The Nature of School-Based Prevention Experiences for Middle School Students

Abstract

A gap exists between the real and the ideal in school-based prevention programming. Research in this area tends to concentrate on determining program elements that yield a positive behavioral outcome. Less attention is given to what schools actually are doing and to what might be real-life constraints to “ideal” prevention programming.

This article is a report on in-person interviews with 139 school personnel from 42 middle and elementary schools in Wisconsin. Our purpose was (1) to determine the intensity of kindergarten through eighth-grade exposure to prevention topics and teaching strategies/or a cohort of students completing the eighth grade in 1991 and (2) to describe the degree of support for prevention topics in the schools.

Findings indicate that those topics and teaching strategies the majority of teachers and administrators felt to be most needed for a successful prevention effort were those actually used the least. Support for the school prevention effort was mixed. To explain these findings, we discuss data from open-ended ethnographic interviews carried out as part of a larger study.