Promoting the implementation of an evidence-based intervention for adolescent marijuana abuse in community settings: testing the use of intensive quality assurance.

The development and evaluation of effective strategies for transporting evidence-based practices to community-based clinicians has become a research and policy priority. Using multisystemic therapy programs as a platform, an experimental design examined the capacity of an Intensive Quality Assurance (IQA) system to promote therapist implementation of contingency management (CM) for adolescent marijuana abuse. Participants included 30 therapists assigned to Workshop Only (WSO) versus IQA training conditions, and 70 marijuana-abusing youths and their caregivers who were treated by these clinicians. Analyses showed that IQA was more effective than WSO at increasing practitioner implementation of CM cognitive-behavioral techniques in the short-term based on youth and caregiver reports, and these increases were sustained based on youth reports. On the other hand, IQA did not increase therapist use of CM monitoring techniques relative to WSO, likely because of an unanticipated ceiling effect. Both sets of findings contribute to the emerging literature on the transport of evidence-based practice to real-world clinical settings.