Family-Based, Web-Based, Media Literacy Education for the Prevention of Substance Use in Elementary School Students

Research

Purpose: To develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a web-based, media literacy education, substance use prevention program for use by families of elementary school-aged children

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OVERVIEW

The objective of this project was to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a web-based media literacy education, substance use preventive intervention program, Media Detective Family, for use with parents and their elementary school children.

The decision to create the program as a web-based program was to provide a method for overcoming barriers to prevention efforts that are frequently encountered in rural communities. MDF provides families with media literacy and media mediation skills through an interactive software application.

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Benefits include increased parental awareness of the importance of media literacy education, improvements in parents’ and children’s critical thinking skills, improvements in parent-child communication about substances and the media, and an increase in the frequency of rural families receiving evidence-based prevention programming. A randomized controlled trial evaluation of the program revealed that children whose families used Media Detective Family reported a significant reduction in their use of substances over time compared to children in the control group. This research supports the use of an online family-based program with a media literacy education approach for reducing children’s substance use behaviors.