Contemporary psychology stresses the use of prevention programs to intervene in family and social situations (divorce, drug abuse, joblessness, etc.) that are known to lead to later social and psychological dysfunction. In planning treatment by intervention, a scientist will develop a program that targets a number of key causes of behavior known as "mediators."
Though the combined program may be found to be effective by measuring the end result (percentage of teens who resist smoking, for example), the relative effectiveness of the methods applied to each of the individual "mediators" may not be known -- an issue of some concern when the availability of treatment is restricted by budget and resource issues. How does a prevention planner know which parts of the program are truly effective and which are a waste of time and money?
"The analysis of mediators is an important area of study in prevention," said David P. MacKinnon, director of Arizona State University's Research in Prevention Laboratory. "The information that we obtain from such analysis helps us develop more effective programs in the future, and it also provides a critical framework for testing new theories on how behavior can be changed."
Ways of scientifically evaluating such mediators and "mediational models" of intervention will be discussed in a free conference sponsored by Arizona State University's Preventive Intervention Research Center entitled "Statistical Methods to Determine How Prevention Programs Achieve their Effects." The conference is scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, March 23 and 24 at ASU's Memorial Union Pima Room.