Implementing Community Prevention: A Pattern Analysis of Drug Free Communities Collaboration and Intervention Strategies

Introduction: Community prevention strategies are increasingly common systems interventions for population-level behavioral health. Research suggests that community coalitions are associated with decreases in youth substance use, but there is little quantitative process evidence demonstrating collaborations form, or how they design and implement coherent prevention strategies. Analyses of process data from 600+ Drug Free Communities (DFC) coalitions identifies patterns of collaboration networking and patterns of intervention activities across coalitions. This systemic analysis generates new insights into complex community coalition decision and implementation processes, and systemic approaches to their evaluation.

Methods: The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) funds DFC coalitions nationwide for up to ten years. Recipient coalitions submit monitoring reports every six months including information on coalition membership, degree of involvement for 12 community sectors, and on the use of 41 intervention activities within seven strategy categories. The DFC National Evaluation team at ICF International conducted a mixed-method pattern analysis using a) associations of sector representation, b) strength of member involvement, and c) a network map of sector involvement across DFC coalitions (Hester & Adams, 2014; Beach & Pedersen, 2013; Caldarelli & Catanzaro, 2012). A pattern analysis utilizing exploratory factor analysis, pattern assessment of cross-loadings, and a forced factor solution were used to map three overlapping strategy orientations. Measures of the presence of distinct collaboration networks and distinct strategy orientations in each coalition were developed and used to assess the association of empirically identified patterns of community involvement and community prevention intervention strategy.

Results: The analyses documented a) 3 distinct collaboration network clusters: school-centered (schools, health professionals, government), law enforcement-centered (law enforcement, government, media, business, and other community organizations), and Family-centered (parents, faith organizations, health professionals, youth); and b) 3 distinct strategic orientations: strengthening community protection, building citizen capacity, and building community connections (ODonnel et al, 2016). Measures of the strength of each collaboration network and each strategy orientation were then used assess multi-variate patterns of connection between collaboration networks and strategy implementation across coalitions. Analysis of these inter-relations is on-going at the time of this submission, including generalizability assessments across time (comparisons of grant recipient cohorts).

 Conclusions: This study contributes to understanding of community prevention processes through 1) identifying strategic orientations that provide guidance in developing comprehensive interventions (Yang et al, 2012); 2) documenting association of these orientations and collaboration networks; and 3) demonstrating the utility of mixed-method pattern analyses in understanding complex community interventions.