The prevention of teen dating violence is a major public health priority. However, the dearth of longitudinal studies makes it difficult to develop programs that effectively target salient risk factors. Using a school-based sample of ethnically diverse adolescents, this longitudinal study examined whether substance use (alcohol, marijuana, and…

Does adolescent depressed mood portend increased or decreased drinking? Is frequent drinking positively or negatively associated with emotional well-being? Do the dynamic relations between depression and drinking differ by gender? Using block-recursive structural equation models, we explore the reciprocal short-term effects (within time, "t") and…

Analyzing problem-behavior trajectories can be difficult. The data are generally categorical and often quite skewed, violating distributional assumptions of standard normal-theory statistical models. In this article, the authors present several currently available modeling options, all of which make appropriate distributional assumptions for the…