Outcomes from CSAP's community partnership program: Findings from the national cross-site evaluation

The cross-site evaluation of SAMHSA-CSAP's community partnership program collected a broad variety of data from all partnerships and also from a stratified, random sample of 24 partnerships and a set of matched comparison communities. The present article reports the results of the main outcome analysis, comparing substance abuse prevalence rates in the 24 partnerships and their matched comparisons, at two points in time. The prevalence rates were derived from surveys of nearly 85,000 individuals in these 48 communities, divided into three age groups: adults, 10th graders, and 8th graders. The survey samples were selected to represent the entire community. All analyses were done by estimating regression models that accounted for individual confounders — i.e., the age, gender, race, education, employment status, and income of the adults, and the age, gender, and race of the youths. Further, the analyses were conducted two ways, a pooled analysis that assumes the same intervention was carried out by each partnership, and an individual analysis that assumes different interventions. (The two assumptions are competing interpretations of the community partnership program, and rather than favoring either one, the cross-site evaluation covered both.) The results showed weak but some statistically significant differences in the predicted direction: Partnerships' prevalence rates were lower than the comparison communities' rates. Ongoing analyses are further investigating these results and also examining the reasons why partnerships might have produced the results — work that needs to be continued before arriving at any definitive interpretation of the partnerships' effects.