navigate: home: magazine: spring 2003: article

Foster receives grant to evaluate child intervention program By S. William Hessert Jr.
Dr. E. Michael Foster, associate professor of health policy and administration at Penn State, has received a grant from the National Institute on Mental Health to evaluate a program designed to prevent chronic antisocial behavior in children.	Dr. E. Michael Foster, associate professor of health policy and administration in the College of Health and Human Development and a faculty member in the Children, Youth and Families Consortium, has received a five-year $2.8 million grant from the National Institute on Mental Health to complete an economic evaluation of Fast-Track, a comprehensive, multisite intervention program designed to prevent chronic antisocial behavior in children.   The grant will allow Foster to evaluate whether costs associated with early interventions with children through the Fast-Track program are offset by future savings that result from reductions in delinquency and other costly societal behaviors. The evaluation will identify the economic impact of the interventions, calculate the cost effectiveness of key outcomes, project future costs of care and identify subgroups of participants for whom the Fast-Track interventions were especially significant, either positively or negatively.   The evaluation focuses on the experiences of 891 high-risk children who were randomly assigned to Fast-Track or to control groups over a 10-year period. In addition to the children, data is being provided by their teachers, parents, tutors, mentors and peers.   Preliminary data collected during the first seven years suggests the Fast-Track intervention has had a positive impact—children involved in the program tend to have higher academic and social-cognitive skills and fewer discipline problems and special education placements than children in the control groups. Another potential benefit of the program includes reduction in the incidence of substance abuse, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among the participants.   Co-investigators on the project include Dr. Karen Bierman, Penn State Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the Children, Youth and Families Consortium; Dr. Kenneth Dodge, professor of public policy studies and psychology and director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University; Dr. Robert McMahon, professor of psychology at the University of Washington; and Dr. Ellen Pinderhughes, research assistant professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University.