2011 · Study · English

Implementing and Evaluating the Communities That Care Prevention System in Rural Pennsylvania

Olson, J.

Olson, J. (2011). Implementing and Evaluating the Communities That Care Prevention System in Rural Pennsylvania. Journal of Youth Development, 6(4), 68–78. doi.org/10.5195/JYD.2011.166

Summary

Utilisation-focused evaluation of Communities That Care in a single rural county in Pennsylvania that had been running the system for more than a decade. CTC is a prevention-planning system that helps local stakeholders plan, implement and evaluate evidence-based strategies against common youth behaviour problems; previous evaluations had reported promising results, but mostly as broad effects pooled across many implementation sites. The author asks whether such results can be replicated at the level of one long-standing site and finds a range of positive effects on the adolescent outcomes examined. Published in the practitioner-oriented Journal of Youth Development, the study is less rigorous than the multisite trials but illustrates what a county can learn from its own routine data after ten years of CTC, a model for the local monitoring that European sites are expected to build into phase 5.