Session: Adopting Innovations in Community Contexts: System-Level Predictors of Readiness, Outcomes, and Sustainability (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

Prevention science has made impressive strides in developing programs and demonstrating, through rigorous evaluation, their efficacy and effectiveness. However, the “next generation” of evidence standards recently endorsed by the Society for Prevention Research indicates that a critical next step for moving toward scale-up is a better understanding of how organizational and community factors predict successful adoption, implementation, and sustainability of best-practices. The current symposium addresses this gap by investigating system-level predictors of readiness, outcomes, and sustainability across diverse youth-serving systems.

First, “Communication is key: State-level organizational determinants of readiness for evidence-based programming within the Cooperative Extension System” will describe the results from a national study examining state-level openness to change, leadership, morale, communication and resources as predictive of implementation readiness. Multi-level, multivariate models found organizational context was strongly associated with readiness, and specifically, that the clarity of communication was the most important characteristic.  

Second, “Examining organizational correlates of student, teacher, and school outcomes in Post-Katrina New Orleans schools,” will describe the results from a study examining school-level autonomy, commitment, involvement in decision making, leader quality, perception of support, and documented support as predictors of student standardized test scores, teacher instructional practices and job satisfaction, and school problems. Findings from multi-level, multivariate analyses indicated that key organizational factors, especially autonomy, commitment, leader quality, and perception of support, likely promote important educational outcomes in charter schools. 

Finally, “Identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for long-term sustainability of the Strengthening Families Program” will describe results from a mixed-methods study examining community, organizational, and program-level factors associated with sustainability of the Strengthening Families Program in a state-wide dissemination effort. Quantitative and qualitative analyses found that environmental support and organizational capacity were conditions consistently present in those sites with the highest levels of sustainability. 

Following these presentations, the discussant, a national expert in the dissemination and replication of EBPs, will conclude by providing a summary overview and will moderate the discussion between the presenters and the symposium attendees.