The Drug Resistance Strategies Project
Chronology of Events
1976-1989
While a faculty member at the University of Montana , the University of Southern California and Arizona State University , Dr. Michael Hecht conducts research on interpersonal and interethnic communication satisfaction.
mid-1980’s
Researchers in the Department of Communication at Arizona State , including Michelle Miller-Day and Michael Hecht, utilize Narrative and Performance Theories to study how the performance of people's personal narratives or stories could be used to encourage reading, prevent date rape, and improve attitudes towards step families.
1988
Michelle Miller-Day and Michael Hecht, Arizona State University , obtain funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for the first Drug Resistance Strategies Project (DRS1).
1989-1991
DRS1 is the first large-scale research project to examine how youth are offered and resist drugs. Two high schools in Mesa and Tempe , Arizona participate in these studies which identify the four resistance strategies (Refuse, Avoid, Explain, and Leave) that are the core of the DRS Project. These strategies become known by their acronym, REAL, and are later found to be used by college and middle school students, too. The youth narratives collected in this research are used to develop live and videotaped performances, entitled Killing Time (produced and directed by Joe Rassulo). These performances prove successful in reducing youth drug use in a pilot study, creating the model for our prevention curriculum.
1994-1997
Michael Hecht, Arizona State University obtains funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for the Drug Resistance Strategies Minority Project (DRS2). Working in collaboration with Melanie Trost, DRS2 extends research to middle school-aged youth and is the first series of studies to examine ethnicity and adolescent drug resistance.
1997-2002
Moving to Penn State University , Michael Hecht obtains funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to continue the Drug Resistance Strategies Minority Project (DRS3). Working with colleagues at Arizona State University , Flavio Marsiglia (Social Work), M. Christina Gonzalez (Communication), and Eric Margolis (Education), the goal of DRS3 is to build upon the research conducted in the previous studies in order to develop, implement, and evaluate a middle school prevention curriculum. Hecht recruits 35, Phoenix area middle schools to participate in the project.
Under the leadership of M. Christina Gonzalez (Department of Communication) working with Monica Gosin and Amy Drapeau, graduate students at Arizona State , Hecht's curriculum design is used to create keepin' it REAL and the curriculum is field tested using participatory action research by a team under the leadership of Flavio Marsiglia. The curriculum consists of 10 lessons teaching decision making, risk assessment, as well as resistance and life skills. Three versions of the curriculum are created. One is grounded in Mexican American culture, which is the majority culture in the Phoenix area middle schools. A second version is grounded in European American and African American cultures. A third, multicultural version, combines influences from all three cultures.
Using the DRS1 video Killing Time as a model and the DRS2 narratives as examples, students at South Mountain High School, under the leadership of their teacher, Richard Lindstrom, work with video directors Matt DeJesus and Brad White, University of Southern California film student Randall Ruben, Michael Hecht, and Flavio Marsiglia, to create a series of Emmy Award winning videos that form the core of the new keepin' it REAL curriculum.
Keepin' it REAL is implemented at 35 middle schools under the leadership of Flavio Marsiglia and Dee Spencer. Later, Patricia Dustman joins the team as Implementation Director and Mary Harthun joins as the trainer. Using a research design developed by Michael Hecht and John Graham of Penn State University and with the involvement of Elvira Elek, Stephen Kulis, David Wagstaff, and Tanya Nieri, the project is implemented and proves successful in limiting increases in alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use between 7 th and 8 th grades. keepin' it REAL is selected as model program by the National Registry of Effective Programs. Additional research involving advances our understanding of how the program works, how ethnicity and gender are related to adolescent drug use, the role of social norms, and identifies acculturation status as an important aspect of drug decisions.
The curriculum was licensed to the Discovery Health Connection and ETR Publishing.
2003-2009
Michael Hecht and the teams at Penn State University (headed by Elvira Elek and John Graham) and Arizona State University (headed by Flavio Marsiglia) obtain additional funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to continue the Drug Resistance Strategies project (DRS4). Under the new grant, research is being conducted to determine the best grade level to start drug prevention (5 th versus 7 th grade) and to try to improve the curriculum to better meet the needs of immigrant populations. In addition, longitudinal research is planned to examine the relationships among acculturation, identity, and drug use.
During the first year, the multicultural version of the keepin' it REAL curriculum was adapted for fifth grades by Nancy Gonzalez, Patricia Dustman, and Mary Harthun. In addition, an acculturation enhancement was developed by this team and a group support component is developed by a team lead by Flavio Marsiglia. During year two, curriculum materials were developed by Leslie Reeves, teachers from 29 elementary schools were trained by Mary Harthun and the curriculum was implemented under the leadership of Patricia Dustman. During 2007-08, the multicultural version of keepin’ it REAL was implemented in 27 middle schools in Phoenix, Arizona. Evaluation research, under the leadership of Elvira Elek, Stephen Kulis, David Wagstaff, and Tanya Nieri, is being conducted to measure the program's impact.
2008-2013
DRS Rural
The development of effective school-based substance use prevention programs has given rise to a recent focus on implementation issues. This study will help us understand how to implement programs beyond their original target audience as well as how to guide teachers when they adapt curriculum to their classes.
The goals of the study are to conduct an effectiveness trial of the keepin’ it REAL middle school substance use prevention curriculum among a new target audience in Pennsylvania and Ohio, describe how teachers adapt the curriculum when they present it, and develop, implement, and evaluate a rural-version of the curriculum to test whether an evidence-based universal curriculum can be improved by adapting it to local cultures. SAMSHA's National Registry of Effective Programs recognized keepin’ it REAL as a “model program”, one of the few that are multicultural. The study will evaluate the effectiveness of the original curriculum, grounded in the cultures of the southwest and compare that to a new version, “regrounded” in the rural culture of Pennsylvania and Ohio, while studying how teachers adapt both versions. This proposal responds to NIDA calls for investigations addressing, “1) the development of novel drug abuse prevention approaches; 2) the efficacy and effectiveness of newly developed and/or modified prevention programs; 3) the processes associated with the selection, adoption, adaptation, implementation, sustainability, and financing of empirically validated interventions.”
A randomized control trial will be conducted in middle schools to accomplish these goals. First, we will conduct formative research to develop the rural version of the curriculum. Second, 42 schools will be randomly assigned to one of these three conditions: teacher adaptation (implementing the original keepin’ it REAL curriculum); researcher adaptation (implementing the new rural version of the curriculum), and a control group. We hypothesized that participation in either form of the curriculum will reduce substance use and that researcher adaptation will produce better outcomes than teacher adaptation. A pretest will be administered followed by posttests in 7th-9th grades. Three measures will assess adaptation and quality/fidelity: a Program Quality and Adaptation online measure completed by teachers after each lesson, observation of two lessons, and audio recording of two lessons. The major hypothesis tests utilize variants of the general linear model, taking into account the multilevel structure of the data (e.g., multilevel multiple regression), tests of a mediation model, and growth modeling.