Purpose: Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs use typically increases in prevalence and frequency during middle and late adolescence. School health instruction often focusses on providing facts and rarely provides tools for addressing the psychosocial risk factors needed to prevent substance use. The purpose of this paper is to report about…

Purpose: The consequences of problematic alcohol consumption fall heavily on Australian adolescents, with this population at increased risk of death, serious injury and other harm. Research regarding whether gender, socioeconomic status (SES) or locality play a role in young people's alcohol consumption and related harm is limited in Australia.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of medicine education by examining pupils' perceptions of medicines and medicine use. Design/methodology/approach: Fourth graders' (n=51, aged 10-11) perceptions about medicines and their use were collected in one school through mixed-methods using a questionnaire, a drawing…

Purpose: As interventions are disseminated widely, issues of fidelity and adaptation become increasingly critical to understand. This study aims to describe the types of adaptations made by teachers delivering a school-based substance use prevention curriculum and their reasons for adapting program content. Design/methodology/approach: To…

Purpose: To be effective, evidence-based programs should be delivered as prescribed. This suggests that adaptations that deviate from intervention goals may limit a program's effectiveness. This study aims to examine the impact that number and quality of adaptations have on substance use outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: The authors examined…

Purpose: The current study aims to examine the influence of contextual and provider-level factors on the implementation fidelity of a research-based substance abuse prevention program. Also, it aims to investigate whether two provider-level factors, self-efficacy and beliefs about the value of the program, statistically moderate and mediate the…

There is mounting evidence that the age at which children are using and becoming exposed to illegal drugs is declining and that such use and exposure is becoming an increasing problem within pre-teenage populations. This suggests that there is an important role for drug education in primary schools in encouraging and helping young children to…

Purpose: A literature review was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of external contributors (anyone other than a teacher at the school) in delivering school-based drug, alcohol and tobacco education (substance use education) programmes. Design/methodology/approach: The review focused upon literature published from 1990 onwards in English.…

Purpose: This study is part of a larger project, which aims to develop medicine education materials for teachers. The aim of the present study was to discover children's interests in medicines and teachers' opinions on what should be taught about medicines to children of different ages. Furthermore, teachers' opinions were assessed about the…

Results of a survey of White (N=1,100) and Black (N=396) middle-class suburban high school students indicate meaningful differences in drug and alcohol sources of information. While both groups rated mass media as their best source of information, Black students more frequently cited family as a source of information and assistance. (IAH)