PROSPER Economic Analysis

By determining the costs, cost-effectiveness, and potential economic benefits of universal prevention, this project provided critical information related to identifying which prevention programs will deliver the greatest public health impact per dollar of cost, and which programs return the most in future savings for each dollar invested. Six separate sets of analyses focusing on two goals were performed by this project.

For the goal of Understanding team functioning, team sustainability and dissemination:

(1) A cost analysis of intervention efforts exclusive of costs associated with research and evaluation, in order to identify costs required to initiate, develop, and sustain the partnership, community team functioning, and the interventions.

(2) Estimating the cost-effectiveness of team functioning, to ascertain the costs required to achieve each unit of various effects that reflect proximal dissemination and sustainability goals of the partnership, including number of facilitators trained, intervention groups conducted, youth and families treated, and dollars raised by local teams during the sustainability phase.

(3) Identifying community-level predictors of partnership economic costs and cost-effectiveness outcomes across communities. 

For the goal of Evaluating intervention effects:

(4) Assessing cost-effectiveness of intervention impacted outcomes relating to the prevention of substance use and problem behaviors to determine the dollar cost required to produce a unit of prevention.

(5) Investigating the risk moderation effects, by evaluating economic outcomes for an identified higher risk subsample.

(6) Providing a cost-benefit assessment estimating projected return on investment of intervention-impacted outcomes, yielding the benefit-cost ratio of dollars spent per future dollars saved.