Community Prevention System Change in the Netherlands and the United States

This is a request for an administrative supplement (ZonMW nr. 27499) for the current ZonMW-funded project Community that Care: Effectiveness of a community intervention strategy for the prevention of alcohol and drug use and other problem behaviour of youngsters in the Netherlands (120610017, M. Steketee, PI). This supplemental project will be conducted collaboratively by researchers from the Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington in the United States and from the Verwey-Jonker Institute in the Netherlands. A prior NIDA-funded binational supplemental project (DA015183-03S1) to compare the prevalence of youth marijuana use and levels of risk and protection experienced by youths of similar age in the U.S. and the Netherlands was successfully completed in 2007 in collaboration with the same Dutch researchers. This supplement will compare the implementation and adoption of Communities That Care (CTC), a community prevention system to prevent adolescent drug use and delinquency, in the Netherlands and the U.S. Like the United States, the Netherlands is facing growing problems with youth health risk behaviors, including binge drinking, smoking, drug abuse, addiction, violence, and delinquency. The Dutch Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport adopted the CTC prevention system on a pilot basis in 2000 and field-tested it in four Dutch communities. Subsequently, the CTC framework was expanded to eight additional communities between 2003 and 2005. The Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) is now funding our collaborators at the Verwey-Jonker Institute to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test CTC in 10 Dutch communities (5 intervention and 5 control communities). Since the randomized trial of CTC in the Netherlands has been closely modeled after the U.S. parent study, using the same instruments and collecting many of the same measures, this binational collaboration is a unique opportunity to study how an intervention that was developed in the U.S. can be implemented, adopted, and sustained in a different cultural and policy context. Specifically, this supplement aims to investigate whether implementation of CTC in the Netherlands is associated with similar changes in community prevention systems as in the U.S. and whether these changes are similarly associated with improvements in communities’ profiles of risk and protection and rates of adolescent drug use and delinquency, as hypothesized by CTC’s theory of change. To accomplish these goals, we request $79,389 in direct costs and $18,772 in indirect costs from NIDA. Our Dutch collaborators are concurrently asking for €86,275 in direct costs and €13,725 in indirect costs from the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw).