Zambia presents a stark backdrop for this research. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis documented an overall alcohol use disorder prevalence of 7.7 percent among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa, and Zambia reported the highest weighted past-6-month prevalence of adolescent alcohol use at 80.6 percent, alongside the highest prevalence of alcohol dependence. Much of this consumption involves inexpensive, unregulated non-industrial alcohol, which carries a heavy burden of disease and injury. The consequences ripple outward: unsafe sexual behavior that raises HIV risk, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, injuries, gender-based violence, and mental health disorders. Against this landscape, the United Nations has called for strengthened prevention under Sustainable Development Goal 3.5, and the African Union has urged evidence-based, community-integrated prevention activities.

The GROW-HFLS curriculum emerged from an earlier success. In 2017, researchers culturally adapted the original Global Resilience Oral Workshops for Zambian primary school students aged 10 to 13, and a cluster-randomized trial of 543 children in Lusaka showed increased hope and resilience alongside decreased alcohol use. Parents, school staff, and community leaders then pushed for an expanded program targeting older adolescents, whose risk of substance use initiation is even greater. The result is a 12-month curriculum delivered in 36 weekly 90-minute after-school sessions, combining a character strengths and resilience component called GROW Strong with a substance use prevention module called GROW Free.

Technically, the intervention draws on the Values in Action framework of 24 character strengths identified by Peterson and Seligman, teaching each through Bible stories chosen from scriptures respected by both Christians and Muslims, including the five books of Moses, Psalms, and the gospels. Sessions weave in evidence-based positive psychology exercises: song and dance, positive self-affirmation, drama, active constructive responding, brainstorming, goal setting, meditation, role modeling, and gratitude practices. The GROW Free component then concentrates on five strengths previously linked to lower alcohol use—forgiveness, hope, self-regulation, spirituality, and prudence—while teaching media literacy, alcohol refusal skills, strategies for avoiding risk-promoting social networks, and coping with negative emotions without substances. Homework booklets reinforce each week’s goals through memorization, meditation practice, gratitude walks, and peer sharing.

Crucially, the program was not delivered by credentialed clinicians but by trained community members. Fifty-four lay candidates were recruited through Zambian pastors, teachers, and addiction specialists, screened for compassionate character and interpersonal skill, and given four days of interactive training. Senior trainers selected four coaches and fifteen group leaders, each group led by one man and one woman. Fidelity was monitored through detailed checklists covering all fifteen activities in every session, with weekly submissions and regular field visits. A three-day Child Protection Protocol workshop equipped the team to identify psychosocial distress and refer at-risk students to a clinical social worker. When five staff members withdrew early due to competing school job demands, a pre-trained replacement pool filled the gaps without interrupting delivery.

The trial enrolled 460 eighth-grade students aged 13 to 17 from eight schools, cluster-randomized in a 1:1 ratio to the intervention or a waitlist control. Researchers measured character strengths, resilience, substance use, sexual risk behaviors, and quality of life using computerized audio-assisted self-report questionnaires at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months, with sensitive sections administered through headphones to protect privacy. School records provided attendance percentages and final exam scores in five core subjects across successive spring terms. Analyses used generalized estimating equations and mixed effects modeling adjusted for the cluster design and baseline differences in age, sex, and meal frequency.

Feasibility results were striking. Ninety-eight percent of intervention students attended at least one session, and 70 percent completed the program by attending 30 or more of the 36 classes. The median attendance was 34 sessions, with no decline between the first and second halves of the year. Rural participants attended even more faithfully, with a median of 35 sessions and a 75.4 percent completion rate compared to 61.5 percent in urban schools. Follow-up survey completion rates exceeded 80 percent in both arms at both timepoints, and qualitative feedback from parents, students, and leaders confirmed strong acceptability.

The efficacy signals were equally compelling. Intervention students showed significantly greater increases than controls in hope, self-regulation, psychological resilience, and perceived self-efficacy to refuse alcohol when others are drinking. School attendance rose from 94.8 to 97.0 percent in the intervention group while falling from 94.3 to 90.8 percent among controls, a highly significant group-by-time interaction. Exam scores climbed from 49.0 to 52.4 percent in the intervention arm versus a smaller gain from 40.4 to 41.8 percent among controls, with the effect concentrated in rural schools. Urban participants, meanwhile, showed stronger gains in hope, resilience, self-regulation, and quality of life measures, suggesting the program’s benefits may manifest differently across settings.

Substance use outcomes were promising but statistically inconclusive. Past-6-month alcohol use fell from 9.9 to 3.7 percent in the intervention group between 6 and 12 months, while remaining flat around 5.6 percent in controls. Adjusted relative risk ratios favored the intervention for alcohol use (0.57), other substance use (0.45), and any sexual partners (0.43), but all confidence intervals were wide and included 1.0, likely because baseline use was far lower than the 42.6 percent reported in earlier Zambian surveys. Notably, the rural subgroup showed a significant effect on sexual partners at 12 months, with 5.9 percent of intervention students versus 23.5 percent of controls reporting any partner—a finding with potential implications for HIV prevention in a country where prevalence remains 8.0 percent among men and 13.9 percent among women.

The study’s limitations temper enthusiasm. Self-reported substance use was not confirmed with biomarkers, social desirability bias may have suppressed reporting, and the power analysis did not account for cluster sampling. Participants knew the program’s goals, introducing possible performance bias, and the sample’s limited religious diversity restricts generalizability. Those lost to follow-up were more likely male, older, and to have reported lifetime alcohol use at baseline. Still, the authors argue that GROW-HFLS demonstrates a feasible, culturally adaptable, and scalable model that aligns with the African Union’s call for community-involved prevention. By training lay community members rather than relying on scarce professionals, the program sidesteps a chronic barrier in low- and middle-income countries, and its tangible academic benefits—attendance and exam gains linked to lifelong health and earning potential—may accelerate adoption by education ministries. Larger trials with longer follow-up, biomarker verification, and more religiously diverse samples are the logical next steps, but for now, a curriculum built on hope, storytelling, and community ownership has shown it can move the needle on some of the most stubborn determinants of adolescent wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa.

Subject of Research: A pilot cluster-randomized trial of a school-based character strengths and substance use prevention intervention for Zambian adolescents

Article Title: Feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects of the GROW Hopes for Life-Schools intervention on character strengths, resilience, substance use, risky sexual behavior, and school attendance and performance among Zambian adolescents: results of a pilot cluster-randomized controlled trial

Article References: Seale, J. P., Harris, S. K., Sampa, M., Seale, D., Mweemba, O., Chimponda, P., Mulavu, M., Mitala, P., Tirrell, J. M., Kasanga, L., Odhiambo, L., & Mutale, W. (2026). Feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects of the GROW Hopes for Life-Schools intervention on character strengths, resilience, substance use, risky sexual behavior, and school attendance and performance among Zambian adolescents: results of a pilot cluster-randomized controlled trial. Frontiers in Adolescent Medicine, 4, Article 1739068. https://doi.org/10.3389/fradm.2026.1739068

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fradm.2026.1739068

Keywords: adolescent health, Zambia, character strengths, positive psychology, substance use prevention, resilience, school attendance, cluster-randomized trial, community health workers, alcohol prevention, risky sexual behavior, positive youth development

The study, conducted by Bomi Jin and Lonn Lanza-Kaduce of the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida, is published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice. Rather than treating schools simply as protective institutions that supervise young people, the authors reframe them as structured social environments that organize adolescents’ face-to-face interactions — including interactions with marijuana-using peers. When schools closed, that organizing structure dissolved; when they reopened, it snapped back, with measurable consequences for the transmission of substance use behavior through peer networks.

The theoretical foundation draws on Akers’ social structure and social learning framework, an extension of Edwin Sutherland’s classic differential association theory. In its simplest form, differential association holds that criminal and deviant behavior is learned through interaction with intimate personal groups, where individuals acquire not only the techniques of deviance but also the attitudes, definitions, and reinforcement patterns that sustain it. Social learning theory, developed by Ronald Akers and colleagues, added mechanisms of differential reinforcement, imitation, and definitions favorable or unfavorable to law-violating behavior. Meta-analytic reviews have consistently ranked peer associations among the strongest predictors of adolescent delinquency and substance use. What the structural branch of the theory adds is the insight that macro-level and organizational contexts — neighborhoods, communities, and schools — pattern the frequency, duration, priority, and intensity of those associations.

Jin and Lanza-Kaduce seized on a rare analytical opportunity embedded in the pandemic. Because Florida school districts resumed in-person instruction at different points during the 2020–2021 academic year, students across the state faced sharply different levels of in-person peer contact at the same moment in time. The researchers used this variation in school return timing as a proxy for the degree of face-to-face interaction adolescents had with their peers. Students in early-returning districts were reimmersed in hallways, classrooms, lunchrooms, and after-school spaces where friendships are enacted bodily — through conversation, shared routines, and what interactionist scholars call interaction rituals — while late returnees remained more dependent on digital communication, which prior research suggests carries weaker or at least different socialization signals than physical co-presence.

The empirical analysis drew on statewide survey data from Florida middle and high school students in grades 6 through 12, with an analytical sample of 7,656 adolescents. The data came from the Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey, an instrument designed to measure risk and protective factors for adolescent substance use and problem behaviors. The outcome of interest was adolescents’ own marijuana use, and the central explanatory variable was friends’ marijuana use, alongside the school return timing that distinguished early returnees from later ones. The models also controlled for established individual and family-level predictors, including low self-control, measured through items adapted from Grasmick and colleagues’ widely used scale, and parental monitoring, with full item wording provided in the study’s online supplement.

Methodologically, the study confronted several challenges familiar to survey researchers. Missing data were substantial and, importantly, not missing completely at random: additional analyses following the approach of Meldrum and colleagues revealed significant mean differences on study variables between cases with and without missing responses, undermining the assumption of randomness. The authors therefore employed multiple imputation using chained equations, a modern technique that preserves uncertainty while filling in missing values based on observed relationships. Because marijuana use in the sample was a relatively low-prevalence behavior, which can bias maximum-likelihood estimates in logistic regression, the researchers also ran penalized Firth logistic regressions, a technique designed to stabilize estimates for rare events; the substantive conclusions were unchanged. To interpret the interaction between school return timing and friends’ use in a nonlinear probability model, the study drew on contemporary best practices for presenting and testing interaction effects in generalized linear models.

The results split cleanly into two parts. Evidence for mediation — the idea that returning to school earlier indirectly increases marijuana use by increasing friends’ marijuana use — was, in the authors’ words, limited. The structural timing of school reopening did not simply manufacture new marijuana-using friendships that then produced use. Instead, the striking finding was moderation: the association between friends’ marijuana use and adolescents’ own use was substantially stronger among early returnees than among later returnees. In other words, having marijuana-using friends predicted a student’s own marijuana use much more powerfully when those friendships were being enacted in person at school. The effect was particularly pronounced among adolescents with multiple marijuana-using friends, suggesting a dose-response pattern in which exposure to several using peers, combined with daily physical co-presence, created the strongest gravitational pull toward use.

These findings carry weight for how scientists understand the mechanics of peer influence. Social learning researchers have long distinguished between what peers think and what peers do, and laboratory and field work on ‘deviancy training’ has shown that adolescent friendships can become engines of reinforcement for rule-breaking talk and behavior. The Florida results imply that this training accelerates in the environments where it can be rehearsed and rewarded most consistently — the structured but only partially supervised social spaces of the school day and its surrounding routines. They also align with research on unstructured socializing, which finds that unsupervised time with peers is a robust situational trigger for delinquency, and with studies showing that school-adjacent settings shape patterns of adolescent alcohol and marijuana use. The virtual substitutes adolescents relied on during remote schooling — messaging, social media, gaming — appear to have sustained friendships but not to have replicated the intensity of in-person reinforcement, consistent with emerging evidence that online and offline peer influences operate differently.

The study is not without limitations, and the authors are candid about them. The data are cross-sectional, which constrains causal inference; perceived friends’ use may partly reflect projection, the well-documented tendency of adolescents to assume their friends behave as they do. The marijuana measure did not separately capture edible forms of the drug. And because the sample is statewide rather than nationally representative, generalization requires caution. Nevertheless, the pandemic-generated variation in school return timing offers a form of leverage that ordinary survey designs rarely achieve, and the consistency of the moderation result across estimation strategies strengthens confidence in the core conclusion.

The practical implications reach beyond criminology into public health and school policy. Prevention programs have traditionally targeted individual adolescents — educating them about drug risks, building refusal skills, strengthening self-control. The Florida study suggests that such individual-level interventions, while valuable, miss a structural layer: the social settings through which marijuana-using friends exert their influence. Schools, in this framing, are not merely backdrops but active organizers of peer exposure. Prevention efforts, the authors argue, may benefit from extending into the social environments where in-person interactions with marijuana-using peers occur — the rhythms of the school day, the transitions between classes, the informal gatherings before and after instruction — with particular attention to students who report multiple friends who use marijuana. As districts worldwide continue to weigh the costs and benefits of remote, hybrid, and in-person instruction, the study adds an unexpected variable to the calculus: the timing of a school’s reopening may shape not only learning loss and mental health, but the very social channels through which adolescent substance use spreads.

Subject of Research: How variation in school return timing during the COVID-19 pandemic moderated the association between deviant peer association and adolescent marijuana use.

Article Title: Structural Context, Deviant Peer Association, and Adolescent Marijuana Use: Evidence from Variation in School Return Timing during the Pandemic

Article References: Jin, B., & Lanza-Kaduce, L. (2026). Structural Context, Deviant Peer Association, and Adolescent Marijuana Use: Evidence from Variation in School Return Timing during the Pandemic. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09947-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09947-7

Keywords: adolescent marijuana use, peer influence, differential association, social learning theory, school return timing, COVID-19, Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey, criminology, substance use prevention, deviant peers, Structural, Context