CENTER FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE PREVENTION

CSAP Analytical Support
The Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs (OIEA), a division of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), has the responsibility of facilitating both public and private sector initiatives designed to deal with substance abuse and its collateral problems. In doing so, OIEA supports CSAP's broader goals of both maximizing the effective use of prevention resources and improving the efficacy of the outcomes from various prevention initiatives.

This project aims to improve the strategy for utilizing the public and private resources available for combating substance abuse and its related problems. This involves effective coordination of federal government and private sector alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs and related (violence, HIV/AIDS) prevention programs, projects, organizations and institutions, publicly known leaders in the field, and constituent groups for the purpose of assisting CSAP.

Conwal provides support to the OIEA for this project in four primary areas:

• Development of an automated information system pertaining to public and private sector prevention resources;
• Special studies and assessments concerning future directions for the field and the appropriate allocation of resources;
• Logistical and administrative support in assembling individuals and organizations for selected meetings; and
• The development and implementation of special initiatives and/or projects designed to demonstrate how prevention resources can be more effectively utilized through coordinated and integrated approaches.

CSAP Management Support
In this contract with the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), Conwal provided conference management support, data collection and analysis, and materials development support. The task of providing comprehensive conference management support included site selection, agenda planning and adherence, pre-conference materials production, travel logistics, post-meeting report preparation, and overall meeting evaluation.

With respect to data collection and analysis, Conwal provided site selection and recruitment, developed strategies for sampling, and designed and conducted analytical methodologies. The purpose of developing materials for CSAP involved educating the public on the status of drug and alcohol abuse prevention measures today. These materials included briefing papers, literature reviews, and special reports developed by qualified technical personnel who understand substance abuse prevention techniques.

Supporting the National Prevention Evaluation Research Collection (NPERC), funded by CSAP, is one of the tasks within the Management Support Services Contract. NPERC is a database and library collection that applies the Alcohol Research Collection, Analysis and Dissemination (ARCAD)-maintained Alcohol and Other Drug thesaurus to scientific literature and field reports on the prevention of alcohol and other drug abuse. Conwal personnel performed abstracting and analysis, which enabled NPERC to expand from a few dozen materials to over 2,000 records. Conwal personnel also abstracted data from the NPERC collection for the National Structured Evaluation of AOD prevention, and contributed to the development of abstracting terms and procedures to ensure intercoder reliability among the project indexing staff.

CSAP National Structured Evaluation
The purpose of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention's (CSAP) National Structured Evaluation project was to conduct a quantitative study to determine which substance abuse prevention approaches are most effective across the United States. A report to Congress is disseminating the study's findings.

Conwal developed methods of collecting data, coding programmatic variables, and assessing methodological rigor in order to facilitate the statistical analysis of this study. Having written two previous reports to Congress on the subject of Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) abuse prevention, Conwal staff possess an understanding of the field and the requirements of a structured evaluation of drug prevention programs. Conwal's first report to Congress gathered information on a wide range of projects, reviewed the field's literature, and commented on the status of evaluation and information dissemination in the field. The second report to Congress documented a pilot study of the National Structured Evaluation. Through the writing of these two reports, Conwal is developing formats for describing the evaluation project and conveying its results to the general public through fact sheets, poster exhibits, and formal reports.

While a number of evaluation studies have been conducted in the drug prevention field, evaluation efforts for the most part have not been coordinated. The existing studies have been valuable for understanding particular programs, but these disparate evaluations have not provided data for comparing approaches and making overall policy decisions. This project laid the groundwork for ongoing structured evaluations of prevention programs on a nationwide scale.