Poor childhood health contributes to lower socioeconomic status in adulthood. Subsequently, low socioeconomic status among parents contributes to poor childhood health outcomes in the next generation. This cycle can be particularly pernicious for vulnerable and low-income minority populations, including many children of immigrants. And because of…

Although afterschool programs for children have been operating for decades in some communities, the afterschool movement--the great national awakening to the opportunity afterschool offers--is just a few years old. As public demand for afterschool has grown, so has the demand for accountability. That is particularly true in afterschool programs…

Substance use among youth remains a major public health and safety concern. One fundamental way to address youth substance use prevention is to keep young people on a positive trajectory by engaging them in positive activities from early years of their childhood. In this article, the author offers a best practice analysis of systematic review…

The present study examined racial differences in the relationship between exposure to community violence and public and private religiosity in predicting externalizing problems among at-risk emerging adults. Participants were 178 African American and 163 European American emerging adults at risk for exposure to community violence. Exposure to…

Group homes sometimes face significant neighborhood opposition, and municipalities frequently use maximum occupancy laws to close down these homes. This study examined how the number of residents in Oxford House recovery homes impacted residents' outcomes. Larger homes (i.e., eight or more residents) may reduce the cost per person and offer more…

This article describes the degree to which high fidelity implementation of the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention operating system was reached during the first 18 months of intervention in 12 communities in the Community Youth Development Study, a 5-year group randomized controlled trial designed to test the efficacy of the CTC system. CTC…

A unique application of the Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM) is introduced as the preferred method for evaluating the psychometric properties of a measure of therapist adherence to Contingency Management (CM) treatment of adolescent substance use. The utility of psychometric methods based in Classical Test Theory was limited by complexities of the…

This study examined factors influencing employment outcomes of people with substance-related disorders (SRDs) in state vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies. The sample included 34,774 VR clients with SRDs from fiscal year 2001. Mean age of participants was 38.35 years. Predictor variables included personal and service variables and the…

Drawing on transactional theories of child development, we assessed bidirectional links between trajectories of adolescent substance use and parenting processes from early through mid adolescence. Hierarchical generalized models estimated trajectories for 3,317 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, exploring both…

In the present study, the authors clustered a pretreatment sample of 190 perpetrators of intimate partner violence (IPV) mandated to attend group counseling based on State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory scores and examined whether these profiles were associated with differential outcomes 1 year postadjudication. Cluster analysis revealed 3…

This cross-sectional study utilized a stress-process model to examine the impact of caregivers' (N = 82) perceptions of their relationship quality with a female family member (i.e., care-recipient) with substance-use or co-occurring substance and mental disorders on caregivers' perceived burden. Regression findings indicate that relationship…

This paper describes an experiment designed to test an imagery-based craving management technique with a sample of adolescents diagnosed with substance-use disorders. Seventy adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 (41 males) were recruited through two substance-abuse treatment programs. The experimental procedure involved stimulating craving…

This first national estimate suggests that the economic cost of methamphetamine (meth) use in the United States reached $23.4 billion in 2005. Given the uncertainty in estimating the costs of meth use, this book provides a lower-bound estimate of $16.2 billion and an upper-bound estimate of $48.3 billion. The analysis considers a wide range of…

Schools are overloaded with health promotion programs that, altogether, focus on a broad array of behavioral domains, including substance abuse, sexuality and nutrition. Although the specific content of programs varies according to the domain focus, programs usually address similar concepts: knowledge, attitudinal beliefs, social influences and…

Young children growing up in poverty face chronic risk factors, including abuse and neglect, severe maternal depression, parental substance abuse, harsh parenting, and family and community violence as well as greater exposure to physical risks, including substandard housing, lack of access to resources, and environmental toxins. The authors offer…