• By Dartington SRU
• Posted on Thursday 29^th May, 2014

On the other hand – perhaps better not

Researchers in Los Angeles say there is no middle ground: being surrounded by your friends is either very good for you – or very bad – depending on how well behaved your friends are.

The University of South California team is known in the prevention field for developing the successful Project Towards No Drug Abuse (Project TND), a substance abuse prevention programme endorsed by Blueprints and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

Project TND is usually delivered by one trained teacher to their entire classroom of children. But recently, researchers at the University have become interested in testing whether the idea could be delivered in smaller groups and via peer-led activities. Peer influence is known to have a strong effect on young people’s behaviour and can be powerful when harnessed in prevention programmes.

There is, however, a potential problem: ten years ago a seminal study by Tom Dishion and colleagues showed that gathering high-risk adolescents together can worsen their behaviour. In such cases, peer influence has a harmful effect and an intervention that involves group work can leave the participants worse off.

According to the developer, Steve Sussman, Project TND equips adolescents with healthy decision-making skills that reduce the chances of them misusing drugs. Once individual mindsets about drugs have been changed, TND aims to modify normative beliefs within the wider context, for the whole school or community. So that young people don’t feel the pressure of thinking that “everyone else is doing it… so I should start too”.

Sussman and his Los Angeles colleagues set about modifying the structure and delivery of the programme in an experiment that tested for both the positive and negative effects of peer influence.

In the resulting TND Network, young people are asked to form small groups of four or five friends. They are then asked to elect a leader – a marked departure from the original version of the programme in which discussions and activities for the class as a whole are facilitated by a trained teacher.

Having modified the programme, the researchers ran a randomised controlled trial to test the effects on children’s behaviour. Over 500 high school students were assigned to a control condition, to TND network or to Project TND in its original form.

TND Network demonstrated relatively long-term positive outcomes in the form of reduced marijuana and cocaine use amongst its participants. Rates of a composite score of substance abuse for participants in TND Network were also lower than for those not receiving the modified programme and remained so at one-year follow up.

However, the successful reduction of substance abuse came at a price. Children in groups with friends who reported using substances at the outset had poorer outcomes by the end of the programme. The researchers hypothesise that by grouping these children together and limiting interaction with non-substance using peers, taking drugs becomes an accepted and socially approved behaviour. In this instance, the curriculum alone was not enough to counteract the strong effects of peer influence.

The message here is that peer influence can accelerate both positive and negative outcomes. So careful consideration has to be given to getting the formula right. Grouping substance-using friends together simply will not work: peers with more positive behaviours must be present in each group in order for there to be a positive influence on outcomes.

Valente, T., Ritt-Olson, A., Stacy, A., Unger, J., Okamoto, J. & Sussman, S. (2007) "Peer acceleration: effects of a social network tailored substance abuse prevention program among high-risk adolescents", Addiction, 102, 1804-1815.