Program Profile: Taking Charge of Your Life

This is a school-based, universal substance abuse prevention program for middle school students. The program is rated Ineffective. Intervention students self-reported greater use of alcohol and cigarettes and more binge drinking, compared with control group students, at the 5-year follow up. These differences were statistically significant. There were no statistically significant differences between groups in marijuana use.

A Negative Effects rating implies that implementing the program may result in a negative outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes at least one high-quality randomized controlled trial.

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes either 1) one study conducted in multiple sites; or 2) two or three studies, each conducted at a different site. Learn about how we make the multisite determination.

A Negative Effects rating implies that implementing the program may result in a negative outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes at least one high-quality randomized controlled trial.

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes either 1) one study conducted in multiple sites; or 2) two or three studies, each conducted at a different site. Learn about how we make the multisite determination.

Program Goals/Target Population

Taking Charge of Your Life (TCYL) targets students during their years most at risk—seventh through ninth grade—to prevent the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs.

Program Activities

The program is administered through 10 lessons delivered in seventh grade and seven booster lessons in ninth grade. The program highlights the personal, social, and legal risks and consequences involved with using tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs. It delivers data from national studies on substance use to dispel the concept that “everybody does it.” Students receive life skills training such as communication, decision-making, assertiveness, and refusal skills. The consequences of drug use and making good choices are reinforced.

Content is based on a series of scenarios of problem situations addressing the use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs. Content is structured to be appropriate for the different ages. In the seventh grade curriculum, alcohol and tobacco are addressed in nine of the lessons; marijuana and other drugs are covered in five and three lessons, respectively. Most of the lessons concentrate on normative beliefs, the consequences of substance use, effective decision-making, and resistance skills. In the ninth grade, most lessons include material on the consequences of substance use and decision-making; alcohol is addressed in five lessons; and all other substances are addressed in three lessons.

All lessons are administered by police officers with Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) training. Teachers schedule time for these lessons to be taught in the classroom during the normal school day.

The program incorporates large and small group discussions, as well as role-playing, and follows a spiral structure that introduces skills and key points that are revisited and practiced in increasingly complex situations. This allows students to build on their knowledge and learn how to incorporate it into real-world decision-making and refusal techniques. Homework provides further practice and helps keep parents informed.

Program Theory

This redesigned program, an updated version of DARE, has an active or constructivist learning approach. This approach encourages students to understand their experiences, ideas, and values about the consequences of substance abuse by relating them to their existing beliefs. Learning occurs through interactions with one another and the instructor, using in-depth deliberations, authentic problem-solving, and realistic role-playing.

Additional Information: Negative Program Effects

An outcome evaluation (described below in Evaluation Methodology and Outcomes) looked at the effects of TCYL in six major metropolitan areas, including Detroit, Michigan; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Newark, New Jersey; New Orleans, Louisiana.; and St. Louis, Missouri. The results showed that students who participated in TCYL had worse outcomes than control group participants who did not receive the program. Students who participated in the program reported significantly more alcohol use, binge drinking, and cigarette use than students who did not participate in the program.

Study

Sloboda and colleagues (2009) used a longitudinal randomized field trial design to determine the effects of Taking Charge of Your Life (TCYL) on adolescent substance use. Six major metropolitan areas, representing 83 school clusters (41 treatment and 42 control) produced a study sample of 19,529 seventh graders enrolled for the 5-year study. The study sites were Detroit, Mich.; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, Calif.; Newark, N.J.; New Orleans, La.; and St. Louis, Mo. Schools from the same metropolitan area selected to be in the study were not grouped together. There was a 50-mile radius between chosen schools. School clusters represent a high school and its associated feeder middle schools. All participating schools agreed to the randomized design. At baseline, treatment and control groups were comparable on demographic characteristics and substance use. TCYL was administered to students at the start of seventh grade and again in the ninth grade.

Seven survey waves were administered at baseline, 30–60 days postbaseline (the post–7th grade intervention survey), 1 year postintervention (during 8th grade), pre– and post–9th grade intervention, then again in 10th and 11th grades. Final analyses were conducted with data from 17,320 students (10,028 treatment and 7,292 control). The outcome measures were self-reported tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use for the past 30 days and the past 12 months. Survey items were drawn from existing national surveys, primarily the Monitoring the Future Study. Questions covered prevalence (how often did you use tobacco in the past 30 days?) and frequency (how many times did you get drunk? did you binge drink in the past 14 days?) of substance use.

Because of the clustered nature of the data (students within schools within districts), a multilevel or hierarchical logistic model was used to adjust for intracluster correlation of students nested within school clusters. The analyses first looked for main effects of TCYL on substance abuse. Baseline exposure/use of substances and exposure to the treatment program were treated as fixed effects. A random effects model that permitted variation in the effect of baseline substance use was run and compared with the fixed-effects model, and there were no significant differences. The authors conducted subgroup analyses examining the effects of gender, race/ethnicity, and baseline use of substances.

Subgroup Analysis

Sloboda and colleagues (2009) conducted subgroup analyses on gender, race/ethnicity, and baseline use of substances. Most of the negative alcohol-related outcomes (alcohol use, getting drunk, and binge drinking) were for male students in the treatment schools. Male students in the Taking Charge of Your Life (TCYL) treatment schools were more likely to report negative alcohol-related outcomes, compared with male students in control schools. Female students in the treatment schools were more likely to self-report binge drinking in the past 30 days, compared with female students in the control schools. These differences were statistically significant.

The research team also examined the outcomes by race. Negative alcohol-related outcomes were primarily and consistently evidenced among white students in the treatment schools but were not as consistent among nonwhite students in the treatment schools. Analyses were also run to determine whether prior use of substances may have influenced the effects of the treatment program. In the TCYL group, they found a statistically significant, negative effect for nonusers at baseline in alcohol use (binge drinking, past 30-day use of alcohol, and getting drunk). However, there were no statistically significant differences in alcohol use or getting drunk in the past 12 months between baseline nonusers in treatment schools and control schools.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

Sloboda, Zili, Peggy C. Stephens, Amod Pyakuryal, Brent Teasdale, Richard C. Stephens, Richard D. Hawthorne, Jesse F. Marquette and Joseph E. Williams. 2008. “Implementation Fidelity: The Experience of the Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention Study.” Health Education Research 24(3):394–406.