“US Planning Prevention for Them”: The Social Construction of Community Prevention for Youth

Abstract

Recently, prevention programs for youth have been aimed at the social spheres presumed to influence health behavior decisions. Community-level programs have emerged as part of this trend. Communities are, however, dynamic, complex, and fluid. Describing community prevention efforts within the bounds of “normal” science has rendered invisible certain important features. We combined open- and close-ended research methods to study the grassroots prevention efforts of ten communities in the upper midwest. Three basic questions formed our inquiry: 1) how were community prevention actions constructed or planned?; 2) toward whom were these actions aimed?; and 3) what were the major success and problems in carrying out prevention actions? A central finding was the existence of an automatic yet tacit “filtering” process whereby certain people became involved in prevention while others did not. This “us versus them” pattern was expressed as a major barrier to the effectiveness and sustainability of community prevention efforts. Existing as informal, “everyday” knowledge, this problem has largely been rendered invisible by the heavy reliance on close-ended, “check the box” communication between the researcher and the researched.