Session: Strategies for Optimizing Evidence-Based Preventive Interventions (Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting)

Several preventive interventions have accumulated multiple decades of evidence and have progressed to scale-up and broad dissemination. From these efforts, strategies for optimizing impact, utility, and sustainability are emerging. To this end, this symposium highlights three areas of contribution to optimization. All of these presentations speak to aspects of research-practice-policy partnerships in optimizing prevention science. The first area is from implementation science. Presenter #1 focuses on the application of best practices in implementation capacity. His team is leading an initiative in North Carolina to support and enhance implementation capacity and quality in the current statewide scale-up of the Triple P—Positive Parenting Program system, and involving multiple partnerships, practitioners, and public policy. The presentation will explicate a ten-component implementation support model and offer concrete examples of implementation strategies, preliminary data related to capacity variables, and recommendations for translating implementation science into state and local systems. The second area has to do with community context including relationships among researchers, program developers, communities, and other stakeholders. Presenter #2 will emphasize the collaborative processes necessary to fit evidence-based prevention programs to the ecology and needs of the community. She will discuss theoretical models to guide dissemination and effective strategies to balance intervention fidelity and adaptation. The third pertains to the stepwise refinement process applied to an established intervention. Presenter #3 describes the improvement steps that have been undertaken to make the latest variation of the Good Behavior Game more acceptable to teachers, children, and parents by attending to ease of administration, clarity of underlying principles, and simplicity and attractiveness of program elements. His presentation will illustrate how iterations of intervention improvement depend heavily on implementer (teachers), participant (children), and school system input. The discussant has substantial experience in testing and refining preventive interventions as well as in researching dissemination and implementation issues. His comments will emphasize the cross-application implications regarding how to build on critical partnerships for smart dissemination and optimization of prevention science.