Exploring Protective Factors: Did Communities That Care Make a Difference?

Introduction: We hypothesize that preventive interventions that target both elevated risk factors and depressed protective factors in communities are likely to achieve positive youth development outcomes and prevent adolescent problem behaviors community-wide.   However, researchers who have examined intervention effects of community interventions have focused primarily on effects on risk factors and problem behaviors. Exploring the degree to which community preventive interventions influence protective factors as a mechanism to enhance positive youth development is an important task for prevention research. This study examines the effects of the Communities That Care prevention system on protective factors identified by the social development model across four domains – peer-individual, family, school, and community – from 5^th grade through 8^th grade.

Data:  Data are from the Community Youth Development Study (CYDS), a community-randomized controlled trial of the Communities that Care (CTC) coalition-based prevention system.  Twenty-four small towns in seven US states were randomly assigned to either the control or intervention condition. As part of this study, a longitudinal panel of 4,407 students was assessed annually starting in grade 5. 

Methods: The present data analyses examined protective factors in the panel in 5^th (baseline) and  8^th grade, during the period when  study intervention resources including CTC training and technical assistance were provided to communities assigned to the intervention condition. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we examined differences in levels of protective factors in 8^th grade among youth in CTC compared to control communities adjusting for 5^th grade levels of the protective factors and other individual- and community-level characteristics.

Results:  Findings indicate that, by the end of eighth grade, youths from CTC communities had higher levels of certain protective factors than those from control communities after controlling for baseline levels and individual and community characteristics.  These included community opportunities for prosocial involvement (p=0.001), school rewards for prosocial involvement (p=0.041), social skills (p=0.019), and interaction with prosocial peers (p=0.048).

 Conclusion: These findings lay the groundwork for further exploring the role of protective factors in reducing problem behaviors as well as promoting positive youth development. They also have important implications for prevention and intervention efforts that focus only on risk factors.