Prevention Education and Service Delivery
Match the strategy to the risk level
Prevention is usually taught as a continuum. Universal strategies address everyone in a population (school-wide curricula, social norms campaigns, policy). Selective strategies target groups at elevated risk (children of substance users, students who are truant). Indicated strategies target individuals showing early signs or risk behaviors who do not yet meet diagnostic criteria - not treatment. Treatment and recovery support sit beyond prevention. Expect at least one question asking you to classify a described program; the trap is calling a targeted program universal because it is delivered in a school, or calling an indicated program selective.
The strategy menu
SAMHSA's classic six strategies - information dissemination, prevention education, alternatives, problem identification and referral, community-based process, and environmental approaches - remind candidates that education is one tool, not the whole toolkit. Effective delivery blends strategies and reinforces the message over time and across settings.
Delivery mechanics
Fidelity matters: evidence-based programs work when delivered as tested - correct dosage, sequence, trained facilitators, and the intended age group. Adaptation should preserve the program's core components. Dosage matters too: a five-session curriculum cut to two loses effect. Readiness matters: a group that has not acknowledged the problem will not absorb a curriculum.
Trap alert: knowledge-only interventions (an assembly, a one-time speaker, a scare film) reliably raise knowledge but rarely sustain behavior change. Questions describing a single awareness event usually want an interactive, skills-based, multi-session approach combined with an environmental component.
Rule of thumb: interactive and skills-based beats didactic; multi-year beats one-shot; program plus environmental support beats program alone.