Session: Increasing the Rigor and Relevance of Prevention Findings for Diverse Populations in Public Systems: Specific Recommendations (Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting)

As prevention science increasingly aims to integrate with public systems, the field is tasked with ensuring that its findings are not only rigorous but also relevant for diverse populations in complex practice settings. Many public systems, such as schools and community health clinics, rely on registries that have vetted programs and determined which are “evidence-based.” Evidence-based lists, although useful, are limited by two challenges. The first stems from the fact that as the population of the U.S. becomes more diverse, prevention research must be mindful of the potential for prevention programming to have differential effects for subgroups of recipients, especially racial and ethnic minority groups, to help address pervasive health disparities. However, current practices for examining subgroup differences have conceptual and methodological shortcomings. The second challenge has to do with our reliance on the randomized controlled trial as the main strategy for generating evidence for prevention programs, which tends to emphasize internal over external validity.

To address these challenges, the first paper reviews the limitations of current subgroup analysis strategies and offers best practices for the use of subgroup analyses in prevention research with racial and ethnic minority populations. The proposed practices are designed to ensure that subgroup findings produce sound results that can be acted upon in practice settings to reduce disparities.

The second paper takes the analysis of subgroups a step further by examining the evidence for generalizability to racial subgroups for social emotional learning programs. This presentation defines the necessary ingredients of a preventive intervention to determine generalizability across racial groups, and highlights the importance of reporting racial group effects due to the disparities in outcomes for students from underserved groups in schools.

The third paper of this panel reexamines assumptions underpinning the methods upon which prevention science is based, and proposes abductive reasoning as an alternative scientific logic to traditional hypothetico-deductive reasoning. This strategy has the potential to overcome limitations of the randomized controlled trial by suggesting a broad array of evaluation methods (e.g., big data analytics, non-linear analysis) to ensure that findings are not only reproducible but also generalizable to diverse groups and settings.

These papers contribute to the field by making specific recommendations for addressing challenges in prevention science that currently limit the relevance of its findings for public systems. The recommendations made hold promise for advancing the field’s mission of promoting healthy development across the life course for all individuals.