2011 · Study · English
Effects of Communities That Care on the Adoption and Implementation Fidelity of Evidence-Based Prevention Programs in Communities: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial
Fagan, A. A., Arthur, M. W., Hanson, K., Briney, J. S., & Hawkins, J. D.
Fagan, A. A., Arthur, M. W., Hanson, K., Briney, J. S., & Hawkins, J. D. (2011). Effects of Communities That Care on the Adoption and Implementation Fidelity of Evidence-Based Prevention Programs in Communities: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial. Prevention Science, 12(3), 223–234. doi.org/10.1007/s11121-011-0226-5
Summary
First implementation-outcome paper from the Community Youth Development Study, in Prevention Science, reporting whether CTC changed what prevention programmes communities actually run. Data come from the Community Resource Documentation, a multi-tiered sampling procedure with telephone and web surveys of directors of community agencies and coalitions, school principals, service providers and teachers in the 24 trial communities. Four years after CTC was introduced, the 12 intervention communities were using more tested, effective prevention programmes than the 12 controls, and significantly more children and families were taking part in them. On implementation quality there were few significant differences: respondents in both conditions reported high fidelity across the services they delivered. The paper thus documents the mechanism CTC is meant to trigger – more evidence-based programming reaching more families – while showing that the control communities were not implementing badly, only less. A key reference for the ‘does CTC change practice?’ question that European commissioners ask.