Family Matters: A family-directed program designed to prevent adolescent tobacco and alcohol use.

Abstract

This article describes a program for families that is intended to reduce adolescent tobacco and alcohol use. The program, featuring mailed booklets and follow-up telephone contacts by health educators, is directed toward general populations and is being evaluated with a randomized experiment involving families throughout the contiguous states of the United States. Considerations include description of the principles that influenced program features, the conceptual model for the program, the formative research conducted to design the program, the attributes of the final program as implemented nationally for 658 families, parent assessments of the program, program costs, and the evaluation design.