This article reports on a project to sensitize graduate social work students taking courses in substance abuse to the needs of older adults. Graduate social work students at a major urban school of social work in the Northeast were recruited and trained to interview older adults with a history of substance abuse problems regarding their life…

Aims: This study investigated the commissioning and delivery of advocacy for problem drug users. We aimed to quantify provision, describe the commissioning of advocacy services in Drug Action Teams (DATs) and to identify factors influencing advocacy provision. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of a randomly selected sample of 50 English DATs. The…

Research has found strong linkages between adolescent substance use and attitudes toward school. Few studies of this relationship, however, consider the different dimensions of students' school attitudes, separating perceptions of the importance of school from the quality of students' affective experiences therein. Using a sample of 301 urban…

Substance use and abuse among pharmacy students is a concern of pharmacy schools, boards of pharmacy, and training sites alike. Pharmacy students must complete approximately 30% of their academic coursework in experiential settings such as community pharmacies, hospitals, and other health systems as part of any accredited pharmacy school's…

Objective: To test the effectiveness of Houvast: a strengths-based intervention for homeless young adults. Method: A cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted with 10 Dutch shelter facilities randomly allocated to an intervention and a control group. Homeless young adults were interviewed when entering the facility and when care ended.…

Enhancing the delivery quality of school-based, evidence-based prevention programs is one key to ensuring uniform program effects on student outcomes. Program evaluations often focus on content dosage when implementing prevention curricula, however, less is known about implementation quality of prevention content, especially among teachers who may…

Substance use and sexual risk behaviors are common among adolescents, but research has focused attention on alcohol use. Much less is known about the relationship of marijuana use and sexual risk behavior among high-risk, especially truant, youths. We report interim findings from a NIDA-funded experimental, brief intervention (BI) study involving…

The EU-Dap study aimed to develop and evaluate a school-based curriculum for the prevention of substance use among young people. The school curriculum, "Unplugged," is based on social influence approach and addresses social and personal skills, knowledge, and normative beliefs. It consists of 12 one-hour interactive sessions delivered by…

Life balance is an important construct within the counseling profession. A validation study utilizing exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression was conducted on the Juhnke-Balkin Life Balance Inventory. Results from the study serve as evidence of validity for an assessment instrument designed to measure life balance.

This study examined the link between developmental risk and protective factors and risky sexual activity among 222 urban African American youth attending an alternative education program (AEP) because of problematic behavior. Self-report information provided by these AEP participants revealed that, for the risk and protective factors examined, the…

Given the importance of communication skills and positive relationships to addiction recovery, a series of communication skills workshops for residents of a long-term drug and alcohol residential treatment centre was designed and delivered by students in an undergraduate communication class within the university's Community Service Learning…

The US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), requested testing of questions about school bullying that are part of the School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The main purpose of this cognitive research was to test proposed changes…

Purpose: Schools are an important setting for a wide variety of activities to promote health. The purpose of this paper is to map the different types of health promotion programmes and activities in schools, to estimate the amount of published evaluations of health promotion within UK schools, and to identify any provisional "candidate…

Drug abuse, or substance abuse, is a substantial public health problem in the United States, particularly among high school students. The purpose of this article was to review school-based programs implemented in high schools for substance abuse prevention and to suggest recommendations for future interventions. Included were English language…

Evidence suggests that the consequences of chronic exposure to stressors extend beyond psychological effects, and that adolescents living in socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhoods may experience an accumulation of exposure to stressors that wears down the physical systems in the body, resulting in hyper-activation of the stress response.…