Clemens Hosman, William Bukoski, Ellen Sogolow, Sheppard Kellam, and Tony Biglan for many helpful discussions on the uses of a registry system in prevention to inform policy. In addition, we thank the advisory board of the International Classification of Preventive Trials for their guidance in helping to organize the literature on prevention. Some of these ideas have directly influenced this paper, other ideas have provided a foundation for the International Registry of Preventive Trials project, now led by the Society for Prevention Research. The empirical results in this paper are derived from a review of the literature for children aged 0–6 that was supported by the Invest in Kids Foundation of Ontario, Canada. We gratefully acknowledge their financial support and their advisory board's intellectual contributions to that project. The first author received support from the NIMH Prevention, Early Intervention and Epidemiology Research Branch, the Child and Adolescent Treatment and Preventive Intervention Research Branch, and the Adult Geriatric Treatment and Preventive Interventions Research Branch, as well as the NIDA Prevention and Epidemiology Divisioin under Grant No. MH40859, “Designs and Analyses for Mental Health Preventive Trials,” the NIMH Prevention Branch under Grants No. MH01259, “Methodologic Advances in Mental Illness Prevention,” No. MH38725, “Epidemiologic Center for Early Risk Behaviors.”
Keywords
- Design quality
- Evidence-based prevention
- Intervention impact
- Preventive trial registry
- Relational database
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Medicine (miscellaneous)
- Clinical Psychology
- Toxicology
- Psychiatry and Mental health