Study of Police-Administered Life Skills Training (LST)

Start Date: 2005

Funder: Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency

Program Development Phase

[what is it?]

This study seeks to test the efficacy of involving police officers in the delivery of a school-based substance abuse prevention program that has clearly demonstrated evidence of effectiveness—the Life Skills Training (LST) program developed by Botvin et al. (1998).

Life Skills Training is a three-year universal classroom-based program designed to address the risk and protective factors associated with drug use by teaching general personal, interpersonal, and social resistance skills through facilitated interactive small group work, role playing and rehearsal, and classroom discussion. The program is the most commonly used model program in both Pennsylvania and the United States, currently in use with over 400,000 students nationwide (Bumbarger et al., 2000).

In this study, the LST program will be evaluated in 6th- and 7th-grade classrooms of up to three school districts during the 2005-2006 school year.

For more information, contact Brian Bumbarger.

Project Team

Brian Bumbarger
Director of Policy and Outreach
bkb10@psu.edu
Mark Greenberg
Director, Edna Peterson Bennett Chair & Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
mxg47@psu.edu
Edward Smith
Director of Evaluation Research
eas8@psu.edu
Sandee Kyler
Project Coordinator
sjw135@psu.edu