College-aged individuals have a significant impact on national health. People in this age group have the highest rates of engagement in many risky health behaviors, such as binge drinking, substance use, and engaging in unprotected sexual activity. The American College Health Association (ACHA) has been actively involved in the study of college…

This study aimed to examine (a) the impact of the change in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" ("DSM") from a categorical to dimensional classification of substance use diagnoses, (b) the elimination of the legal criterion, and (c) the inclusion of a craving criterion in the "DSM"-5.…

Youth involved in illegal street activities such as drug trafficking and violence are at high risk for school failure and other negative outcomes. Research often seeks to identify what is "wrong" with them, what makes them different from "normal" youth, but relatively few studies focus on variations in how youth engage in and…

Introduction: Based on internal and external assets, the positive youth development approach aims to increase the capacity among adolescents to overcome challenges as they transition to adulthood. Developmental assets have been found to be positively associated with academic achievement, a variety of health promoting behaviors, and improved…

Although truancy has been studied extensively, less attention has been given to the actual voices of the truants themselves. The current study helps fill that gap by examining recollections from a sample of 34 emerging adults (ages 18-25) who experienced various levels of high school truancy across different geographical settings. A qualitative…

Chapter 1: In response to tightened budgets and concerns about higher education costs, governments have introduced rules to limit the use of publicly funded aid, particularly at for-profit colleges. In this paper, we use an event study framework to estimate how tuition, enrollments, and loan use changed at for-profit colleges that became…

The purpose of this review is to introduce the reader to the concepts of delay and probability discounting as well as the major empirical findings to emerge from research with humans on these concepts. First, we review a seminal discounting study by Rachlin, Raineri, and Cross (1991) as well as an influential extension of this study by Madden,…

Among any cohort of American youths, some will use drugs and alcohol whereas others will not. Further, some youngsters will not only use these illegal substances but also abuse them, at times wreaking havoc with their lives and ruining their futures. The purpose of this study is to attempt to unravel this heterogeneity of substance abuse; that is,…

Previous research finds adolescent work hours to be associated with increased alcohol use. Most studies, however, fail to account for possible selection effects that lead youth to both work and substance use. Using data from the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 12,620), a fixed effects regression method…

The purpose of this study is to identify factors associated with adolescent alcohol or drug (AOD) abuse/dependence, mental health and co-occurring problems, as well as factors associated with access to treatment. This is a secondary analysis of data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) 2000. The 12-month prevalence rate of…

Truancy is associated with an array of negative social consequences, including poor school performance, delinquency, and dropout. Numerous individual, family, school, and community risk factors associated with truancy are also associated with adolescent substance abuse. However, little is known about substance use patterns among court-adjudicated…

Data from 57 clinical supervisors in licensed substance abuse treatment programs indicate that 28% had completed formal graduate course work in clinical supervision and 33% were professionally licensed or certified. Findings raise concerns about the scope and quality of clinical supervision available to substance abuse counselors. (Contains 3…

Children's misuse of harmful legal products (HLPs), including inhaling or ingesting everyday household products, prescription drugs, and over-the-counter drugs, constitutes a serious health problem for American society. This article presents a community prevention model (CPM) focusing on this problem among pre and early adolescents. The model,…

This article provides an overview of some common challenges and opportunities related to cultural adaptation of behavioral interventions. Cultural adaptation is presented as a necessary action to ponder when considering the adoption of an evidence-based intervention with ethnic and other minority groups. It proposes a roadmap to choose existing…

Employing school catchment areas (SCAs) to represent communities in Alabama, this study hypothesized that student substance use would be most prevalent where structural disadvantages were most numerous and school- and community-bestowed encouragement of or rewards for students' prosocial behaviors were scant. We employed data from the 2000 census…