Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Verifying Drug Abuse Prevention Program Effects Using Reciprocal Best Friend Reports, Stewart I. Donaldson, Craig W. Thomas, John W. Graham, Judith G. Au, William B. Hansen

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Considerable research suggests that social influences-based drug abuse preven- tion programming has produced the most consistently successful preventive effects. However, a common criticism of this literature is that most prevention intervention studies rely solely on self-reported substance use. The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of normative education, arguably the most successful component of social influence based prevention programs, on alcohol and cigarette consumption using both self- and reciprocal best friend reports of substance use. Analyses of subsamples of data from 11,995 students participating in the Adolescent Alcohol Prevention Trial revealed that norma- tive education significantly delayed …