Preventing Adolescent Drug Abuse: Intervention Strategies, 47

The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the capability ofsocial skills training approaches for preventing adolescent sub-stance abuse and to suggest directions for future research in thisarea. Social skills and training are defined from the perspectiveof social learning theory. Training approaches are then reviewedfor their effect on drug use and drug use-related behaviors. Theresults indicate that social skills training reduces substance useand related behaviors such as aggression, withdrawal, truancy, andstealing in adolescents. Outcome was enhanced by the inclusion ofmodeling in a training program and the use of normal (versusproblem or disordered) adolescents. In addition, discriminantanalyses indicated that the more positive outcomes were discrimin-able by a focus on prevention, experimental rigor, and trainingcomprehensiveness, that is, inclusion of multiple techniques andskills. Follow-up results showed that training effects weremaintained, and that they could be generalized to several areas ofeveryday adolescent functioning. The findings suggest that socialskills training is an effective means for substance abuse preven-tion in adolescents, and that it may have an advantage over moredirect prevention methods in terms of long-term generalizationcapabilities. Finally, several issues are raised for their poten-tial impact on social skills training as a strategy for substanceabuse prevention in adolescents. These issues encompass con-ceptual, methodological, and evaluative domains: development of ataxonomy of person-situation specificity characteristics toincrease the validity and reliability of assessment and trainingprocedures; assessment of the relative contribution of individualdifferences in adolescents to training outcome; identification ofqualitative developmental shifts in social skills as adolescentsprogress through grade, school, and family transitions; and com-parison of the maintenance and generalization effects, over time,of social skills training with more direct abuse preventionmethods. Guidelines are offered for addressing these issues, aswell as directions for the role of social skills training researchin future drug abuse prevention efforts.