Evaluating Comprehensive Community Drug Risk Reduction Interventions

Abstract
Comprehensive community interventions pose several challenges to rigorous evaluation design. This article summarizes the recommendations for a feasible and rigorous design that were formulated by a 1991 conference on the evaluation of comprehensive community interventions. One such comprehensive intervention strategy for drug risk reduction called Communities That Care illustrates the points discussed. Conference participants recommended a multisite experimental trial of matched community pairs randomized into intervention and comparison conditions. In this design, randomization occurs at the community level. The implications of this design for community selection, sample size, and power are discussed