Session: Scaling Effective Prevention Strategies for Social Impact: Contextual Factors Related to Success and Sustainability (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

The goal of this organized symposium is to present and discuss series of findings about local context factors that may impact the success and sustainability of efforts to scale-up evidence-based prevention strategies. The symposium supports the conference theme of Dissemination and Implementation Science and brings together researchers and projects that have investigated factors related to the success and sustainability of prevention strategy scale-up initiatives in a variety of contexts and settings (i.e., local, county, and state/province; schools and community public health).

The first paper, “Scaling Up Positive Family Support in Public Middle Schools: Outcomes, Implementation Challenges and Potential Solutions” reviews findings from a randomized hybrid effectiveness trial of the Positive Family Support model in 41 middle schools using the tiered PBIS behavior management system.  Local context factors such as personnel changes and staffing resources were associated with implementation and intervention outcomes.

The second paper, “Agency and County Characteristics Associated with Sustainability of an Evidence-Based Parenting Program” reviews findings from an implementation evaluation of a public health rollout of the Triple P – Positive Parenting Program system of interventions in two North Carolina counties.  The impact of county- and agency-level leadership and implementation teams, numbers of practitioners trained by agencies, and agencies’ sustainability planning were associated with whether or not an agency was actively supporting the delivery of Triple P two years into the evaluation.

The third paper, “PAX Good Behavior Game: Robust Prevention Engineering for Population-Level Impact” reviews findings across several trials to scale-up the PAX Good Behavior Game in U.S. communities, cities, and internationally.  The author will describe how PAX GBG makes use of “robust prevention engineering” to mitigate the variation that local context factors can cause on the success of PAX GBG implementation and scale-up.

The discussant will discuss the implications of local context factors in the scale-up of evidence-based prevention strategies, including how they may have affected historical attempts to translate prevention science into real world applications, how researchers may use “robust prevention engineering” and other principles of implementation science to design interventions more resilient to local context factors, and how implementation technical support specialists may need to identify and address local context factors as a part of the technology transfer process.  Policy and funding implications for the translation of prevention science into human service systems will also be discussed.