The monitoring of alcohol use is a key focus of public health surveillance efforts to better understand the relationship between alcohol use, particularly excessive use, and its harmful effects. This session will describe five alcohol indicators included in Substance Abuse and Mental Health Surveillance Indicators adopted by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists in 2016.

Listen in to discover what MiPHY is, the resources available, what data the survey is collecting and how the data is being utilized. Further understand how Organizations and School Districts are involved when taking the survey.

Environmental scanning aims to identify your community’s risk factors that can contribute to underage or excessive alcohol consumption. Conducting a scan allows you to observe and document the 4 P’s: Price, Product, Promotion, and Placement. Recording these observations and pairing that information with other assessment data, such as youth survey data, allows you to create a clear picture of alcohol in your community. From that picture, you can then identify strategies to reduce underage and excessive use of alcohol.

The State of Michigan is committed to preventing violent deaths of its citizens. Currently available data, however, do not always provide the information needed to assess accurately all factors associated with such a death. For example, death certificates provide victim data, but do not provide perpetrator information; police reports focus more on the perpetrator and less on the victim. The MiVDRS will collect detailed information on victims and offenders, including: 

  • demographics
  • substance use
  • relationship of victim to offender
  • circumstances leading to the injury
  • whether the event occurred at home or work
  • date and location of the incident
  • weapon type

The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) is a set of surveys that track behaviors that can lead to poor health in students grades 9 through 12. The surveys are administered every other year. Some of the health-related behaviors and experiences monitored are:

  • Student demographics: sex, sexual identity, race and ethnicity, and grade
  • Youth health behaviors and conditions: sexual, injury and violence, bullying, diet and physical activity, obesity, and mental health, including suicide
  • Substance use behaviors: electronic vapor product and tobacco product use, alcohol use, and other drug use
  • Student experiences: parental monitoring, school connectedness, unstable housing, and exposure to community violence

How to collect qualitative data from focus groups and listening sessions.

This handout provides tips on how to avoid common mistakes. To quote The United Nations Children’s Fund, Multiple-Indicatory Survey Handbook (2006): “These numbers, whether they are correct or not, will take on a life of their own once released…and may cause you a lot of trouble if you have not checked your arithmetic carefully.”

Fidelity of implementation refers to the degree to which teachers and other program providers implement programs as intended by the program developers. While there is agreement generally about what is intended when research refers to fidelity, in fact, fidelity has come to refer to a broad and loosely collected set of specific definitions.

This handout explains how to facilitate a focus group step by step.

This course provides guidance to facilitate selection and implementation of one of the many evidence-based programs related to prevention and treatment that are publicly available today. You will learn how to (1) select the program that best matches your organization’s needs and (2) carry out the steps necessary to implement the program you choose.

Conducting a strong needs assessment is the foundation for developing a successful prevention plan. The Prevention Technology Transfer Center (PTTC) Data-Informed Decisions Working Group has designed this review sheet to support addressing data gaps through primary data collection. It provides several methods and select resources as a starting point for prevention team’s planning. These methods can involve varied means of data collection, including oral narratives, written text, photographs, video, and others.

Before conducting any focus groups or key informant interviews, it is important to decide what information you would like to obtain from your qualitative methods. The objective of collecting these qualitative data is to identify the most relevant contributing factors in your community. Based on the information you’d like to obtain, you can create questions. Here are some sample questions you may use. Remember that these are only suggestions – feel free to adjust, discard or add any questions to adapt your qualitative methods to your specific community.