Communities That Care (CTC) is a prevention system designed to reduce adolescent substance use and delinquency through the selection of effective preventive interventions tailored to a community's specific profile of risk and protection. A community-randomized trial of CTC, the Community Youth...

Comprehensive community interventions pose several challenges to rigorous evaluation design. This article summarizes the recommendations for a feasible and rigorous design that were formulated by a 1991 conference on the evaluation of comprehensive community interventions. One such comprehensive...

Evaluators often assume that outcome studies assessing agency effectiveness should pro vide the most relevant data for decision makers who must form judgments about treat ment in order to make policy, program, and clinical decisions. Yet evaluators have found that decision makers often fail to...

Risk and protective factors predictive of adolescent problem behaviors such as substance abuse and delinquency are promising targets for preventive intervention. Community planners should assess and target risk and protective factors when designing prevention programs. This study describes the...

There is evidence to suggest that the effects of behavioral interventions may be limited to specific types of individuals, but methods for evaluating such outcomes have not been fully developed. This study proposes the use of finite mixture models to evaluate whether interventions, and,...