Western > Resources > Planning and Best Practices > Step 5

Step 5: Focus Your Efforts

Now that you have completed your community assessment, identified priority risk and protective factors, assessed your community's existing resources, and identified the gaps, it is time to take a look at what type of strategy you need.

Since you know in which area you want to place your time and funding (your priority risk and protective factors) and you know which gaps you need to fill (from your resource assessment), you can now identify what type of prevention strategy is needed: universal, selective, or indicated.

To determine what type strategy you need, answer the following questions:

• Can your priority risk/protective factors and resource gaps be addressed with a universal strategy? Or would those risk/protective factors and gaps be better addressed with selective or indicated strategies? For example, if your priority risk factor is family management problems but you know through your resource assessment that several local programs already offer parenting classes aimed at the general population, then you may want to look at implementing a selective or indicated strategy.
   
• Do you need a program/strategy that impacts the broader community (e.g., a city, a school), not a particular segment of that community? If so, you may want to implement a universal program/strategy.
   
• Do you need to implement a program/strategy with greater intensity and duration for a specific population with identified risks? If so, you may want to choose a selective or indicated program/strategy to implement.
   
• If you are looking at implementing a selective or indicated program/strategy, do you have adequate funding? (Many selective and indicated programs/strategies require more funds than do universal programs/strategies.)
   
• Once you have answered the above questions and have determined what type of prevention strategy you need, make sure you are clear as to: what age group(s) you want to address; whether you are targeting both genders or just one; in which developmental stage your target group is; and from which culture your target group is.

Next Step: Select and Implement Best Practices and Guiding Principles

For more information and tools on selecting a target population:

Achieving Outcomes: A Practitioner's Guide to Effective Prevention, developed by the National Center for the Advancement of Prevention (funded by the HHS SAMHSA Center for Substance Abuse Prevention), Conference Edition 2002.