Systematic Review on International Evidence-Based Family Drug Prevention Programs (11-14 Years Old)

Introduction: Reviews on efficacy of family-based drug prevention programs demonstrate that they have preventive effects; nevertheless, they have been criticized for presenting low size effects (Van Ryzin, Roseth, Fosco, Lee, & Chen, 2016; Foxcroft & Tsertsvadze, 2011; Vermeulen-Smit, Verdurmen, & Engels, 2015). Some recent critiques have doubted on the effectiveness in drug prevention of replications of universal Strengthening Families Program (Gorman, 2017). The main objective of this work is to defend the approximation of universal prevention programs based on the family as a strategy to prevent drug use among young people. To undertake so, an analysis of the methodological characteristics of the studies with positive results is developed.

Method: A qualitative systematic review was carried out in different databases on practices based on evidence (PubMed, PsycINFO, PsycArticles, Social Work abstracts, CINAHL, SocIndex, Scopus, Academic Search Premier, SCIC-ISOC, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, ERIC, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Project Cork, Blueprints, SAMHSA, and Xchange). Expert consultations and review of gray literature were also implemented. To select the studies, these should be about universal family drug prevention programs, aimed at young people between 10 and 14 years old, published between 2007 and 2018, with results on their effects on prevention of substance use.

Results: 20 studies were found that belong to 7 family programs of universal prevention (Strengthening Families Program 10-14, Parent's Who Care, Family Check-Up, Linking Lives Health, Prevention of Alcohol use in Students, Strong African American Families-Teen, and Örebro Prevention Program). The structure and duration of the interventions, the methodological designs, the type of statistical analysis used, and the main results on the prevention of drug use were analyzed.

Conclusion: the review allows to visualize and analyze the studies that have reported positive results in universal drug prevention programs focused on the family with children 11-14 years old. The results dispel the doubts about the effectiveness of the universal family programs, since, at the methodological level, it is found that the great majority present guarantees that allow to assure the relationship between intervention and preventive effects. However, the debate remains open, maintaining the desire for improvement and standardization of designs and evaluations in order to establish increasingly tight comparisons.