Session: Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of Preventing Risk Behaviors Among South African Adolescents (Society for Prevention Research 22nd Annual Meeting)

SESSION INTRODUCTION:  The three papers in this symposium focus on a population at great risk for substance abuse, HIV/AIDs, and their comorbidity: South African adolescents living in impoverished and under-resourced locations.  We address ways to better understand the risk environment and ways to improve prevention efforts by taking a comprehensive approach to understanding the lives and contexts of these youth. In these papers we examine school drop-out, the rapidly escalating problem of methamphetamine (MA) use, and factors that influence implementation quality of a prevention program aimed at HIV/AIDS and substance use. Included in each of these papers are variables that address free time use as well as specific measures of sexual risk and substance use behavior and knowledge.

Paper 1, “Longitudinal Predictors of Early and Late School Dropout in South African High School Students,” we address a huge but understudied problem in South Africa (SA), school dropout from a longitudinal perspective. Using proxy measures of dropout based on responding to a series of questionnaires across 8 waves of data, we start to gain a picture of factors that contribute to early and later school leaving. These findings provide insight into how prevention efforts might be better designed to reach a group of extremely vulnerable youth.

Paper 2, “Free-Time Predictors of South African Adolescent Methamphetamine Use,” provides an understanding of a rapidly escalating problem of methamphetamine use among SA youth.  In SA, common wisdom suggests that much MA use takes place in informal and unsupervised settings that includes being on school property. This study empirically addresses that conjecture and findings have direct policy implications regarding environmental factors and intervention efforts that may decrease risk of MA use.

Paper 3, “Predicting Implementation Quality of the HealthWise South Africa Prevention Program: Preliminary Analysis,” is the first analysis of our efforts to better understand factors that contribute to implementation quality by teachers in 56 high schools who are teaching the HealthWise (HW) intervention. HW uses a variety of pedagogical methods and provides Grade 8 and 9 students with information about sexual risk, substance use, and how to use their free time in healthy ways. Findings from these preliminary analyses will inform ways to promote implementation quality as programs are taken to scale.