IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/evarev/v22y1998i1p78-94.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Zero Effects in Substance Abuse Programs

Author

Listed:
  • David Rindskopf

    (City University of New York)

  • Leonard Saxe

    (City University of New York)

Abstract

The evaluation of community-based programs poses special design and analysis problems. The present article focuses on two major types of errors that can occur in such evaluations: false positives—incorrectly declaring a program to be effective—and false negatives—incorrectly declaring a program to be ineffective. The evaluation of a national demonstration of community- based programs to reduce substance abuse, Fighting Back, is used to illustrate several ap proaches to reduce the probability of errors. Both those errors that are affected by the design and those by analytic approaches are considered. Ways to assess multiple outcomes and to match the complexity of the program with design and analytic strategies are proposed. Community trials are complex interventions, and, although they can provide very useful information, their outcomes have to be understood in terms of the constructs they test and the contexts within which they are carried out.

Suggested Citation

  • David Rindskopf & Leonard Saxe, 1998. "Zero Effects in Substance Abuse Programs," Evaluation Review, , vol. 22(1), pages 78-94, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:evarev:v:22:y:1998:i:1:p:78-94
    DOI: 10.1177/0193841X9802200104
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0193841X9802200104
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0193841X9802200104?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yin, Robert K. & Kaftarian, Shakeh J., 1997. "Introduction: Challenges of community-based program outcome evaluations," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 293-297, August.
    2. Susser, M., 1995. "The tribulations of trials--intervention in communities," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 85(2), pages 156-158.
    3. Feinleib, M., 1996. "New directions for community intervention studies," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 86(12), pages 1696-1698.
    4. Saxe, Leonard & Reber, Emily & Hallfors, Denise & Kadushin, Charles & Jones, Delmos & Rindskopf, David & Beveridge, Andrew, 1997. "Think globally, act locally: Assessing the impact of community-based substance abuse prevention," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 357-366, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Feinberg, Mark E. & Greenberg, Mark T. & Osgood, D. Wayne & Anderson, Amy & Babinski, Leslie, 2002. "The effects of training community leaders in prevention science: Communities That Care in Pennsylvania," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 245-259, August.
    2. Manning, Gerald S. & Mohanty, Udayan, 1997. "Counterion condensation on ionic oligomers," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 247(1), pages 196-204.
    3. Babiak, Kathy M., 2009. "Criteria of effectiveness in multiple cross-sectoral interorganizational relationships," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 1-12, February.
    4. Crowley, Kathleen M. & Yu, Ping & Kaftarian, Shakeh J., 2000. "Prevention actions and activities make a difference: a structural equation model of coalition building," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 381-388, August.
    5. Denise Hallfors & Bonita Iritani, 2002. "Local and State School-Based Substance Use Surveys," Evaluation Review, , vol. 26(4), pages 418-437, August.
    6. Pronyk, Paul M. & Harpham, Trudy & Busza, Joanna & Phetla, Godfrey & Morison, Linda A. & Hargreaves, James R. & Kim, Julia C. & Watts, Charlotte H. & Porter, John D., 2008. "Can social capital be intentionally generated? A randomized trial from rural South Africa," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 67(10), pages 1559-1570, November.
    7. Feinberg, Mark E. & Kim, Ji-Yeon & Greenberg, Mark. T., 2008. "Personality and community prevention teams: Dimensions of team leader and member personality predicting team functioning," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 403-409, November.
    8. Florin, Paul & Mitchell, Roger & Stevenson, John & Klein, Ilene, 2000. "Predicting intermediate outcomes for prevention coalitions: a developmental perspective," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 341-346, August.
    9. John B. McKinlay, 1996. "More Appropriate Evaluation Methods for Community-Level Health Interventions," Evaluation Review, , vol. 20(3), pages 237-243, June.
    10. Schilling, Robert F. & Fernando, Daniel & Fontdevila, Jorge & El-Bassel, Nabila, 2000. "HIV risk reduction among injection drug users: explaining the lack of anticipated outcomes in a community-level controlled comparison study," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 301-313, August.
    11. Gabriel, Roy M. & Mondeaux, Frank P. & Laws, Katherine E. & Hahn, Karen J. & Weaver, David, 2000. "Reducing births of drug-affected babies: a retrospective analysis of archival data and a community wide effort," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 347-353, August.
    12. Tessa M. Van Koperen & Anja De Kruif & Lisa Van Antwerpen & Anna-Marie Hendriks & Jacob C. Seidell & Albertine J. Schuit & Carry M. Renders, 2016. "Barriers to and Facilitators of the Evaluation of Integrated Community-Wide Overweight Intervention Approaches: A Qualitative Case Study in Two Dutch Municipalities," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-19, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:evarev:v:22:y:1998:i:1:p:78-94. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.