NCJ Number
235429
Editor(s)
Thomas K. Greenfield,
Robert Zimmerman
Date Published
1993
Length
319 pages
Annotation
This monograph - a product of the second international research symposium on "Experiences With Community Action Projects for the Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems," held January 29 - February 2, 1992, in San Diego, CA - examines new evaluations of intercommunity differences that influence the impact of specific alcohol-control measures and how to assess these and other prevention measures in natural experiments.
Abstract
The first section contains conference papers on conceptual issues in evaluating community action projects. They encompass the nature of community action research projects and developments in the field since a similar conference held in March 1989; a Canadian case study of a government-sponsored prevention initiative and evaluation; methodological issues in two evaluated New Zealand community prevention projects; and issues in the attribution of program effects in the Rhode Island Alcohol abuse/Injury Prevent Project over time. The second section contains papers on experiences with policy-adoption case studies that involve anti-drunk-driving campaigns conducted in Canada and Australia; two Canadian studies that involve program philosophy and politics in drunk-driving prevention and tobacco regulation; the intersection of community prevention and national politics based on experiences in Israel and Poland; and strategies for implementing local policy change in Oxford, England, and California. The next section presents papers that address the design of community trials, with case studies from Minnesota and Stockholm, Sweden. The fourth section is composed of papers that focus on needs assessments or natural experiments in special settings, followed by a section of papers that address broad-based programs and their interaction with grass-roots initiatives. The last section of papers discusses issues in the transfer of knowledge (training) and sustaining citizen/community organization. One paper presents an overview of the conference, addressing tensions inherent in community-action evaluation research and exploring recurrent conference themes of tradeoffs, balance points, and compromise. Appended conference participant list