Background: The purpose of this paper is to use data from the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) conducted in Bogota, Colombia, in 2001 and 2007 to examine changes in tobacco use among youth 13-15 years of age. The current tobacco control effort in Bogota will be accessed relative to Colombia ratifying the World Health Organization Framework…

In India, 57% of men between 15 and 54 years and 10.8% of women between 15 and 49 years use tobacco. A wide variety of tobacco gets used and the poor and the underprivileged are the dominant victims of tobacco and its adverse consequences. Project MYTRI (Mobilizing Youth for Tobacco-Related Initiatives in India) was a tobacco prevention…

The present study monitored a student-centred educational anti-smoking intervention with fifth graders by focusing on their cognitive achievement and intrinsic motivation. In order to assess the potential influence of the setting on self-directed learning, the intervention was conducted in two different learning environments: a classroom-based…

Objective: Secondhand smoke exposure is associated with asthma onset and exacerbation. Latino children have higher rates of asthma morbidity than other groups. The current study compared the effectiveness of a newly developed smoking cessation treatment with existing clinical guidelines for smoking cessation. Method: Latino caregivers who smoked…

Being a teenager is not easy, but most of us live through it. Cyberbullying suicide victims will not have this luxury. Advancements in and access to social technologies (social networking sites, instant messaging systems, cell phone texting) are rewriting interaction patterns as they provide a majority of our nation's students with 24-hour-a-day,…

This paper examines how disadvantage affects educational outcomes, in this instance, Year 12 completion. While previous studies have found a strong link between parental education or occupational status and Year 12 completion, this research was able to capture a broader set of cultural, material and resource aspects of disadvantage. It did this by…

This article presents abstracts from the 2011 AMERSA National Meeting. It includes 2011 best abstracts on research, programmatic, and curricular presentations.

Overweight and obesity are major health problems associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk, which is not sufficiently studied in people with intellectual disability yet. The present study was part of the Healthy Ageing in Intellectual Disability (HA-ID) study. The aim of this study was to establish (1) the prevalence of overweight,…

Researchers are only beginning to investigate how to measure a community's readiness to engage in an intervention. In this study, we investigated the readiness of police departments to deal with tobacco policies about youth access to tobacco and youth possession of tobacco. Police officers in 24 towns completed structured interviews designed to…

Objective: There is a dearth of studies on the mechanisms of multiple risk behaviors, even though these behaviors are significant public health issues. The authors investigated whether health behavior interventions have transfer or compensatory effects on other health behaviors. Participants and Methods: The authors looked at transfer and…

A binary logistic regression analysis was performed to predict high school students' cigarette smoking behavior from selected predictors from 2009 CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey. The specific target student behavior of interest was frequent cigarette use. Five predictor variables included in the model were: a) race, b) frequency of…

Sustained mass media campaigns have been recommended to stem the tobacco epidemic in the United States. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to estimate the effect of awareness of a national smoking cessation media campaign (EX[R]) on quit attempts and cessation-related cognition. Participants were 4,067 smokers and recent quitters aged 18-49…

Parental knowledge is defined as parental awareness and information about a child's activities, whereabouts, and associations that is obtained through parental monitoring, parental solicitation, or self-disclosure. Increased parental knowledge is generally associated with lower adolescent substance use; however, the influence of various contextual…

Drug use in mainstream rave parties has been widely documented in a large number of studies. However, not much is known about drug use in underground raves. The purpose of this study is to find out the polysubstance use patterns at underground raves. Two hundred and fifty-two young people between the ages of 18 and 30 who went to underground raves…

Objective: There is increasing interest regarding the risk and overlap of executive function deficits (EFDs) in stable cigarette smoking and substance use disorders (SUD). Therefore, we examined whether earlier EFD was a risk factor for subsequent cigarette smoking and SUD and further explored the relationship between EFD and SUD. Method: We…