A Systematic Review of Community Prevention Studies Empowering Parents as Vectors of Prevention
Author(s): Cátia Magalhães*, Daniel Lloret, Elena Gervilla, Florence Samkange-Zeeb, Claudia R. Pischke, Montse Juan and Mariangels Dutch
Abstract
Background: Community efforts to prevent substance use and other risk behaviours are an important element of promoting and enhancing health behaviours during adolescence and later yearsand also to promote public health and achieve collective impact community wide. In this sense, empowering parents to boost environmental prevention is a promising strategy that however only a few programs use.
Aim: To identify and summarize the available studies regarding empowering and engaging parents as active agents for prevention of substance use/problem behaviour among adolescents.The questions that guided this review were the following: (i) which studies regarding community prevention in empowering parents as vectors of prevention have been conducted? (ii) What are the experimental designs and methodologies used to assess the efficacy of these programs?; (iii) what are the main findings after the implementation of these studies? Methods: For this, English and Spanish articles published between January 2019 and April 2020available at Scopus, Science Direct, Psych Articles, Psych Info, Redalyc, EBESCO. Results: The literature search yielded 490 articles, 12of which fulfilled the inclusion criteria of the systematic review. Most of the studies focused on reducing delinquency and other behaviour problems and on decreasing alcohol and other drug use; and family empowerment and engagement to access resources in their communities as a vector to prevention of risk behaviours. Conclusions: The results of the studies reviewed here in encourage the implementation of a community program that engage and empower parents and families as a prevention vector.