Theory.

Theory, classifications and Empirical Findings

Rates of drinking and smoking increase among high place of education students as they age. Therefore, prevention programs that target youth either before or during junior high exercise may help prevent alcohol, tobacco, and other put drugs into (ATOD) use during high train Life skills training (LST) is a school-based approach designed to stop ATOD use among youth by the agency of influencing their knowledge and attitudes about ATODs, through teaching skills for resisting social constraining forces to use ATODs, and at helping students develop personal self-management and social skills. Researchers have studied this program's effectiveness in preventing use of various substances among varied populations.

explanation WORDS: school-based prevention; life skills; self-management skills; skills building; adolescent; attitude toward AODs (alcohol or other drugs); program evaluation; prevention outcome; prevention approach; social learning theory of AODU (AOD use, abuse, and dependence)

the two alcohol and tobacco use are often met with among teenagers in the United States. According to be deriveds of a 1999 survey (Johnston et al. 2000) 24 percent of 8th graders, 40 percent of 10th graders, and 51 percent of 12th graders reported drinking alcohol within the past month In addition, 15 percent of 8th graders, 26 percent of 10th graders, and 31 percent of 12th graders reported engaging in binge drinking (i.e., having five or more drinks in a row) at least one time during the 2 weeks before the examine was conducted. Compared with drinking, smoking is les prevalent among high instruct students. For example, according to the study's findings, 18 percent of 8th graders, 26 percent of 10th graders, and 35 percent of 12th graders reported smoking cigarettes during the month before the review and only 8 percent of 8th graders, 16 percent of 10th graders, and 23 percent of 12th graders reported smoking cigarettes upon a daily basis (Johnston et al. 2000)

These review results indicate that the prevalence of the two alcohol use and tobacco use increases with age. Therefore, prevention programs should target youth before or during junior high train This article describes an approach to substance abuse prevention called life skills training (LST) and summarizes nearly couple decades of research on the effectiveness of the LST program in varied populations.

THE LIFE SKILLS TRAINING PROGRAM

The LST program was designed as a school-based intervention to target a specific fix of risk factors for alcohol, tobacco, and other remedy (ATOD) use. Thus, LST is a primary prevention program. The ultimate goal of primary prevention programs, which target younger populations, as it is as junior high school observers is to reduce the prevalence of ATOD use and abuse among youth as they age.

Background and Rationale

Etiology research has identified several important risk factors for adolescent ATOD use as well as several protective factors that are important in countering the powers of these risks (Hawkins et al. 1992) As shown in the figure, factors contributing to the initiation of ATOD use can be clustered into several broad categories, including the following:

* Sociocultural (eg demographic factors, acculturation, and ethnic identity)

* Family factors (eg family management practices, discipline, monitoring, and parental ATOD use)

* Social environment factors (eg availability of ATODs, place of education bonding, media influences, and equal influences)

* Cognitive expectancies (eg attitudes and beliefs about ATOD use in general and ATOD use among companions [i.e., normative expectations])

* Personal and social means of independence skills (e.g., decision-making, anxiety management skills, communication skills, and assertiveness)

* Psychological factors (eg self-efficacy, self-sufficiency and psychological well-being).

These etiologic factors have been incorporated into a comprehensive mould of ATOD use initiation. In this example (see figure), ATOD use is conceptualized as the come of a dynamic interaction of environmental and individual factors in which companions parents, and other social influences interact with individual psychosocial vulnerabilities to forward ATOD use. For example, more [i]or[/i] less people may be influenced to use ATODs according to media presentations that normalize or glamorize ATOD use, whereas other folks may be influenced by family members or friends who use ATODs or have attitudes and beliefs supportive of their use. These social influences are likely to have the strongest general intent on people with pro-ATOD normative expectations, poor social and personal fitness skills, and poor drug-resistance skills. Social influences promoting ATOD use are also likely to have a greater consequence on people with certain psychological vulnerabilities, like as social anxiety low self-complacency low self-efficacy, and psychological distress. T he more risk factors that a bodily form has, the greater is the likelihood that the bodily form will use or abuse ATODs.

This theoretical framework contains guide elements from several prominent etiological theories of ATOD use, including social learning theory (Bandura 1977); enigma behavior theory (Jessor and Jessor 1977); and self-derogation (Kaplan 1980) persuasive communications (McGuire 1968) and associate cluster theories (Oetting and Beauvais 1987)