ABSTRACT
With the growing awareness that even very young children are at risk of socialization into drug and alcohol-using behavior, the number and variety of drug abuse prevention programs available for pre-school children have increased greatly. This growth has oc-5 curred with little empirical evidence that such programs are effective. This shortage of sound evidence stems in part from the methodological difficulties encountered when evaluating outcomes for pre-school drug prevention programs. Such difficulties include: 10 How to assess impact on behavior when the onset of those targeted behaviors (drug or alcohol use) are a number of years distant; generally weak predictive power of other indicators; and attrition of samples over time in longitudinal studies. For example, Hall and 15 Zigler’s (1997) survey of drug abuse prevention programs for young children found no longitudinal outcome data available on program effectiveness that was linked to impacting drug abuse. Where evaluation data were available, pre-test/post-test intervals typically 20 were only several weeks in duration, leaving the question of longer-term effects unanswered.
