Pilot and Feasibility Testing of the Ho‘Ouna Pono Drug Prevention Curriculum: 12-Month Follow up Findings

Introduction: Recently, there has been a national emphasis on the health and well-being of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (NHOPIs), yet, research has lagged in terms of identifying the social and environmental contributors to health disparities of these populations, and the interventions necessary to address them. To fill this scientific gap, this paper describes a culturally grounded model for the development of a prevention intervention for rural Native Hawaiian youth, describes the process of program implementation, and highlights findings over four waves of data (pre-test, post-test, 6-month, and 12-month follow up).

Methods: The prevention intervention (Ho‘ouna Pono) is a 7-lesson, video-enhanced, school-based curriculum developed from a mixed methods, NIDA-funded, pre-prevention study. Six middle or intermediate public schools participated in the study, and were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 3) and control (n= 3) conditions. Two hundred and fifty four youth participated in the study. A longitudinal randomized controlled trial design was utilized to examine intervention effects. Participating physical education and/or health teachers were trained in the implementation of the curriculum in the classroom through a credit-granting professional development course. Implementation fidelity was monitored virtually through distance learning methods and through a comprehensive portfolio assignment.

Results: The evaluation findings from pre-test to 6-month follow up were promising. Compared with youth in the control schools, paired t-tests of mean difference scores indicated that youth in the intervention schools thought significantly more about the consequences resulting from accepting drugs from pre-test to 6-month follow up. Paired t-tests of mean difference scores also indicated that youth in the control schools had a significant decrease in the use of non-confrontational drug resistance strategies (avoid, explain, and leave) at 6-month follow up (ps < .05), which was not observed with the intervention youth, suggesting that the curriculum may have helped maintain or sustain youths' use of these types of strategies. Finally, youth in the control schools demonstrated a significant increase in fighting at 6-month follow up (p < .05, Cohen's d = -0.38), which was not observed in the intervention group. In this presentation, we will present additional findings, incorporating 12-month follow up data.

Conclusions: This presentation illustrates one model for the development of culturally grounded drug prevention, with particular relevance to indigenous and Pacific Islander youth. It also presents preliminary longitudinal findings related to the efficacy and effectiveness of a culturally grounded intervention.