Sembrando Salud

Sembrando Salud is a culturally sensitive, community-based tobacco- and alcohol-use prevention program specifically adapted for migrant Hispanic adolescents and their families. Designed for youths 11 to 16 years old, the 8-week curriculum for adolescents and their families is delivered by bilingual/bicultural college students in classrooms and meeting rooms in school-based settings. The program interventions are a mix of interactive teaching methods, including videos, demonstrations, skill practice, group discussions led by a leader, and role-playing. All interventions include three central components: 1) information about the health effects of tobacco/alcohol use, 2) social influences on tobacco/alcohol use, and 3) training in refusal skills. Further, adolescents are exposed to how problems can be identified and analyzed, solutions generated, and decisions made, implemented, and evaluated. There is an additional emphasis on developing parental support for the healthy discussions and behaviors of adolescents through enhanced parent-child communications. Parental communication skills--such as listening, confirmation, and reassurance--also are developed.

This program is designed to improve parent-child communication skills as a way of improving and maintaining healthy decision-making.

In a randomized pretest-posttest control group study the program was found to be effective in increasing perceived parent-child communication in families with fewer children. Specifically, parents and children enrolled in the treatment condition reported greater improvements in communication than those in the attention-control condition. The intervention appeared to be more effective in smaller families, owing presumably to the increased opportunity for parents to monitor and communicate with participating youths. Researchers determined that the intervention effect could be translated into a future 5 percent to 10 percent decrease in susceptibility for smaller families, owing to the effect size and to the previously established relationship between communication and susceptibility to tobacco and alcohol use. The study had notable limitations. First, it targeted a hard-to-reach population, with 60 percent of those eligible not participating. This factor makes it difficult to generalize the findings to those who were not reached. Additional limitations include the short-term nature of the follow-up, which does not allow any determination of long-term effects, and reliance on self-report measures, which raises the concern that the promising results of the intervention are due to the desire of parents and their children to be presented in a positive light.