Fast Track

Fast Track is a multisite intervention designed to investigate and prevent the onset of behavioral and psychological problems in adolescents.

The project has followed and worked with three cohorts of children from the time they entered the first grade, in 1991, 1992, and 1993, respectively, and the researchers have just finished ten years of the originally envisioned twelve-year intervention trial at four sites, of which Duke-Durham is one.

The project has involved approximately 900 children in intervention, normative, and control groups. The principal investigators are Kenneth A. Dodge (Duke), John Coie (Duke), John Lochman (University of Alabama), Ellen Pinderhughes (Vanderbilt), Karen Bierman (Pennsylvania State), Mark Greenberg (Pennsylvania State), and Bob McMahon (University of Washington).

The Fast Track Data Center, serving all of the national project, is located at the Center for Child and Family Policy.

Click here to reach Fast Track's home page.

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Interventions
The children in the Fast Track intervention and control groups were selected because of their conduct problems in kindergarten and home, which were seen as indicators of high risk for later trouble. The problems they might be expected to face as adolescents include juvenile delinquency, psychological disorder, substance abuse, school failure and dropout, and risky sexual practices. The elementary school phase of the prevention program addressed risk and protective factors for adolescent problems, derived from the project's developmental model, in six areas:

• parenting
• the children's problem-solving and emotional coping skills, peer relations
• classroom atmosphere and curriculum
• academic achievement
• home-school relations

Ten project interventionists work with the intervention-group children, their families, and the schools in order to increase the number of protective factors in each of these areas and reduce the number of risk factors. The curriculum and interventions have changed over time to be developmentally appropriate as the children grew older. The research intervention occurs in childhood so that its effect on subsequent behavior can be assessed, but intervention staff members have subsequently worked with adolescents and families on special request.

Fast Track Longitudinal Research
Fast Track researchers are evaluating (1) the longitudinal outcomes of the intervention and (2) the project's guiding hypotheses concerning the development of conduct problems. The first evaluation relies on long-term outcome analysis of high-risk children who either received the intervention or were followed as a nontreated control group. For this part of the study, the project's data collection team conducts comprehensive summer interviews of parents and youth and collects teacher interviews and archival data from school records, court records, and medical and mental health institutions.

Project results thus far indicate that the intervention effectively improved parenting practices and children's social-cognitive skills, peer relations, reading achievement, and problem behavior at home and school during the elementary school years. Recent results show that children receiving the intervention are one-third less likely than the control group at similar risk to require hospitalization for psychiatric and/or behavioral problems in adolescence.

The evaluation of the project's guiding hypotheses about the development of conduct problems relies on studies of nearly four hundred children (one hundred for each of four sites) who did not receive the Fast Track intervention and who were stratified according to their risk for conduct problems (a normative sample).

Several analyses have been or are being conducted to evaluate Fast Track's theory and developmental hypotheses. Examples include the analysis of:
(1) the disadvantages in children's general living and family conditions that influence later psychological and academic outcomes,
(2) whether and how the conduct problems of high-risk children change over time both in their level and their characteristics,
(3) how certain beliefs and poor decision making in social confrontation or conflict may explain the behavior of children who are characteristically aggressive, and
(4) the ways in which conduct problems may emerge from and contribute to social rejection in school over time.