Assessment of methodological practices in the evaluation of alcohol and other drug (AOD) abuse prevention.

No authoritative consensus has been achieved on which substance abuse prevention activities are effective for given populations. One response to concern about "what works" took the form of a National Structured Evaluation (NSE), mandated by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. The present paper describes the NSE's pivotal task of determining whether evaluation methodologies applied to substance abuse prevention were adequate to produce credible findings. The lessons learned from this evaluation experience, in turn, offer guidance on changes that must be made in the application of evaluation methodology prior to a conclusive demonstration of the value of prevention efforts.