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The Oregon Model Communities Project: Building a Shared Vision of Successful Youth Development
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The Oregon Model Communities Project: Building a Shared Vision of Successful Youth Development
The Oregon Model Communities Project is a long-term partnership among communities, federal and private funding agencies, local and state organizations concerned with the well-being of young people, and research organizations. The model focuses on implementing and maintaining research-based practices to prevent the development of the entire range of youth problems and thereby increase the proportion of young people who develop a broad base of skills, interests, and knowledge. Although initially the Oregon Model focuses on youth development from the prenatal period through elementary school, ultimately the model also will be applied to ensuring that youth development is optimally nurtured in the middle school and high school years.
Strides
in Research on Youth Development
Over the past 30 years, scientific understanding regarding the optimal conditions for young people’s development has grown significantly. Effective methods of assisting families to nurture their children’s skills and abilities have been identified, as have school practices that ensure that children achieve their full academic potential, and develop critical social, athletic, and artistic skills. Moreover, we now know a great deal about the policies and practices of neighborhoods and community organizations that can contribute to youth success.
Bringing Research into Practice
Despite these strides in research, it is widely recognized that research-based programs, policies, and practices are not being effectively implemented to their full potential, and that we lack scientific understanding of how effective implementation can be achieved. Further research is needed, but that research must focus on a new set of problems and will require new methods. Among the characteristics of this new paradigm are the following:
• Long-term partnership between communities and research organizations. Traditionally, prevention research has involved at best a five-year commitment of a research organization to a community, and the researchers typically have selected the goals and methods of that research. This approach may be adequate for testing the efficacy of an intervention, but it is inadequate for learning about the factors that influence the long-term effective implementation and maintenance of practices shown to be efficacious.
• Coordinated support of funding sources. If research is going to contribute to understanding how to bring about permanent improvements in the practices that influence youth development, the funding of research and the funding of practice must be integrated. Huge sums of money are spent each year on the implementation of child-rearing practices by federal, state, and local agencies, but the growing efforts of these agencies to ensure that best practices are effectively implemented are little informed by research. Research is needed to experimentally evaluate strategies for influencing the adoption, effective implementation, and maintenance of best practices. Over time, such a strategy will create a research-based infrastructure for practice that will improve outcomes for young people.
• An integrated approach to the prevention of the entire range of youth problems. The evidence is overwhelming that youth problem behaviors are inter-related and that they have many social and biological influences in common. Yet both research and practice continue to focus on single problems. It is time to develop, implement, and test comprehensive approaches to the prevention of the entire range of youth problems.
• Research on the factors that influence the adoption and maintenance of practices. Although we know a lot about the practices that influence successful development, we know far less about the factors that influence youth-serving organizations to effectively implement and maintain those practices. Research is needed to identify the key influences on these processes.
The Oregon Model Communities Project will bring together communities and research organizations to work with private and public agencies that fund practice and research in a long-term project to implement research-based practices, monitor the impact of those practices, and modify the practices based on evidence of their impact.
The Generic Features of Effective Childrearing
The Oregon Model project is guided by evidence about the generic features of environments that contribute to successful development. Communities that wish to ensure youth success create environments that:
This list has two implications for communities that wish to optimize outcomes for young people. First, communities should adopt research-based practices that will instantiate one or more of these practices. Second, they should systematically examine all the settings in which young people are found and ensure that these environments have these features. The strategy is to enhance research-based programs and policies by establishing their features in every youth setting in the community.
The project conceives of communities in terms of multiple levels. The immediate environment directly influences the development of each young person. The three most important social fields for development in early childhood and childhood are the family, school, and peer groups. We propose to help communities implement, evaluate, and maintain empirically evaluated programs for schools and families that are likely to maximize the supportiveness of these social fields. We will assist schools to conduct systematic assessments of academic and social behavior to monitor children’s well-being and to identify children who may need intensive assistance. To address social behavior, we will assist schools in implementing the Good Behavior Game, recently modified to become more easily disseminated. To enhance academic skills, we will begin by assisting schools to implement research-based reading instruction. For families, we will aid family service organizations in the community–including schools—to effectively provide the self-administered version of the Incredible Years parenting program. Screening conducted by schools and family services will identify children who require more intensive assistance. For those children, we will help provide more intensive treatment focused on supporting social and academic skill development in family, school, and peer group settings.
Implicit in this analysis is the notion that the child’s proximal environments are, themselves, influenced by organizations and other factors. Indeed, the frontiers of prevention science involve understanding the key influences on the practices of schools, families, and other child environments and experimentally evaluating strategies for changing these environments.
Advocating for Supportive Environments
Based on the above analysis of the generic features of supportive environments,
the project will work to enhance all settings that influence children directly
or indirectly. We will work with local media to provide numerous models of
desirable child and adult behavior and to generate powerful public recognition
for such behavior. The organizations that reach children and families will
be systematically identified, analyzed, and mobilized to support the project.
Examples of such organizations include after-school child care centers, YMCA,
Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, churches, shopping malls, and
youth sports organizations.
The knowledge generated in this research should yield principles that can guide the dissemination, effective implementation, and maintenance of effective child-rearing practices in other communities across the country.
Research design to evaluate the Oregon Model Communities Project is under development. A multiple baseline design across communities, as well as numerous multiple baseline and ABA designs within communities, may be employed. We will also study the correlates of the maintenance of practices over time.