This monograph documents the first phase of a project to design and evaluate a drink driving education intervention for high school students. It describes the development and implementation of the research-based Plan a Safe Strategy (PASS) intervention for 15-year-old high school students. The links between the educational program, background research and systematic review of relevant literature are made explicit and the resolution of a variety of issues associated with this task are discussed. The aim of the monograph is to document the steps taken to define the drink driving problem for a target group and to develop an educational solution. This information should be useful for policy formation and for educational workers in this field. Developing an intervention to change a large group of people is a major undertaking. It involves a number of costs including the expenses of the development itself and ultimately the costs in time and alternative opportunities for the administrators of the program and its recipients. In order to justify incurring such costs three issues have to be considered: firstly, the problem addressed has to be of sufficient magnitude that it is worth committing time and finance to it; secondly, there has to be sound evidence that the proposed intervention is likely to have a desirable and measurable impact on behaviour; and finally, it is also important to consider whether the program and any changes in behaviour it produces are likely to have negative or undesirable effects. In 1984 when the project commenced there were few drink driving education programs for high school students which had been systematically evaluated for their impact on later driving. At that time it was not possible to ascertain whether the programs had changed behaviour or whether such changes were in the desired direction. The drink driving project's research therefore involved a social experiment which aimed to provide information on these issues for future workers in the field. This monograph examines the evidence to see whether drink driving is a sufficiently serious problem to justify developing an intervention; it explores the literature to determine whether there is likely to be any change in behaviour as a result of an educational intervention; and it describes the development of the intervention and presents the research model which will be used to assess the effectiveness of the program. (Author/publisher)
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