Study of Alcohol Use and Abuse

You have been working at the Wayne County probation office for approximately 6 months now. Your supervisor has given you your 6-month employment evaluation, which was excellent. As a result, your supervisor has informed you that he is to choose one of the probation officers on his staff of 45 to be appointed to a committee on alcohol use and abuse. This committee is being put together by the County Board of Supervisors. Your supervisor asks you to be part of this committee, which you excitedly agree to do.

At your first committee meeting, the committee chair divides the 30 individuals into smaller subcommittees to explore specific areas of alcohol use and abuse. You are assigned to the prevention and treatment committee along with eight other individuals. The committee is made up professionals from various disciplines, including probation, parole, corrections, addiction, substance/alcohol abuse, social work, psychology, psychiatry, and pharmacology. The board of supervisors has asked that your committee focus solely on prevention issues relating to minors (not adults).

Group Portion

As a group, you must choose 3 prevention strategies that are effective with minors (children under the age of 18). For each prevention strategy addressed, you must state/explain/discuss the following:

The definition of the prevention strategy and where you learned of it
How it is put into practice
What environment this prevention strategy is used in
The efficacy of the prevention strategy
The cost of the prevention strategy
The specific minor age group that it targets
Citations for each sentence that contains information from any source

Individual Portion

After reading and reviewing the group portion and the contributions from your fellow subcommittee members, your supervisor asks you to prepare a memo to him with your personal position on the following:

Which prevention strategy do you personally believe would be most effective, and why?
Which prevention strategy do you believe would be the least effective, and why?
Which prevention strategy would you recommend for the preteen population (defined as children ages 10–12)?
Do you believe that the strategy that you identified as the most effective is cost-effective? Support your position with facts.
As a subcommittee member, rank the 3 prevention strategies in order of the most valuable to the least valuable, and explain your position.