A Gender-Specific, Web-Based Intervention to Prevent Drug Abuse Among Adolescent Girls

Introduction: Though the arc of adolescent drug use in the last decade is positive, a detailed exam of female adolescent drug use is alarming. In particular, girls’ drug use often meets and in some cases surpasses boys’ use. Adolescent girls have a proclivity for particular drugs and their unique risk and protective factors warrant a gender-specific approach to prevention. A web-based drug abuse prevention program that is visually appealing and interactive has the potential to reach girls where they socialize and spend much of their free time. Traditional prevention programs, gender-specific or otherwise, often require significant implementation and monitoring that hinder their adoption by schools and communities who serve youth. Our program, if effective long-term, will be theory-driven, rigorously tested, and easily available for inexpensive delivery to a national audience.

Methods: This study is a longitudinal, randomized clinical trial to develop and test a gender-specific, web-based drug abuse prevention program. Study participants are 689 adolescent girls, aged 13 and 14 years, who were recruited exclusively through Facebook Ads. All girls have completed baseline assessment and one-half of girls have been randomly assigned to interact with the 9-session, skills-based intervention. The intervention is accessible to girls as a menu of sessions embedded in a tailored website with the features that girls seek: access to entertainment news, health and beauty tips, horoscopes, inspirational quotes, chat boards, and polls.

Relying exclusively on the Internet for recruitment, data collection, and intervention delivery, our presentation will detail lessons learned from recruiting a national sample of adolescent girls through Facebook (e.g., cost per enrolled girl, durations, advertising strategies). We will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of designing a 9-session, web-based, gender-specific intervention for delivery to a heterogeneous groups of adolescent girls. And, our use of telephone calls and regular mail versus texting to track and engage study participants for this longitudinal trial, will also be discussed.