GETTING AND KEEPING SCHOOLS AND KIDS FOR EVALUATION STUDIES

Recruiting schools and kids to participate in drug prevention evaluati ons is no longer, if it ever was, a ''done deal.'' Since the mid-1980s , schools have been inundated with requirements for drug programs and requests to cooperate with program evaluations. As a consequence, both treatment and control schools are harder to find. In addition, many s chool administrators feel that their students have been ''overstudied' ' and parents often look askance at questionnaires that seek informati on on sensitive topics such as drug use. Even if evaluators successful ly pass the ''recruitment barrier,'' additional problems, such as the loss of schools or study participants over time, may threaten the stud y's integrity. This paper examines the challenges facing evaluators of community-based programs when the design calls for assessing preventi on efforts targeted at children or adolescents in school. It discusses the barriers to recruiting schools for the evaluation and keeping the m in the study over time, and presents alternative strategies for over coming those barriers. It then turns to the problems of getting and ke eping student participants, focusing, in particular, on strategies for obtaining parental consent and minimizing attrition over time.