Quasi-Experimental Study of Functional Family Therapy Effectiveness for Juvenile Justice Aftercare in a Racially and Ethnically Diverse Community Sample.

Functional Family Therapy (FFT) is an intensive community-based treatment program designed to reduce youth behavior problems such as violence, drug use, and other delinquency. Although there is evidence of FFT efficacy and effectiveness with predominantly White samples, there is very little evidence with racial/ethnic minority samples. In light of the over-representation of African American and Latino youth in the juvenile justice system, this study examined the effectiveness of FFT and an adaptation of FFT to probation supervision, called Functional Family Probation (FFP), among a predominantly Latino and African American sample of youth returning home from court-ordered out-of-home placements (OHP).

Testing effects of community collaboration on rates of low infant birthweight at the county level.

Interorganizational collaboration has become a popular strategy for addressing population health and well-being. However, evidence for its effectiveness in achieving outcomes at the population level is limited, at least in part due to a variety of methodological challenges such as reduced sample size at the population level, the availability of suitable comparison groups of communities, and study durations that are too short to detect slowly emerging outcomes. The present study addresses these challenges by retrospectively examining the effectiveness of a mature network of community collaboratives, using latent growth modeling of longitudinal change in an archival community-level outcome, low infant birthweight, and propensity score matching of comparison communities.

Multilevel measurement of dimensions of collaborative functioning in a network of collaboratives that promote child and family well-being.

Evaluating collaboration between community partners presents a series of methodological challenges (Roussos and Fawcett in Annu Rev Public Health 21:369-402, 2000; Yin and Kaftarian 1997), one of which is selection of the appropriate level of analysis. When data are collected from multiple members of multiple settings, multilevel analysis techniques should be used. Multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) is an analytic approach that incorporates the advantages of latent variable measurement modeling and multilevel modeling for nested data.

Parent involvement in the academic adjustment of Latino middle and high school youth: teacher expectations and school belonging as mediators.

A path model based in a theory of social capital was tested with Latino middle school (n=195, 58% female, average 13.8 years of age) and high school students (n=129, 64% female, average 16.8 years of age).

Systems change as an outcome and a process in the work of community collaboratives for health.

The widespread development of comprehensive community initiatives that aim to improve community health is driven by the need to change the systems charged with delivering the services and creating the policies related to a variety of health outcomes. Georgia's Family Connection initiative is the nation's largest statewide network of community collaboratives for health, with collaboratives operating in 159 counties. Data on community context, collaborative processes, engagement in systems change, and changes in programs and activities implemented, gathered consistently at the collaborative level over 3 years, will be used to answer the following questions.