STARS (Start Taking Alcohol Risks Seriously) for Families is a health promotion program for preventing alcohol use among at-risk middle and junior high school youths. The goal is for youths to postpone alcohol use until adulthood. The program is founded on the Multicomponent Motivational Stages prevention model, which is theoretically based in the Health Belief Model, the Social Learning Theory, and the Behavioral Self-Control Theory. STARS for Families matches media-related, interpersonal, and environmental prevention strategies to each child’s specific stages of alcohol initiation, stages of readiness for change, and specific risk and protective factors. The program has been tested and shown useful for youths ages 11 to 15 in both urban and rural schools, and for youths attending physical exams for sports teams.
The program has three phases:
One evaluation of the program examined a modified version of the STARS for Families program using a randomized controlled trial that tested the program’s feasibility and efficacy in physical examinations for school sports teams. The evaluation involved 178 seventh through ninth grade students from one urban, one suburban, and one rural school located in northeastern Florida. Participating youths were recruited by project staff and introduced to participating nurses during physicals for school sports programs. Most subjects were male (52 percent) and either white (75 percent) or African-American (13 percent), with a mean age of 13.1 years (SD=1.00). Subjects were randomly assigned to the intervention or a control group with a 6-month posttest.
A more comprehensive evaluation involved 650 sixth grade students in an experimental design with pretest and posttest. The students were from two schools in Jacksonville, Fla.—a magnet (bused) school and an innercity neighborhood school. Students were randomly assigned—half to the intervention group and half to the control group. A significant majority of the sample was African-American (85 percent), followed by white (12 percent). Seventy-nine percent of the sample (n=515) completed the posttest.
Six-month posttest outcomes for the sports physical examination study of the STARS for Families program, relative to the controls, included
Posttest results from the sixth grade students showed
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Paula Jones
NIMCO, Inc.
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Phone: (800) 962-6662
E-mail: Paula@nimcoinc.com
Web site: http://www.nimcoinc.com