A Family-Centered Ojibwe Substance Abuse Prevention
Condition: Substance Use
MeSH terms: Substance-Related Disorders
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      This study will complete a multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a family-centered
      alcohol and drug prevention program for Anishinabe (Ojibwe) pre-adolescents in 3rd or 4th
      grade (Fall 2017) or who are age 8-10 years on June 1, 2017. The 14 week program includes
      cultural lessons to strengthen family interactions, decrease substance use, teach parenting
      skills, increase social skills, improve refusal skills, and teach coping mechanisms for
      adolescents and parents. Session are expected to last around 3-hours, including a meal, youth
      and parent breakout sessions, and group based discussions. Parents and adolescents will
      participate in a pre-test before the program begins and a series of post-tests after the
      program ends.
    

Detailed description: 
      Investigators will implement a multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a
      family-centered alcohol and drug prevention program for Anishinabe (Ojibwe) pre-adolescents
      in 3rd or 4th grade (Fall 2017) or who are age 8-10 years on June 1, 2017. to assess its
      efficacy for delaying and/or preventing adolescent onset of alcohol and drug use. This unique
      project will empirically address cultural challenges for RCTs involving AI cultures by
      evaluating contamination and informal diffusion in AI communities and extended families. AI
      values of sharing and community benefits clash with Western RCT methods of withholding
      benefits from control groups vs. treatment groups. Although risks of informal community
      dissemination and control group contamination are widely acknowledged challenges for AI RCTs,
      the degree to which this actually occurs and the potential impact has never been assessed.
      Rather, efforts are made to suppress and minimize AI values that result in informal
      dissemination and contamination, or the potential effects are simply ignored. This research
      will address these challenges by attempting to measure and control for them. The
      intent-to-treat study design will allow us to use question routing aimed at identifying
      content sharing among treatment and control adolescents and their treatment and control group
      parents. Moreover, the project will also use question routes to investigate potential
      contamination via extended family members who have contact with both the treatment and
      control families. Investigators will then assess potential impact of measured contamination
      on observed intervention effects.

      At the completion of the study, Investigators will work with community research partners to
      develop a plan to sustain the prevention program. A sustainability plan is part of our model
      for developing and implementing culturally specific evidence-based prevention programs.
      Communities have readiness for sustainability due to familiarity and the popularity of BZDDD.
      We will work through community advisory boards (named Prevention Research Councils or PRCs)
      to place the program within schools, health services, and social services agencies. The
      project will leave behind comprehensive facilitator manuals in addition to a videotaped
      training program to facilitate ongoing training. In addition, the program has recently been
      adapted to a virtual program in response to COVID-19. The investigative team has a proven
      track record of sustainability in prior adaptions of BZDDD.
    

Intervention name(s): Bii-Zin-Da-De-Dah (Listening to One Another)
Intervention type(s): Other
Intervention description(s): Bii-Zin-Da-De-Dah (Listening to One Another) is a family-centered alcohol and drug prevention program for Anishinabe communities. It was the first American Indian adaptation of the Iowa Strengthening Families Program (now called the Strengthening Families Program). This program has been developed and adapted in partnership with multiple Anishinabe communities over a span of 13 years. Bii-Zin-Da-De-Dah has been enormously popular in communities. It is currently the center piece of a National Canadian Mental Health Promotion Program funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada. Now in its third Phase, focusing on national scale-up among first nations people, it has been adapted for eight cultures and translated into French in a recent implementation in Canada.
Other intervention name(s): BZDDD
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Prevention
Keywords: Intervention; Prevention; Randomized Controlled Trial; Bii-Zin-Da-De-Dah