The Substance Use Prevention, Education, and Research (SUPER) Project: Findings from the Implementation of Botvin Lifeskills Program

Background and Purpose: SUPER is a comprehensive 5-year community-engaged quasi-experimental mixed-methods study that aims to reduce adolescent substance use (SU) in two North Carolina counties, by increasing counties’ capacity and resiliency to decrease and prevent adolescent SU. SUPER created and convened adult and youth advisory councils, conducted community needs assessments, provided community and practitioner trainings/townhalls, connected schools and community partners, created an online repository of substance use prevention resources for the community, and implemented and evaluated youth and parent interventions. Botvin LST was implemented with over 1,000 middle school youth. The current presentation examines the impact of LST on SU outcomes relative to youth who participated in a mindfulness class. Given past research on LST, we hypothesized that youth in the LST group would report significant decreases in SU relative to youth in the mindfulness group. However, based on some recent critiques of past LST research, we hypothesized that decreases in SU would be less than in previous studies.

Method: LST was administered to middle school youth across 4 middle schools, 4 after school programs, and 1 church over the course of 5 years. Parents provided passive consent, and adolescents signed an assent form and filled out an online survey prior to LST beginning and again directly after the intervention finished. LST consists of 15, forty-five-minute lessons addressing risk and protective factors associated with SU (e.g., SU education, social skills, anger/anxiety management, self-esteem). Trained interventionists implemented LST and all sessions were audio recorded and random sessions were reviewed to ensure high fidelity. Comparison youth completed a 30-minute online mindfulness class created by NIDA. Resercher analyzed data for the current study using logistic regression.

Results: Findings indicated that LST youth reported a 49% reduction in the odds of alcohol use at post-test compared to youth in the comparison group. Further, current alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use at pre-test was significantly associated with an increased odds of SU at post-test. However, there was no change in cigarette use, vaping, or marijuana use between the LST and mindfulness groups.

Conclusions and Implications: LST findings indicate that participation in the program had a beneficial impact on alcohol consumption, likely due to the program content focused on the physical impact of alcohol. However, we did not find similar findings for cigarette, vaping, or marijuana use. It is possible that changes are needed for the LST program to increase its overall effectiveness. For example, there is a strong focus on tobacco use, but minimal focus on vaping. In addition, the program should be more culturally tailored and sensitive.