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Translational research in action: implementation of the communities that care prevention system in 12 communities
Author(s) -
Fagan Abigail A.,
Hanson Koren,
Hawkins J. David,
Arthur Michael W.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.585
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 1520-6629
pISSN - 0090-4392
DOI - 10.1002/jcop.20332
Subject(s) - action (physics) , translational research , medicine , nursing , public relations , political science , physics , pathology , quantum mechanics
Translational research (Pentz, Jasuja, Rohrbach, Sussman, & Bardo, 2006; Woolf, 2008) is concerned with moving advances in prevention science into everyday practice in communities, yet there are few models for ensuring this transfer of knowledge. Communities That Care (CTC) provides a planned, structured, and data‐driven system that trains community prevention coalitions to select evidence‐based programs and replicate them with strong implementation fidelity. In this article, the authors describe the implementation of the CTC prevention system over a 5‐year period in 12 communities participating in the Community Youth Development Study. The results indicated that the intervention communities enacted, on average, 90% of the core components of the CTC system, and achieved high rates of implementation fidelity when replicating a variety of school, afterschool, and parent training programs. These results held over time; communities successfully launched their prevention coalitions and programs and maintained the quality of their prevention services over 5 years. These results indicate that the CTC system can be used to foster translational research. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.