ABSTRACT
Community-based approaches to drug abuse prevention have received increasing attention in recent years. The rationale for using the entire community to plan and implement a drug prevention strategy is that such a strategy is likely to include more channels for program delivery, program exposure, and opportunities for repetition and diffusion of prevention messages and changing the social norm for drug use than are available from single channel programs such as school or parent programs (Pentz, 1993). As this chapter will discuss, most of the community-based drug abuse prevention research conducted thus far has focused on communities that are either primarily white, with smaller ethnic groups represented within the larger white community, or communities that represent primarily one ethnic group. Few community-based prevention efforts have deliberately focused on multi-ethnic communities, defined as communities that represent multiple, sizeable ethnic populations within a circumscribed community, region, or neighborhood. Federal research agencies are currently exploring whether drug abuse and other chronic disease risk behaviors require specialized prevention interventions for multi-ethnic communities, particularly whether unique interventions are required for each type of community or whether certain principles of community-based prevention research might be universal or generalizable across communities regardless of ethnic status. The remainder of this chapter addresses this question.
