1992 · Study · English
Evaluating Comprehensive Community Drug Risk Reduction Interventions: Design Challenges and Recommendations
Peterson, P. L., Hawkins, J. D., & Catalano, R. F.
Peterson, P. L., Hawkins, J. D., & Catalano, R. F. (1992). Evaluating Comprehensive Community Drug Risk Reduction Interventions: Design Challenges and Recommendations. Evaluation Review, 16(6), 579–602. doi.org/10.1177/0193841x9201600601
Summary
Methodological paper that set out how a comprehensive community intervention such as Communities That Care could be evaluated rigorously. It summarises recommendations from a 1991 conference on evaluating comprehensive community interventions and uses CTC as the worked example. Because the intervention operates on whole communities, individual randomisation is impossible and standard designs fail; the participants therefore recommended a multi-site experimental trial in which communities are matched in pairs and each pair is randomised to intervention or comparison, with randomisation at the community level. The authors discuss what this implies for selecting communities, for the number of communities needed and for statistical power. There are no empirical results. The paper is nonetheless a cornerstone of the CTC literature: the design it proposes is essentially the one used a decade later in the Community Youth Development Study, and the same matched-pair logic underlies the current German CTC-EFF trial.