Enlisting Peer Cooperation and Prosociality in the Service of Substance Use Prevention in Middle School (Prosocial)

Students' cooperative and prosocial behavior is vital to their social and academic success and to the quality of a school's social environment. This project will evaluate an instructional technique that could benefit students and schools by encouraging higher levels of prosocial behavior among students and promoting social integration and inclusion, particularly for marginalized students. The instructional technique is called "cooperative learning" which involves students working in groups toward shared academic goals. Previous research indicates that cooperative learning promotes social acceptance and increases academic engagement and achievement. However, it has not been evaluated as a technique to reduce student behavioral problems and promote greater school safety. There is strong reason to believe that it will have these benefits, since cooperative learning brings together students from diverse social groups and provides them the opportunity to work together toward shared goals in a positive setting.

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Social Behavior
• Intervention / Treatment: Behavioral: Cooperative Learning

Detailed Description

A key contributing factor to the initiation and escalation of substance use during early adolescence is affiliation with deviant peers. These affiliations often arise when socially isolated and rejected youth aggregate and reinforce substance use and other deviant activity within the group (i.e., "deviant peer clustering"). Even though the field has developed a number of efficacious prevention programs, few have demonstrated strong effects on deviant peer clustering. Further, on a national level, substance use among adolescents continues to be high, suggesting that a fresh approach to prevention with a renewed focus on the peer context is needed to create a broad, sustainable public health impact.

Existing programs have proven difficult to disseminate with fidelity, often due to their complex design or the significant expenditures required for curricula, materials, and training. To realize broader public health benefits, an approach that integrates scientific knowledge across domains must be applied to develop and test programs that address root causes of youth substance use, are less complex and expensive to implement, are more flexible and adaptable to local conditions, and once established, can spread.

This proposal represents an approach to prevention in which evolutionary theory provides a unifying theoretical framework, which implies that diverse problems are due to social environments that are unfavorable for the expression of prosocial behaviors, instead eliciting a variety of self-oriented or exploitative behaviors. Systematic efforts to reduce multiple problems among youth (e.g., substance use, risky sex, depression, academic failure, etc.) need to look beyond the immediate issues to the social conditions that make the entire range of problems more likely. Programs should focus on modifying key social environments to nurture prosocial behavior and minimize the toxic or stressful conditions that give rise to behavioral problems in youth.

The investigators propose to integrate a few simple, flexible, and powerful prevention strategies that have proven value in establishing a social context conducive to positive peer group development. This project will apply cooperative learning and behavioral kernels to reduce social rejection and isolation, promote new friendships among youth from different social groups, and encourage greater levels of prosocial behavior. This should create a positive feedback loop in which the social and behavioral processes "amplify" one another to bring significant change to the school social context, interrupting deviant peer clustering and addressing a key root cause of escalations in substance use and related problem behavior. With this approach, the investigators anticipate a simple, straightforward implementation, greater sustainability, and opportunities for the program to spread through sharing of best practices among teachers. This project will conduct a small-scale randomized controlled trial involving 12 middle schools in the state of Oregon.

Aim 1a of the project is to evaluate the main effects of the program on both prosocial behavior and substance use. The investigators will also examine effects on secondary outcomes, including delinquent and high-risk sexual behavior, teasing and harassment, depression, school attendance, and academic achievement. The project will include an assessment of program fidelity, which will be incorporated into data analyses. Aim 1b of the project is to explore links among peer rejection, prosocial behavior, and substance use over time in an attempt to determine the direction of effects, which can inform both developmental theory and future intervention design.

Aim 2 will evaluate social network changes as a mediator of intervention effects. The investigators will use longitudinal social network analysis (RSiena) to examine a variety of processes as mediators of effects, including deviant peer clustering. This analyses will provide (1) fresh insight into the processes by which deviant peer groups form, how they impact substance use and related problem behavior, and the ways in which prevention programs may be able to counteract or interrupt these processes, (2) exploration of the social mechanisms by which prosocial behavior is disseminated across a network, and (3) an indication of whether the alteration of contextual norms in favor of prosocial behavior can create a clustering process driven by prosocial behavior.

• Study Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Actual): 2064
• Phase: Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• United States
  • Oregon
    • Eugene, Oregon, United States, 97403
      • Oregon Research Insititute

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: Child; Adult; Older Adult
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Genders Eligible for Study: All

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

• All students in participating schools in the 7th grade (first year) and 8th grade (second year)

Exclusion Criteria:

• None

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Prevention
• Allocation: Randomized
• Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
• Masking: None (Open Label)

Number of Arms

2

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm	Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Cooperative Learning; Teachers in intervention schools are training in cooperative learning (CL).	Behavioral: Cooperative Learning; CL is an umbrella term that includes peer tutoring, reciprocal teaching, collaborative reading, and other methods in which peers help each other learn in small groups. CL is not prescriptive but rather is a conceptual framework within which teachers design their own small-group activities. Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec's approach to CL combines positive interdependence with individual accountability, a high degree of face-to-face social interaction among youth, and support for the development of cooperative social skills. The Johnsons' approach offers teachers the combination of specific cooperative activities and the conceptual tools to create their own lesson plans using positive interdependence.
No Intervention: Business as Usual; Schools continue with business as usual.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Substance use	Tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana; actual use, intentions to use, willingness to use	twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)	Externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behavior	twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades
Engagement vs. Disaffection with Learning	Behavioral and emotional engagement in learning	twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades
Classroom Life Scale	Student academic support	twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades
University of Illinois Bully Scale	Bullying and victimization	twice a year for two years during 7th and 8th grades

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: Oregon Research Institute
• Collaborators: Michigan State University

Publications and helpful links

General Publications

• Van Ryzin MJ, Roseth CJ. Enlisting Peer Cooperation in the Service of Alcohol Use Prevention in Middle School. Child Dev. 2018 Nov;89(6):e459-e467. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12981. Epub 2017 Dec 19.
• Van Ryzin MJ, Roseth CJ. Cooperative Learning in Middle School: A Means to Improve Peer Relations and Reduce Victimization, Bullying, and Related Outcomes. J Educ Psychol. 2018 Nov;110(8):1192-1201. doi: 10.1037/edu0000265. Epub 2018 Mar 1.
• Van Ryzin MJ, Roseth CJ. Peer influence processes as mediators of effects of a middle school substance use prevention program. Addict Behav. 2018 Oct;85:180-185. doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2018.06.016. Epub 2018 Jun 13.
• Van Ryzin MJ, Roseth CJ. Effects of cooperative learning on peer relations, empathy, and bullying in middle school. Aggress Behav. 2019 Nov;45(6):643-651. doi: 10.1002/ab.21858. Epub 2019 Aug 20.

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Actual): July 1, 2016
• Primary Completion (Actual): June 30, 2018
• Study Completion (Actual): June 30, 2020

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: April 13, 2017
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: April 13, 2017
• First Posted (Actual): April 18, 2017

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): July 23, 2020
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: July 21, 2020
• Last Verified: July 1, 2020

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Additional Relevant MeSH Terms: Mental Disorders; Chemically-Induced Disorders; Substance-Related Disorders
• Other Study ID Numbers: AA024275

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: NO
• IPD Plan Description: No plan

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No