2019 · Study · English
Community intervention to prevent adolescent health behavior problems: Evaluation of communities that care in Australia
Toumbourou, J. W., Rowland, B., Williams, J., Smith, R., & Patton, G.
Toumbourou, J. W., Rowland, B., Williams, J., Smith, R., & Patton, G. (2019). Community intervention to prevent adolescent health behavior problems: Evaluation of communities that care in Australia. Health Psychology, 38(6), 536–544. doi.org/10.1037/hea0000735
Summary
Population-level evaluation of Communities That Care in Australia, where the process was introduced from 2001 to address high rates of adolescent alcohol use. Trends were examined in self-report surveys of 41,328 adolescents (mean age 13.5; 51.7% female) across 109 municipal localities between 1999 and 2015. Multilevel models compared the five localities of the first four CTC coalitions to complete the process with the remaining 104 localities on lifetime alcohol, tobacco and cannabis use and past-year antisocial behaviour. Relative to the national trend, adolescents in CTC localities reported significantly steeper annual reductions in alcohol use (AOR 0.94; 95% CI 0.93–0.95), tobacco (AOR 0.97; 0.96–0.99), cannabis (AOR 0.96; 0.93–0.98) and antisocial behaviour. The effects are small per year but accumulate over a long window, and the authors read them as evidence that supporting community coalitions to adopt evidence-based interventions is a feasible route to improving the health of large youth populations. The Australian benefit–cost analysis builds on this paper.