The Interaction Between General and Strategic Leadership and Climate on Their Multilevel Associations with Implementer Attitudes Toward Universal Prevention Programs for Youth Mental Health: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Emerging literature has highlighted the importance of discerning general and strategic organizational context (OC) factors (e.g., leadership and climate) and their interaction effect on individual implementation behaviors (e.g., attitudes toward evidence-based practices; EBPs) in youth mental healthcare. This study aimed to examine how leadership and climate (general and strategic) are associated with implementer attitudes toward EBPs across the individual and organizational levels and their interaction effect in schools. A series of multilevel models (MLMs) were fitted on a diverse sample of schools actively implementing universal prevention programs for youth mental health (441 implementers from 52 schools). The organization-level aggregates and individual educators' perceptions of general and strategic leadership and climate, and their interaction terms, were entered as level-2 and level-1 predictors of four attitudinal dimensions (Requirement, Openness, Appeal, and Divergence) based on their level of measurement. At the organizational level, higher levels of strategic leadership and climate, but not their general counterparts, were consistently associated with more favorable attitudes in all four dimensions. At the individual/within-school level, higher levels of perceived general and strategic leadership and climate were associated with more favorable attitudes of Requirement and Openness. At the organizational/between-school level, general climate moderated the positive effect of strategic climate on implementers' perception of appeal and divergence of EBPs. Our findings indicate that leaders should make data-based decisions to allocate resources on strategic and/or general leadership and climate to foster favorable staff attitudes toward EBPs based on the level of measurement, implementation-specificity, and attitudinal dimensions.

What Constitutes High-Quality Implementation of SEL Programs? A Latent Class Analysis of Second Step® Implementation.

With the increased number of schools adopting social-emotional learning (SEL) programming, there is increased emphasis on the role of implementation in obtaining desired outcomes. Despite this, the current knowledge of the active ingredients of SEL programming is lacking, and there is a need to move from a focus on "whether" implementation matters to "what" aspects of implementation matter. To address this gap, the current study utilizes a latent class approach with data from year 1 of a randomized controlled trial of Second Step® (61 schools, 321 teachers, over 7300 students). Latent classes of implementation were identified, then used to predict student outcomes. Teachers reported on multiple dimensions of implementation (adherence, dosage, competency), as well as student outcomes. Observational data were also used to assess classroom behavior (academic engagement and disruptive behavior). Results suggest that a three-class model fits the data best, labeled as high-quality, low-engagement, and low-adherence classes. Only the low-engagement class showed significant associations with poorer outcomes, when compared to the high-quality class (not the low-adherence class). Findings are discussed in terms of implications for program development and implementation science more broadly.