Predictor of Adolescent Substance Abuse,
Violence, and Delinquency
For a study to offer persuasive evidence that an intervention offered to young children is likely to reduce later substance abuse, violence, or delinquency, it must actually assess effects on one of the primary predictors of these problems (see Fig. 2). Although outcomes on secondary factors hypothesized to be related to later problems are interesting, unless benefits are measured on at least one of the primary predictors of later substance abuse and delinquency, it is unclear what the implications are of such findings. Therefore, programs that did not target these primary factors were not included in this review.
Standard 4: A Manual is Available Describing the Intervention
The final standard that we set for this review was that an intervention has to have a detailed and available manual describing the intervention used. The im-portance of an intervention being carefully described so that others could potentially replicate it, is a critical feature of an empirically supported intervention (Chambless & Hollon, 1998).