Alcohol and Drug Information Centre (ADIC - Ukraine)

In short the method of "life situations" works the following way. An educator or a peer leader comes to a class or youth group and asks questions starting from general ones and then like by "funnel" moves to more specific ones. When the audience has a needed mood the educator proposes some "life situation" which includes a conflict concerning legal or illegal drugs and usually has an open end. Participants are proposed to play the situation their own way. After the play the educator puts some questions to the characters, then to the actors and then to the audience. The questions look natural and simple, but they are carefully developed and tested by the project team. At the end participants pronounce prevention messages themselves, and these are their own ideas. 
The preconditions of the life stories approach are:
1. Active participation of the teenager in discussion is more effective, than his passive listening to a lecture. Role playing is one of the most productive ways to develop life skills and behavioral strategies. 
2. The game is familiar to everybody since early childhood, comparing to such activity, as the analysis and understanding of the complex text. The game entertains, easily attracts and keeps attention. The approach therefore is applicable and is recommended for rather young participants, does not impose special requirements to the audience.
3. Participating in a situation, the teenager brings in his own senses, attitudes, values, which he subsequently discusses. The offered typical situations are stimulus for projections, enable to look at stereotyped behavior from aside, as at the play. The developed situations are very close to realities of teenagers life, they are not imposed by the adults, the discussions concern the most essential problems of the teenagers.
4. Individuals act as social and cultural (and sub-cultural) norms dictate, because it seems "self-evident". To realize stereotyped behavioral patterns and ways to solve problems is the possibility to be released from their compulsion. The formation of drug free (tobacco free and especially alcohol free) lifestyle is very closely connected to change of cultural norms and systems of symbols.
5. The problem of smoking, drinking and drug taking is frequently not perceived as a problem itself. It is rather a way to solve other important and vital issues - conflicts in family, relations with a peer group. Paying attention to these emotionally significant relations, we get an opportunity to realize the place of legal and illegal drugs in this issues, to show their symbolical, rather than chemical value.
There was a very indicative example during one of the sessions used for the method testing. Participants were proposed to discuss the life situation, in which a boy and a girl do not smoke and oppose to smoking of the parents. After the story presentation to a group of the girls - students of a sewing school, most of the girls stated that the story is not real: "Now all guys smoke. There are none, who are against smoking". However after the story was role-played, the girls told about three examples, in which their own boy-friends do not smoke and actively discourage girls' smoking. When asked if this is typical, the girls have noted with surprise: "This is true, more than half of ours boy-friends do not smoke!"
This story shows, how the created method of life situations helps the target group to see the distinction between a declared idea and a reality.
For volunteers, participating in prevention, such discussions give opportunities to consider their personal motives to participate in anti-drug work and to develop strategy of behaviors.