2013 · Study · English

Variation in the Effect of Communities That Care on Community Adoption of a Scientific Approach to Prevention

Shapiro, V. B., Hawkins, J. D., Oesterle, S., Monahan, K. C., Brown, E. C., & Arthur, M. W.

Shapiro, V. B., Hawkins, J. D., Oesterle, S., Monahan, K. C., Brown, E. C., & Arthur, M. W. (2013). Variation in the Effect of Communities That Care on Community Adoption of a Scientific Approach to Prevention. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 4(3), 154–164. doi.org/10.5243/jsswr.2013.10

Summary

Paper in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research examining not whether CTC works but how evenly. In the community-randomised trial, 24 communities were matched in pairs and assigned at random to CTC or control, and CTC significantly increased community-wide adoption of a science-based approach to prevention, as reported by key leaders. Applying a meta-analytic technique to the 12 matched pairs, the authors show that the size of this effect varied significantly from pair to pair, even though CTC itself was implemented with uniformly high fidelity in every intervention community. Fidelity, in other words, did not guarantee equal impact. The authors present the variation as a starting point for identifying which aspects of coalition structure, functioning or capacity explain it and could be strengthened to make the effect more reliable – the line of work pursued in the group’s subsequent coalition-capacity papers. Useful for European evaluators expecting heterogeneity across sites.