Sunday, 16 January 2005 - 10:15 AM

This presentation is part of: Interventions for Adolescent Drug Abuse: Individual, Group, Family and Community Approaches

Measuring the Strengths of Community Collaborations to Improve Youth Substance Abuse Treatment

In efforts to use empirical evidence with local providers to improve community collaboration we have traditionally used standard surveys, questionnaires and collected qualitative data. Over the last 10 years we have found that the use of social network analysis (SNA) to measure and report on the strengths in community collaboration offers several advantages.

First, the approach provides illustrative diagrams (sociograms) that are intuitively appealing and meaningful to project staff. Sociograms illustrate the strength of connectedness among the members of a network based on responses of the members to one or more questions. Questions target specific elements of relationships (e.g., who has the most power, who has the most access to resources, who works well together, what’s effective). For single response sets (i.e., responses by all members of a network to one question), it is easy to see how members of the network are connected on that one relational content. At a higher level of abstraction, we are currently working on “multiplex analysis” which uses information from all network members on several relational contents (e.g., working together, sharing space and sharing funding). Multiplex analysis helps to uncover social structure based on the combined responses over several questions, not just one relation.

Second, because the illustrations are intuitively appealing and meaningful to staff, the results are especially valuable for formative evaluation purposes facilitating the use of data in decision-making (Richardson and Huff, 2001). The sociograms and associated statistics serve as an evidence-based and strengths-based foundation upon which action may be taken to further strengthen a community collaborative. A baseline survey illustrates how members of a network of community providers are connected suggesting where interventions should be employed. Subsequent measurement provides an assessment of effectiveness of the strategies undertaken and suggests additional ones.

Third, collecting standard survey data and using a multi-method approach including network data provides powerful outcome measures for funders (i.e., summative evaluation); SNA computer programs provide robust statistics in addition to the computer- generated sociograms (e.g., UCINET 6, but see http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/INSNA/soft_inf.html for a more complete listing of computer programs).

We are currently evaluating the Strengthening Communities – Youth program (“Project Iowa SCY”), one of 12 CSAT funded Strengthening Communities in the Development of Comprehensive Drug and Alcohol Treatment Systems for Youth initiatives (Hall et al, 2002). One of the major goals for evaluation was the measurement of community strengths in the development of linkages and networking mechanisms across the system of care network. Strengthening the connectedness of the local system of care is associated with better identification, assessment, referral, and treatment of youth with substance abuse. A baseline SNA was conducted to measure the strengths of the community collaboration and these results are being used in the outreach and community education efforts to improve early identification, referral and treatment. Follow-up data will be presented illustrating the effects of the interventions with recommendations for further intervention in strengthening the network of community providers collaborating to treat substance abuse among youth.

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