2009 · Study · English

Translational Research in Action: Implementation of the Communities That Care Prevention System in 12 Communities

Fagan, A. A., Hanson, K., Hawkins, J. D., & Arthur, M. W.

Fagan, A. A., Hanson, K., Hawkins, J. D., & Arthur, M. W. (2009). Translational Research in Action: Implementation of the Communities That Care Prevention System in 12 Communities. Journal of Community Psychology, 37(7), 809–829. doi.org/10.1002/jcop.20332

Summary

Implementation study from the Community Youth Development Study describing how the 12 intervention communities put Communities That Care into practice over five years. The authors frame CTC as a model of translational research: a planned, structured, data-driven system that trains local coalitions to choose evidence-based programmes and replicate them faithfully. They report that the communities enacted on average 90% of the system’s core components and delivered a range of school, after-school and parent-training programmes with high fidelity. These results were stable over time: coalitions were launched, programmes were adopted and the quality of prevention services was maintained across the five-year period. The paper contains no outcome data on youth behaviour; its contribution is to show that a structured coalition process can move prevention science into routine local practice, which is the operational premise of every CTC site in Europe.