Family Matters

Family Matters is a family-directed program to prevent adolescents 12-14 years of age from using tobacco and alcohol. The intervention is designed to influence population-level prevalence and can be implemented with large numbers of geographically dispersed families. The program encourages communication among family members and focuses on general family characteristics (e.g., supervision and communication skills) and substance-specific characteristics (e.g., family rules for tobacco and alcohol use and media/peer influences). The program involves successive mailings of four booklets to families and telephone discussions between the parent and health educators. Two weeks after family members read a booklet and carry out activities intended to reinforce its content, a health educator contacts a parent by telephone. A new booklet is mailed when the health educator determines that the prior booklet has been completed. The program can be implemented by many different types of organizations and people, such as health promotion practitioners in health departments, school health educators and parent-teacher groups, volunteers in community-based programs, and national nonprofit organizations.

The goal of this program is to prevent tobacco and alcohol abuse among adolescents.

Family Matters was initially implemented in 1996-1997 with 658 families across the United States and is currently offered by organizations nationwide. To date, on-site training has been provided for this intervention in at least 11 States (Alabama, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, and Washington).

In two evaluation studies, the intervention reduced smoking onset among adolescents who reported being non-users at the start of the program. At 12-month follow-up, 16.4% fewer program participants had initiated smoking compared with an adolescent control group. In addition, the intervention reduced prevalence of self-reported alcohol use among both users and nonusers, after adjusting for use rates at the start of the program and demographic variables.