Lawrence M. Scheier, associate professor of counseling in UNLV's Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, recently was awarded a two-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the effectiveness of a school-based drug abuse prevention program.
The $375,000 grant is an integral part of a collection of ongoing studies already under way at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where Scheier previously worked as an investigator for the Multi-Ethnic Drug Abuse Prevention Research Center before his arrival at UNLV this fall.
While working at the center, Scheier was part of a team that developed and tested a drug abuse prevention program called Life Skills Training. The program targets middle-school students and is designed to improve personal self-management and social skills, enhance drug-refusal skills, and correct misperceptions regarding the social acceptability and prevalence of drug use. Scheier's research focused on discerning important risk factors involved in the beginning stages of drug use among adolescents.
Scheier said this new study will focus specifically on examining whether the Life Skills Training program deterred or reduced drug use among the youth in the manner hypothesized.
"An important component to this research is examining statistically whether treated youth report improved skills and cognitions and whether these changes are responsible for the lowered rates of drug use among experimental youth," Scheier said.
The grant outlines several advanced statistical modeling techniques that will be used to monitor growth and developmental change in social skills and personal self-management strategies.
"One area that has not been researched heavily is whether trajectories of growth in alcohol use are lower among treated youth compared to control students," Scheier said. "In many prevention programs, the means of the treated and control groups may not show marked program-related differences; however, trajectories of alcohol use, for example, may be lowered by the program. In subsequent years, fewer treated youth may be drinking at a problematic level and this would support positive program effects over an extended time period."
Scheier holds a master's degree in psychology from New York University and a doctorate in educational psychology and technology from the University of Southern California. Before coming to UNLV, he served as an associate professor of psychology in the department of public health at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where he was an investigator on several projects at the Institute for Prevention Research.
For more information about the grant and the study, call Scheier at 895-3398.
