Abstract
Youth tobacco, alcohol, and other substance abuse is a serious concern in the State of Florida, as well as across the nation. 4-H Health Rocks! is a positive youth development prevention program that utilizes experiential learning methods and youth-adult partnerships. The program and supporting curriculum were designed to foster personal and social skills to better equip adolescents to overcome pressures to participate in substance use. The purpose of this article is to describe the implementation of Health Rocks! in Florida and program evaluation including its impact on participants’ drug knowledge, drug beliefs and attitudes, and drug resistance skills. Program evaluation indicates that 4-H Health Rocks! resulted in statistically significant improvement in each of these categories for hundreds of youth reached in 2009-2012. The importance of program components in preventing and influencing adolescent substance abuse are discussed.
Highlights
Across the United States and Florida, youth face a variety of emergent healthy living issues including tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use
According to the Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey (FYSAS) (2012), covering selected middle and high schools in 66 out of 67 Florida counties, thirty eight percent (38%) of high-risk sixth through eighth grade students reported laws and norms favorable to drug use in their communities and 40% believed that drugs were largely available in their communities
A statistically significant change in mean scores are found in all categories, indicating that Health Rocks! program improves participating youth’s drug knowledge, anti-drug beliefs and attitudes, and behavioral skills to resist using drugs
Summary
Across the United States and Florida, youth face a variety of emergent healthy living issues including tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use. Nineteen percent (19%) of the high-risk middle school students reported that their parents had favorable attitudes toward alcohol and other drug use. 28.9% of Florida middle school students reported having used alcohol in their lifetime, of which 12.3% reported having consumed alcohol in the past 30 days and 4.7% reported having consumed five or more alcoholic drinks (binge drinking) in the past two weeks. 8.3% of Florida middle school students reported ever using marijuana, of which 4.2% reported using marijuana or hashish in the last 30 days. Among Florida high school students, 14.5% reported that they had started smoking cigarettes at age thirteen or younger
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