NCT05736211

Organization-level Youth Engagement Approach for Substance Misuse Prevention

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 43 (actual)
• Sponsor: Wake Forest University Health Sciences · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 11 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study will consist of a small pilot Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). Four prevention organizations will be randomized either to include Youth Engagement in prevention efforts (treatment) or not (control). The study team will attempt to match the treatment and control groups on relevant characteristics such as geographic location (e.g., urban, rural), population served (e.g., church-based, school-based), and/or prior Youth Engagement involvement. The objective of this study is to evaluate the preliminary effectiveness of YE as a prevention strategy for opioid misuse in a small pilot randomized control trial (RCT). This pilot study will examine the effects of the YE prevention strategy on (a) organization-level outcomes, such as perceived value added to prevention programming and (b) individual-level outcomes such as personal skills and attitudes as well as knowledge and attitudes about substances including opioids. Up to 15 leaders/staff and 45 youth/young adults (60 people overall) will be recruited for the study.

Detailed description

Substance misuse is a major public health problem and opioid misuse is an acute problem in rural and high poverty communities. Adolescence and young adulthood is a formative time for positive social development, as young people increase their needs for maturity and autonomy, define their identities, and carve out their roles in society. But many youth and young adults are isolated within communities, feel that they do not matter, and lack meaningful opportunities to engage with society and form positive connections with prosocial institutions. Further, community systems and settings that serve youth and young adults often do not effectively involve them. Engaging youth and young adults in their communities and in the prevention systems targeting substance misuse may prevent the use of substances by targeting two pathways. The first is an individual pathway via bolstering psychosocial development and reducing risks for opioids by providing youth and young adults with meaningful prosocial opportunities to fulfill developmental needs. The second is an environmental pathway via affecting health system and community-based settings through improving prevention efforts targeting young adults. This project tests an organization-level Youth Engagement (YE) approach to improve prevention. Only organizations randomized to treatment will include youth/Young Adult (YA) participants. Youth/YA survey data will be collected at the start of their participation in the YE strategy (pre-YE) and 6 months later (post-YE). At the post-YE the study team will interview a subset of interested YE group participants to qualitatively assess their experiences and to identify, in their own voices, what aspects of YE emerge as important to youth development and their health-related decision-making. The timeframe for this phase will be 12-18 months.

Conditions

• Drug Use
• Substance Use
• Opioid Use
• Substance Misuse

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Organization-level Youth Engagement prevention strategy	Systematically incorporating Youth Engagement into prevention efforts in a community setting

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-03-14
• Primary completion: 2025-07-01
• Completion: 2025-07-01
• First posted: 2023-02-21
• Last updated: 2025-10-31
• Results posted: 2025-10-31

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States