The Effectiveness of the Strengthening Families Intervention Program on the Resiliency of Adolescents with High-Risk Behaviors Living in Kermanshah City, Iran

The strengthening families program (SFP) 10–14 (Kumpfer et al. 1996) is a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (SAMHSA) designed model program. The program has undergone scientific review by the national registry of evidence–based programs, and practices and has been used in many communities. The program outcomes showed decreased substance use and risk behaviors among the sixth– and seventh–grade students and child's adjustment and resiliency. The program could enhance family protective factors and reduce risk behaviors among family processes. This paper aims to report the results of a preliminary examination of the efficacy of the SFP 10–14 on the resiliency of high–risk adolescents.

This quasi–experimental study has a pretest–posttest and follow–up design with a control group. The study population included all adolescents aged 12 to 16 years living in Kermanshah City (Kermanshah Province, West of Iran) in 2016–17. In order to select the samples, in the first stage, a call was made for holding classes to promote family education among schools and educational centers for adolescents in Kermanshah. In the second stage, among all adolescents and parents enrolled in this call (225 people), 40 adolescents with the following criteria were selected: aged 12 to 16 years; no history of participation in a workshop or a class for the prevention of addiction or other high–risk behaviors; lack of behavioral, mood, or emotional problems; lack of adolescent drug and alcoholic beverages; and the ability to participate in 7 educational sessions. The inclusion criteria for parents were as follows: parents between the ages of 23 and 65, being the main caregivers (biological or non–biological), having a teenager in target schools, and living at least 1 year in a target society. The participants' satisfaction was recorded, and the ethical standards of the research were respected. Subjects were then assigned randomly to the experimental group (n=20) and the control group (n=20), but the study was completed with 15 families and adolescents in the control group and 17 families and adolescents in the experimental group. After determining the sample, all selected adolescents were invited to the educational center of the welfare organization's counseling center. The training of the SFP was implemented in 7 180–minute sessions, once a week for the experimental group, with emphasis on the principles of the curriculum by the workshop's instructor (PhD specialist in psychology) under the supervisor's guidance (Dr. Mohammadkhani). Besides doing their daily activities, the control group participated in a 2–hour session on life skills. On the last day of the training session, a posttest was taken from the experimental group and one day later from the control group at the educational salon of the welfare organization's counseling center. Forty–five days after the completion of the training period, the participants of the control and experimental groups were tested again (follow–up phase). Descriptive statistics, such as mean and standard deviation, and inferential statistics, such as repeated measures analysis of variance (with p=0.05 as the significance level), were used to analyze the data based on observing the assumptions of this statistical method. Data analysis was done in SPSS–21.

Repeated measures analysis of variance showed that the family strengthening program training increased resiliency of adolescents with high–risk behavior in the experimental group compared to the control group at posttest and follow–up.

The present study showed that the family enhancement curriculum increased the resilience of adolescents with high–risk behaviors. In this regard, it seems that this program can be used in organizations that deal with abusive and high–risk adolescent affairs as an intervention. The selective enhancement of adaptation and reduction of high–risk behaviors in this context, with appropriate training to promote mental health and resilience to counteract high–risk behaviors during this critical life cycle, should be considered.