SAAF - Strong African American FamiliesPersonnel Description The Strong African American Families (SAAF) project evaluates the effectiveness of a 7-week interactive educational program for African American parents and their early adolescent children. The intervention program is based on an empirically-based model of the processes linked to psychological adjustment, substance use and high-risk behavior in rural African American youth. Early adolescence is the period in which children gain increasing control over their behavior, begin forming friendships based on similarities and common interests, and develop attitudes toward substances and substance use. The attitudes and behaviors that they develop during this time influence their achievement motivation, academic performance and friendship selections, which in turn place them on a developmental trajectory leading toward or away from substance use. The SAAF program is designed to strengthen positive family interactions and to enhance parents’ efforts to help their children establish and reach positive goals during this critical transition between childhood and adolescence. The SAAF curriculum is based on data collected in two other Center studies, Families In It Together (FIIT) and the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS). These studies survey large numbers of African American families residing in rural areas about the kinds of things that parents and children do that foster competence. The SAAF program targets the following predictors of child competence: (1) family routines, parent-child relationship quality, no-nonsense discipline, monitoring and communication and parental involvement with the child’s school; (2) self-regulation and emotion regulation; and (3) the cognitive antecedents of adolescent risk behavior, including the formation of prototypes of drinking youths and willingness to drink in risk-conducive situations. Project Goals 1. To test the efficacy of the SAAF program in: • Developing structured family environments, supportive mother-child relationships, monitoring of child behavior outside the home and maternal involvement at school; • Promoting the development of self-regulation, emotion regulation and positive personal outlooks; • Fostering unfavorable prototypes of youths who drink and favorable prototypes of non-drinkers, helping youths to develop realistic perceptions of their peers’ drinking, and decreasing their willingness to expose themselves to drinking-conducive peer groups and situations; • Delaying the onset and lowering the rate of substance use in rural African American youth. 2. To explore the mediating mechanisms through which specific components of the SAAF program affect the onset and escalation of the use of alcohol and other substances among rural African American youth. Intervention Component The intervention component of the SAAF project is called the SAAF program. It consists of a series of 2 ½ -hour group sessions (7 initial sessions and 2 booster sessions). During the first half-hour of the meetings the participants are served a meal. This is intended to be a time for family members and group leaders to build rapport with one another. During the next hour, the parents/caregivers and youth meet separately with their assigned facilitators. During the second hour, everyone comes together for a group meeting with all of the families. Thus, all parents and youths receive 14 hours of prevention training. All sessions are videotaped. The SAAF curriculum is designed to: • Help parents/caregivers learn nurturing skills that support their children; • Teach parents/caregivers effective ways to discipline and guide their youth; • Give youth a healthy future orientation and an increased appreciation of their parents/caregivers; • Teach youth skills for dealing with stress and peer pressure. Facilitators are African American community members who are trained to teach the SAAF curriculum. One facilitator leads the parent/caregiver portion of the session, while two facilitators share the responsibility of leading the youth sessions. All three group leaders participate in the family session. To insure the integrity of the intervention, program content is presented in videotape format. Facilitators follow curriculum modules for each session and document and summarize what happens in each session. As well, they receive ongoing supervision, including sporadic direct observations made by the field supervisor. Treatment Efficacy Component Families are randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. During the same 7-week period that the intervention families participate in the prevention sessions, the control families receive three leaflets via postal mail. One describes various aspects of development in early adolescence, another deals with stress management, and the third provides suggestions for encouraging children to exercise. Families in both groups are pre-tested one month before the SAAF program begins and post-tested three months after the sessions end, producing a 7-month interval between pretest and posttest. During the pre- and post-test data collections, a research assistant visits the home to administer a 2-hour interview with the parent and child individually. These interviews are conducted privately, with no other family members present. During the visit, the research assistant enters family members’ responses into a laptop computer. These interviews incorporate several self-report questionnaires designed to measure intervention-targeted parenting behaviors and indicators of targeted youth protective factors. Sample parenting behaviors include involved-vigilant parenting, adaptive racial socialization, communication about sex and clear communication of expectations about alcohol use. Sample indicators of youth protective factors include future-oriented goals, resistance efficacy, negative images of drinkers, acceptance of parental alcohol influences, and negative attitudes toward alcohol use and sexual activity. The effectiveness of the intervention program is tested using structural equation modeling (SEM), which can be applied to the evaluation of models that include hypothesized sequences of intervention effects on proximal and distal outcomes. As well, SEM also allows simultaneous examination of intervention effects on interrelated constructs, such as targeted parenting behaviors and youth protective factors, while controlling measurement error. Family Recruitment and Retention Strategies In each of the six counties included in the sample, community members serve as liaisons (link to list) between the university researchers and the county residents. Many of these individuals have worked with the Center on other ongoing investigations of African American families and have served as community liaisons for several years. They are well-respected, familiar members of the communities in which they live. They compile rosters of children within each county who meet the sampling criteria using information from parents, teachers, pastors, youth groups and community organizations. Families are selected randomly from these rosters. After a child has been selected for participation, a community liaison contacts the child’s family to schedule an appointment for a home visit, during which the project is explained and the family’s participation is solicited. The personal relationship established between the community liaison and the family is pivotal to families’ participation. S/he describes the program and encourages family members to ask questions and share any concerns they may have. Emphasis is placed upon the contribution that the family would make by helping the researchers understand family life among African Americans living in rural Georgia. All families receive $150 upon completion of each wave of data collection, for a total of $450 for families who complete the entire study. Additional incentives include a complete dinner for family members at each training group session, round-trip transportation and babysitting services, if needed. The community liaison maintains monthly contact with all families during the period when they are participating in the study. At recruitment, families are asked to provide names of relatives or friends who will always know their whereabouts; and twice each year they receive a newsletter that include a stamped address correction form to facilitate the updating of participant address lists. These efforts at ongoing contact have been essential in maintaining participants’ commitment to longitudinal projects conducted at the Center. Preliminary Results • After participating in the SAAF program, parents engage in more regulated, communicative parenting than parents in the control group do. As well, youths who participated in the SAAF program report higher levels of protective factors than youths who did not participate. (Brody et al, 2004) • Regulated, communicative parenting and youth protective factors actually declined in control families from pre-to post-test, while they increased in the intervention families. These striking results suggest that the SAAF program may have derailed potential declines in these two factors during the 7-month assessment period. (Brody et al, 2004) • Changes in the targeted youth protective factors were mediated through the SAAF program’s effects on their caregiver’s communication and parenting behaviors. (Brody et al, 2004) Timeline Approximately 700 families will participate in the SAAF project between 2001 and 2006. Approximately 400 will participate in the family education group sessions, while 300 control families will receive home educational materials to read on their own. For Cohort One, consisting of 200 intervention and 150 control families, the data collection timeline was as follows: • Fall, 2001: pre-test data collection For Cohort Two, consisting of the remaining 350 families, the timeline will be: • Fall, 2002: pre-test data collection Links |
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