APA PsycARTICLES

The prevalence of pregnancy, substance abuse, violence, and delinquency among young people is unacceptably high. Interventions for preventing problems in large numbers of youth require more than individual psychological interventions. Successful interventions include the involvement of prevention practitioners and community residents in community-level interventions. The potential of community-level interventions is illustrated by a number of successful studies. However, more inclusive reviews and multisite comparisons show that although there have been successes, many interventions did not demonstrate results. The road to greater success includes prevention science and newer community-centered models of accountability and technical assistance systems for prevention. Family, school, and community systems influence the status of youth problems for alcohol, tobacco, and other drug abuse; violence and delinquency; and mental illness. Large improvements across these domains depend on favorably influencing the development of large numbers of youth with effective prevention and health promotion interventions. Over the past decade, community-level interventions combining multiple strategies across multiple settings have been embraced as a promising approach for broad outreach. In this article, we define community-level interventions for prevention and health promotion and briefly describe their appeal, present examples of community-level interventions that demonstrate their promise and summarize literature reviews that document that the promise is not realized regularly, and propose that models to bridge the gap between science and practice via accountability processes and technical assistance systems for prevention may increase the effectiveness of preventive interventions. Community-Level Interventions: Definition and Rationale Community-level interventions are multicomponent interventions that generally combine individual and environmental change strategies across multiple settings to prevent