The Effects of Communities That Care on Community-Wide Protection during the Sustainability Phase

Background and Purpose: Social Work practitioners and scholars have emphasized the importance of addressing problem behaviors through increasing strengths in addition to reducing risks. Exploring the degree to which community interventions influence protective factors as a mechanism to enhance positive youth development is an important research task. The Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system is rooted in the social developmental model, which highlights the importance of providing youth with opportunities, skills, and recognition for prosocial involvement in order to build prosocial bonding that motivates prosocial behaviors.  CTC has been shown to reduce levels of risk factors as well as tobacco use, alcohol use, and delinquency. Furthermore, previous findings suggest that CTC increased overall levels of protective factors among community youth during the period when training and technical assistance were provided to CTC communities. Given CTC’s sustained effects on youth problem behaviors 1 year after technical assistance has ended, the present study asks whether the increased levels of protection among community youth are also sustained.  

Methods: Data were from the Community Youth Development Study (CYDS), a community-randomized controlled trial of the CTC prevention system in twenty-four communities across seven states. As part of this study, a longitudinal panel of 4,407 students was assessed annually starting in grade 5. The present analyses examined data up to 10^th grade, 1 year after training and technical assistance ended. Fifteen protective factors, specified in the social development model, were assessed using scales consisting of 2 to 6 items.  Using three level hierarchical linear modeling, differences were examined in levels of protective factors among 10^th graders in CTC compared to control communities adjusting for 5^thgrade levels of the protective factors and other individual- and community-level characteristics. Global test statistics (GTS) were used to examine the effect of CTC in overall levels of protection community-wide as well as the levels of protection in each domain.

Results:  Analyses of the longitudinal panel reveal that 10^th graders from CTC communities had higher overall levels of protection compared to those from control communities after controlling for baseline levels of individual and community characteristics, but the difference was not statistically significant (GTS t = 1.220, p= 0.235). 

Conclusion: Previous findings suggest that the CTC prevention system had a community-wide impact on levels of adolescent protective factors, but unlike the sustained effects on youth problem behaviors, the effect on protective factors was not sustained beyond the intervention phase. Exploration of the mechanisms through which the CTC system increases protection for youth may provide communities with an increased understanding for how to improve their prevention services. Longitudinal research is particularly important in answering intervention sustainability questions. In doing so, CTC can extend beyond simply preventing problem behaviors by reducing risks and more effectively achieve healthy youth development by promoting strengths among youth in the community.