A Social-Cognitive Educational Protocol for Parents with Adolescents at Risk of Substance Use: Impact on Adolescents' Life Skill

Objective: The aim of this study was to instruct social cognitive protocol based on life skills and parenting skills to parents with teenagers at substance use risk and also to investigate its effectiveness among teenagers. Method: The present study is a quasi-experimental study with a pretest, posttest, and follow-up approach with a group in 3 stages of measurement. The statistical population included 70 adolescents at risk of substance abuse who were selected using the available sampling method. The survey consisted of 40 questions about adolescents' life skills in four subscales of self-control skills, assertiveness and saying no skills, decision-making skills, and problem-solving skills, and the reliability of the entire questionnaire was estimated to be 0.98 using the Cronbach's alpha method. In this study, adolescents were first given a test, and after two weeks, their parents learned the social cognitive protocol over a 12-week period and were asked to impart these skills to their adolescents at home. After that, the adolescents gave the same test after the intervention (posttest). Two months after the posttest, the follow-up test was performed without any training. Results: Comparison of the mean of the three stages of measurement showed that the effect of the overall life skills score, according to the value of Wilkes Lambda multivariate test (0.666) with degrees of freedom two and 40, can be rejected as a null hypothesis (P <0.01). In addition, in the subscales of decision-making skills (0.781), problem-solving (0.688), and self-control (0.816), the mean score of the participants in the three measurements was simultaneously different; and in the follow-up stage, the scores were significantly different than the pretest. However, in terms of assertiveness and the skill of saying no, the scores did not differ simultaneously in the three measurements (0.986). Conclusion: These scores show that teaching social cognitive protocol to parents of adolescents who are at risk of substance abuse is effective.