Promoting the Implementation of an Evidence-Based Intervention for Adolescent Marijuana Abuse in Community Settings: Testing the Use of Intensive Quality Assurance

Abstract

The development and evaluation of effective strategies for transporting evidence-based practices to community-based clinicians has become a research and policy priority. Using multisystemic therapy programs as a platform, an experimental design examined the capacity of an Intensive Quality Assurance (IQA) system to promote therapist implementation of contingency management (CM) for adolescent marijuana abuse. Participants included 30 therapists assigned to Workshop Only (WSO) versus IQA training conditions, and 70 marijuana-abusing youths and their caregivers who were treated by these clinicians. Analyses showed that IQA was more effective than WSO at increasing practitioner implementation of CM cognitive-behavioral techniques in the short-term based on youth and caregiver reports, and these increases were sustained based on youth reports. On the other hand, IQA did not increase therapist use of CM monitoring techniques relative to WSO, likely because of an unanticipated ceiling effect. Both sets of findings contribute to the emerging literature on the transport of evidence-based practice to real-world clinical settings.

This manuscript was supported by grants DA015844 and DA015658 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and K23-MH01889 from the National Institute of Mental Health.

We sincerely thank the clinical and research teams including Steven B. Shapiro, Julie Schmidt, the Connecticut Department for Children and Families, Community Solutions, the North American Family Institute, and the Wheeler Clinic for their support in facilitating the success of this project. We also greatly appreciated the feedback that Sharon Foster, Alliant University, provided on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott W. Henggeler

The first author is a board member and stockholder of MST Services, LLC, the Medical University of South Carolina-licensed organization that provides training in MST.