Project Northland - a multi-level long-term intervention combining behavioural with environmental approaches

Project Northland provides six years of comprehensive programming for students beginning in sixth grade. Phase I provides programmes for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders (11-14 years of age). Each of the three years of programmes has a specific theme and incorporates individual, parent, peer and community participation. The students receive skills training in communicating with their parents about alcohol (6th grade; 11 years of age), dealing with peer influence and normative expectations about alcohol (7th grade; 12 years of age), and understanding methods that bring about community-level changes in alcohol-related programmes and policies (8th grade; 13-14 years of age).

Phase II of the programme is designed to help maintain the effects through high school. Phase II intervention strategies include community organising, parent education, youth development, media and school curriculum. The five intervention strategies are designed to increase communities’ efficacy in enacting changes in policies and practices related to high school students’ alcohol use.

Sixth grade: the ‘Slick Tracy Home Team’ programme consists of four weekly sessions of activity/story books that the students read and complete as homework with their parents. The books also include information on young adolescent alcohol use for parents. Small-group discussions about the books are held during school and at an evening fair at which students’ posters and projects are displayed. Community-wide task forces are created, including members from a cross-section of the community: government officials, representatives of the school and the business community, law enforcement personnel, health professionals, youth workers, parents, concerned citizens, clergy and adolescents.

Seventh grade: the ‘Amazing Alternatives!’ programme includes the following: an eight-week peer- and teacher-led classroom curriculum using interactive activities related to the themes of why young people use alcohol and alternatives to use, influences in terms of drinking, strategies for resisting those influences, normative expectations that most people their age do not drink, and intentions not to drink; a peer participation programme called T.E.E.N.S. creates alternative alcohol-free activities outside the classroom with the help of adult volunteers; and parental involvement through the use of booklets mailed to parents, which include behavioural prescriptions for parents and activities for parents and children to complete, as well as updated information on the programme and its events.

Eighth grade: ‘Power Lines’ consists of an eight-session classroom curriculum that introduces students to the ‘power’ groups within their communities that influence adolescent alcohol use and availability, and teaches community action/citizen participation skills. Students interview parents, local government officials, law enforcement personnel, school teachers and administrators, and alcohol retailers about their beliefs and activities concerning adolescent drinking; they also organise a town meeting to make recommendations for community action to prevent alcohol use. A theatre production is performed at each school for classmates, parents and community members. T.E.E.N.S. continues to provide alternative activities in all intervention school districts. A newsletter written by and for eighth grade students is sent to parents and peers. Finally, the community-wide task force continues its activities aimed at limiting access to alcohol.

Ninth grade: during the interim phase, a brief five-session classroom programme entitled ‘Shifting Gears’ is implemented. This programme focuses on pressures to drink and drive or to ride with a drinking driver, the influences and tactics of alcohol advertising, and ways to deal with those influences. No programmes are implemented in grade 10.

Eleventh and twelfth grades (1997-1998): Phase II consists of five components designed to reinforce and complement the previous goals of Project Northland. The ‘Class Action’ programme is implemented during Phase II, using a substance abuse prevention curriculum that can be used as a booster session for the Project Northland series or as a stand-alone curriculum. ‘Class Action’ builds on the early adolescent interventions with new strategies for the cohort’s last years in high school, while emphasising changes in the social environment of young people. The six-session curriculum is based on the social influences theory of behavioural change; students are asked to debate and discuss the social influences that might lead them to use alcohol and the negative consequences that those influences have not only on the individual teen but on the community as a whole. Through an innovative, civil-trial approach, ‘Class Action’ challenges high-school students to examine the real-world consequences, both legal and social, of teenage alcohol use.

The programme is peer-led and uses interactive methods to accomplish its instructional goals. Students debate and discuss the consequences of substance abuse, thus changing the social norms around alcohol use and changing negative peer pressure into positive peer pressure.
Community and parent components of Project Northland are also continued during the implementation of ‘Class Action.’ Eleven action teams, representing all communities and ranging in size from five to twelve members are formed and asked to encourage community adoption of institutional or policy solutions to underage drinking through a number of sponsored activities and awareness campaigns. The parent component involves a postcard campaign designed to increase awareness about alcohol-related issues and encourage specific actions to keep adolescents alcohol free. A total of 11 postcards designed to correspond to events sponsored by the action teams are posted to the cohort’s parents at six-week intervals.

A new parent-child intervention, ‘Sound OFF!’, is used in the second year to encourage parents and their children to communicate about alcohol. A series of three mail-outs are sent to parents and children in November, January, and February, with discussion questions regarding teen drinking. Students are asked to answer the questions and return the questionnaire to the researchers.
Print media campaigns are also implemented. The first targets young adults with the theme of ‘Don’t provide alcohol to those under 21.’ Other print media products include calendars for alcohol merchants, newsletters for students and adults, and a celebration poster for the many participants in Project Northland over the years of the study.
In addition, youth action teams are formed in Phase II. Young people are recruited for participation in teams to influence alcohol use among their peers. The teams meet as an extracurricular activity, assisted by adult coordinators.