Exploring Youth Substance Use Challenges and Solutions: Initial Developments in Participatory Research Focused on the Icelandic Prevention Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The Icelandic Prevention Model (IPM) represents a promising practice for youth substance use prevention. It applies a community-driven primary prevention approach that is designed to create healthy contexts. Lanark County was the first community in Canada to adopt the IPM and has been pioneering a youth engagement approach to support the implementation. This paper describes the early findings related to a participatory evaluation that was co-designed with young people and focuses on examining youth perspectives on community needs and substance use issues. Method: Our approach integrated three levels of youth involvement, including co-design with youth advisors, collaborative asset mapping and community consultations. For the consultations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with 10 young people. A thematic analysis was applied using NVivo software. Results: Thematic analyses of the consultation interviews identified four themes: (1) Social norms and accessibility as influences in youth substance use behaviours, (2), Lack of activities, (3) Intersectional discrimination and (4) Youth suggestions for strategies to enhance the community. Discussion: This research represents a novel participatory approach that includes youth in the strategic design and evaluation of the IPM. It highlights issues related to implementation and the added value of youth perspectives. Our multi-level approach enabled the meaningful engagement of young people within a complex prevention initiative. Findings will support the ongoing efforts in Lanark County and serve to inform other IPM implementations, as well as upstream prevention initiatives that integrate youth engagement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".