Session: Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Systemic and Organizational Features That Enhance and Detract from Implementation Quality in Evidence-Based Prevention Practices (Society for Prevention Research 22nd Annual Meeting)

This symposium offers three empirical presentations on the systemic and organizational features that significantly enhance or detract from the quality of implementation of evidence-based preventive intervention in community agencies and public school environments. All three papers are at the cutting edge of implementation science in that objective measures of implementation quality have been used and the training protocols of an evidence-based practice are well established. The first paper involves a collaborative group of investigators who are implementing and evaluating the Positive Family Support system for providing services to families in the context of the public middle school. The second paper includes a recognized group of implementation scientists with extensive experience implementing and evaluating the PMTO program in several countries and community mental health service delivery systems. The third paper involves a group of researchers implementing a widely adopted evidence-based multicomponent intervention model for public elementary schools. The discussant is a former president of the SPR who is extensively familiar with community change and a public health perspective on prevention science.