Teacher Training in Affective Education for the Primary Prevention of Adolescent Drug Abuse

Abstract

Students in the experimental school were exposed over 3 years to teachers trained in a “generic” primary prevention program designed to deal with the affective needs of students. Students were expected to benefit from this exposure by adopting more positive attitudes, behaviors, and norms with regard to themselves, peers, teachers, and school. Ninth graders in the experimental school were compared with 9th graders in a control school; both groups were pretested during the first year of this study and posttested at the end of the third year. For boys, although there was a pattern of negative treatment effects, these were probably artifacts of the research design. For girls, there was no evidence of treatment effects. Analyses within the experimental school revealed a pattern of effects favoring students having the fewest classes with trained teachers. The results are discussed in terms of problems inherent in this type of strategy for the prevention of adolescent substance abuse.