In response to aggressive marketing of tobacco to college students, Florida's legislature allocated multi-settlement agreement dollars to fund tobacco prevention programming at state institutions of higher learning. The Student Tobacco Reform Initiative: Knowledge for Eternity (STRIKE) was one such program. Its purpose was to increase awareness…

Little is known of smoking trajectories or of the correlates of smoking trajectories among African American youth. Ninth-grade African American adolescents (n = 566) were interviewed in Year 1 and then were subsequently interviewed annually for 3 additional years. Five trajectories of cigarette smokers were identified: abstainers,…

The problems associated with the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (ATOD) extract a significant health, social, and economic toll on American society. While the field of substance abuse prevention has made great strides during the past decade, two major challenges remain. First, the field has been disorganized and fragmented with respect to…

Prior work indicates that substance use is related to adolescent marriage. We describe two different processes that may account for this relationship and hypothesize patterns of association that would be consistent or inconsistent with each. Using data from a study that followed west coast youth from 7th grade to young adulthood N3,324, we…

Objective: To examine predicted relationships among transtheoretical model of change measures in a sample of 211 low-income, African American hospitalized smokers. Methods: We used discriminant analysis to examine differences in decisional balance and self-efficacy across stages of change for quitting. Results: Differences in decisional balance…

Because of high levels of risk behavior, adjudicated adolescents are at high risk for negative health outcomes such as nicotine and drug addiction and sexually transmitted diseases. The goal of this article is to examine relationships between future orientation and impulsive-sensation-seeking personality constructs to risk behaviors among 300…

It is increasingly argued that the effectiveness of health promotion interventions should be measured to inform policy and practice. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) continues to be regarded as the "gold standard" of health services research but health promotion practitioners have raised concerns about the RCT's appropriateness for evaluating…

The high rates of substance use among American adolescents are challenging; however, runaway youth are at particularly high-risk for substance use. Runaway youth utilizing two service sectors, emergency crisis shelters and juvenile detention centers, were recruited to evaluate differences in risk factors associated with substance use. Findings…

A study comparing four models of substance misuse were performed. Alcohol drinking, tobacco use, sniffing of a dissolvent and cannabis use were proposed to depend on one, two, three, or four latent factors. In confirmatory factor analyses the fit of the models were tested against empirical data from a group of adolescent school pupils. The result…

Three major components have been repeatedly implicated for the origin(s) of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS): system, minor sickness and surroundings. All these factors also frame infant temperament, and therefore it seems logical to suppose that the babies who either succumb to or are at risk of SIDS may present with certain behavioral…

Purpose: To assess what volunteers--and ministers of faith-based organizations (FBO) think about their own expertise in delivering a tobacco prevention initiative, the impact of such an initiative on youth, their potential for burnout in doing so, and their interest in other health initiatives. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 149…

Scotland has the worst health in the United Kingdom; worse than comparable areas like the industrial North East of England. Scotland's health also lags behind comparable European countries. In fact, the nearest neighbours in the health "league table" of European nations are Slovenia and Portugal. One has only a limited understanding of…

Objectives: To describe the Better Practices model and its application to review youth tobacco cessation practices. Methods: Growing emphasis on evidence-based practice in health has drawn attention to methods for the identification of "best practices." Canadian organizations and government collaborated to develop a framework for…

Response to smoking cessation treatment programs sharply decreases when applied to smokers with psychiatric comorbidities. Consequently, the development of smoking cessation treatments that address the needs of psychiatric patients is greatly needed. The primary purpose of this article is to detail the process of development of an empirically…

Two public health objectives, one methodological and the other substantive, are realized in the present study. First, average survey ratings are replaced by negated mean cumulative logits (MCLs), which have the advantage of interitem commensuration. Second, these negated MCLs improve the analysis of two Florida tobacco control surveys of community…