Message (mis)Targeting to Maximize Outcomes in Youth Drug Prevention

An important requirement of any persuasion campaign involves the choice of target. Who is the intended recipient of our messages? Without answering this question, any campaign, branded or not, is unlikely to succeed.  Traditional campaigns designed to moderate adolescent substance misuse have focused on the youths themselves. More recently, variations within this audience have been suggested, and appear to foster persuasive success; even so, this group as a whole exhibits considerable resistance to anti-drug prevention messages. An audience more amenable to prevention of youth misuse may involve parents, and considerable research and theory concerned with parental involvement/monitoring/warmth/etc. suggest that shifting the focus of prevention campaigns to this group might have positive effects. Recent research concerned with parental effects on youth drug misuse will be presented. These studies indicate the impact, reach, and subtlety of parental influences on adolescent drug use, and could lead to a fundamental change in the design and development of approaches to drug prevention in youth.