Evaluating the Effectiveness of Communities That Care in Germany: Rationale and Study Design of CTC-EFF

Purpose Health promotion works through community action by setting priorities, making decisions, planning and implementing strategies to achieve better health. Communities That Care (CTC) is an approach to support and empower communities to assess their local prevention gaps based on epidemiological data and select, implement and monitor appropriate evidence-based interventions (policies, practices, programmes) subsequently. CTC, developed in the USA to prevent youth problem behavior, was transferred to Germany in 2008. The BMBF-funded project “Effectiveness of the Community-Based Prevention System Communities That Care” (CTC-EFF) aims to replicate the original study on the effectiveness of CTC. The CTC Five-Phase-Model, the logical model, the study design and the methods of CTC-EFF are presented.

Methods A quasi-experimental study will be conducted. For each recruited intervention community, one socio-demographically similar control community will be recruited. The intervention communities will receive training and technical assistance. At the community level outputs such as Capacity Building and the Adoption of Science-Based Prevention Framework will be measured biannually. In addition, data on Coalition Functioning, the achievement of CTC-Milestones and CTC-Benchmarks will be collected in the intervention communities annually. At the level of the target group (students*), a panel survey on health-related behavior will be conducted annually.

Results For the panel survey, the optimal sample size (including drop-out) is n = 4,733 students* in 24 communities. Five intervention communities have already been recruited, in which an average of four secondary schools are located.

Conclusions CTC-EFF has launched a study on the effectiveness of community health promotion among young people, which is so far unique in Germany.

Publication History

Article published online:
02 September 2021