This study examined longitudinal relationships between depressive symptoms and use of alcohol, cigarettes, and illicit substances among adolescents, addressing methodological limitations and potential confounding in the extant literature. The sample comprised adolescents who were surveyed in Grades 6 (n = 916), 9 (n = 804), and 11 (n = 791).…

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…

This report uses data from the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS) for 2008 to provide information on the characteristics of youths aged 12 to 14 admitted to substance abuse treatment. In 2008, approximately 23,770 substance abuse treatment admissions were adolescents aged 12 to 14. The two most frequently reported primary substances of abuse among…

Studies of the therapeutic alliance typically use a one-with-many (OWM) design in which each therapist (the one) treats multiple clients (the many). This study used Kenny, Kashy, and Cook's (2006) OWM method to examine the composition of the therapeutic alliance and to analyze the association between alliance and outcome in a sample of 398…

Using latent class/transition analyses, this study: (a) identified subgroups of youth based on their targeted communication about substance use with parents and friends, (b) examined subgroup differences in substance use, and (c) considered changes in subgroup membership over four years. Among 5,874 youth, five subgroups emerged, with parents-only…

Local governments play an important role in improving substance abuse and mental health services. The structure of the local learning collaborative requires careful attention to old relationships and challenges local governmental leaders to help move participants from a competitive to collaborative environment. This study describes one county's…

Therapeutic communities have become increasingly popular among correctional agencies with drug-involved offenders. This quasi-experimental study followed a group of inmates who participated in a prison-based therapeutic community in a California state prison, with a comparison group of matched offenders, for more than 5 years after their initial…

In the context of talk about changing their lives, incarcerated young men and their supervisors talk about faith as a force for positive change. Given the historical and contemporary significance of religion as a locus of organizing and collective struggle, I argue that faith represents a potential asset in efforts to assist incarcerated young…

Meditation has been studied as a way of reducing stress in counseling clients since the 1960s. Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and new wave behavior therapies incorporate meditation techniques in their programs. This article identifies meditation's curative factors and limitations when using meditation in addiction settings.