The Impact of the Communities that Care Approach in Reducing Violence and Crime Within an Urban, High-Burden Community.

Community violence and crime are significant public health problems with serious and lasting effects on young people, families, and communities. This violence and crime have significant ripple effects, affecting not just those who are directly physically injured, but also those who witness violent episodes, those who have friends or loved ones killed or injured, and those who must everyday navigate streets that they know have been frequent sites of serious violence and crime. The current study presents evidence of the impact that a data-driven, collective impact approach - the Communities that Care prevention system - can have on violence and crime outcomes within a large urban, high-burden community.

Family Support and Connection Groups: Long-Term Benefits for Inner-City Children?

Relatively few prevention trials have had long-term follow-up to determine if immediate impact translates to and explains long-term impact. The present report summarizes the long-term influence (measured when students are near the end of high school) of the SAFEChildren preventive intervention, which was applied during first grade. This program aims to facilitate and support developmental management, school-family connection, and social support among neigbhors through family groups and student tutoring and is focused on familes raising children in inner-city neighborhoods.

The Family Context and Adolescent Dating Violence: A Latent Class Analysis of Family Relationships and Parenting Behaviors.

Adolescent dating violence is a persistent public health concern, impacting many youths during their initial and formative relationships during middle school. Despite theoretical and empirical studies highlighting the essential role of family relationship dynamics and parenting practices in relation to youth violence, substantially less research has focused on associations between these factors and rates of adolescent dating violence. The current study examined aspects of the family context in relation to dating violence outcomes among a racially and ethnically diverse sample of middle school students from economically disadvantaged communities, a group of adolescents at a high risk for exposure to risk factors for dating violence.

Fathers' Criminal Behavior and Involvement With Children: The Moderating Role of Family Relationships.

Objective: Research indicates that fathers' criminal behavior can be problematic for children through multiple pathways, yet few studies have examined the effect of fathers' kinship networks in this process. This study examines the association between fathers' criminal behavior and involvement with their children and the extent to which a father's relationships with individuals in his extended family network moderate this association.

Method: Hierarchical linear modeling was used to predict fathers' involvement using data from a longitudinal intergenerational study of 335 children and 149 low-income, minority fathers.

Neighborhood Concentrated Disadvantage and Dating Violence among Urban Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Neighborhood Social Processes.

The link between relationship violence and aspects of neighborhood concentrated disadvantage (e.g., percent of unemployed adults, percent of families below poverty level), has been established.

Disagreement in Parental Reports of Father Involvement.

Despite agreement on the value of father involvement in children's lives, research has been limited due to the exclusion of fathers in studies, questionable validity of mothers' reports on father involvement, and simple measures of fathering behavior. Our study extends previous research by comparing reports of father involvement using robust, multidimensional father involvement measures. Data from 113 fathers and 126 mothers reporting on 221 children were used to assess father involvement.

The Longitudinal Relation Between Community Violence Exposure and Academic Engagement During Adolescence: Exploring Families' Protective Role.

Few published studies have examined the interaction between community violence exposure, academic engagement, and parental involvement, despite theory suggesting that these three domains of development are interrelated during adolescence. This study had two related objectives: (a) to assess the temporal ordering of the relation between community violence exposure and academic engagement over the course of mid-adolescence and (b) to examine whether the pattern of these relations varies by level of parental involvement. The study sample included 273 ethnic minority males (33.

Reciprocal Effects of Positive Future Expectations, Threats to Safety, and Risk Behavior Across Adolescence.

We examined the reciprocal relationships among positive future expectations, expected threats to future safety, depression, and individual substance use and delinquency using 4 waves of data (N = 248-338) from African American and Latino adolescent male participants in the Chicago Youth Development Study. Individual positive future expectations and expected threats to safety were assessed at each wave and modeled as latent constructs. Individual substance use and delinquency were assessed at each wave and represented as ordinal variables ranging from low to high.

Alternatives to Randomized Control Trial Designs for Community-Based Prevention Evaluation.

Multiple factors may complicate evaluation of preventive interventions, particularly in situations where the randomized controlled trial (RCT) is impractical, culturally unacceptable, or ethically questionable, as can occur with community-based efforts focused on inner-city neighborhoods or rural American Indian/Alaska Native communities. This paper is based in the premise that all research designs, including RCTs, are constrained by the extent to which they can refute the counterfactual and by which they can meet the challenge of proving the absence of effects due to the intervention-that is, showing what is prevented. Yet, these requirements also provide benchmarks for valuing alternatives to RCTs, those that have shown abilities to estimate preventive effects and refute the counterfactual with limited bias acting in congruence with community values about implementation.

Methodological and Design Considerations in Evaluating the Impact of Prevention Programs on Violence and Related Health Outcomes.

Drawing on research that has identified specific predictors and trajectories of risk for violence and related negative outcomes, a multitude of small- and large-scale preventive interventions for specific risk behaviors have been developed, implemented, and evaluated. One of the principal challenges of these approaches is that a number of separate problem-specific programs targeting different risk areas have emerged. However, as many negative health behaviors such as substance abuse and violence share a multitude of risk factors, many programs target identical risk factors.

Assessing future expectations of low-income minority young men: Survival-threats and positive expectations.

Future expectations, a subset of overall orientation, represent youths' most realistic appraisals of future outcomes, and has been demonstrated to be associated with a range of health risk behaviors and wellbeing. The current study extends previous measurement efforts to operationalize and measure future expectations by estimating a multidimensional model of future expectations encompassing both positive and survival-based expectations, and using longitudinal data to test the consistency of these constructs over time. The current work uses data from six waves of the Chicago Youth Development Study (n=338), a sample of African American and Latino young men from low income neighborhoods in an urban center, to test a hypothesized multidimensional structure of future expectations across adolescence.

Neighborhood Disadvantage Alters the Origins of Children's Nonaggressive Conduct Problems.

Neighborhood disadvantage plays a pivotal role in child mental health, including child antisocial behavior (e.g., lying, theft, vandalism; assault, cruelty).

Implementation Measurement for Evidence-Based Violence Prevention Programs in Communities.

Increasing attention to the evaluation, dissemination, and implementation of evidence-based programs (EBPs) has led to significant advancements in the science of community-based violence prevention. One of the prevailing challenges in moving from science to community involves implementing EBPs and strategies with quality. The CDC-funded National Centers of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention (YVPCs) partner with communities to implement a comprehensive community-based strategy to prevent violence and to evaluate that strategy for impact on community-wide rates of violence.

Standards of Evidence for Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Scale-up Research in Prevention Science: Next Generation.

A decade ago, the Society of Prevention Research (SPR) endorsed a set of standards for evidence related to research on prevention interventions. These standards (Flay et al., Prevention Science 6:151-175, 2005) were intended in part to increase consistency in reviews of prevention research that often generated disparate lists of effective interventions due to the application of different standards for what was considered to be necessary to demonstrate effectiveness.

CDC grand rounds: preventing youth violence.

Youth violence occurs when persons aged 10-24 years, as victims, offenders, or witnesses, are involved in the intentional use of physical force or power to threaten or harm others. Youth violence typically involves young persons hurting other young persons and can take different forms. Examples include fights, bullying, threats with weapons, and gang-related violence.

"Neighborhood matters": assessment of neighborhood social processes.

Neighborhoods are important contexts for understanding development and behavior, but cost and difficulty have challenged attempts to develop measures of neighborhood social processes at the neighborhood level. This article reports the development, reliability, and validity of Neighborhood Matters, a collection of instruments assessing three aspects of neighborhood social processes, namely, norms (five subscales), informal social control (six subscales and total scale), social connection (two subscales), as well as individual scales for assessing neighborhood change, neighborhood resources, and neighborhood problems. Six hundred six residents of Chicago, chosen at random from 30 neighborhoods (defined by US Census tracts), completed the measures.

Effects of the SAFE Children preventive intervention on developmental trajectories of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms.

This study examined whether a family-based preventive intervention for inner-city children entering the first grade could alter the developmental course of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. Participants were 424 families randomly selected and randomly assigned to a control condition (n = 192) or Schools and Families Educating Children (SAFE) Children (n = 232). SAFE Children combined family-focused prevention with academic tutoring to address multiple developmental-ecological needs.

The role of the school environment in relational aggression and victimization.

Research conducted over the last decade has documented both the high rates of and serious consequences associated with both victimization and perpetration of relational aggression. This study examines risk for involvement in relational aggression and victimization among middle school youth, evaluating both individual beliefs about violence, as well as aspects of the school environment, including interpersonal school climate and school responsiveness to violence. A sample of 5,625 primarily urban minority middle school youth (49.

Risk and direct protective factors for youth violence: results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Multisite Violence Prevention Project.

Background: This study was conducted as part of a multisite effort to examine risk and direct protective factors for youth violence.

Purpose: The goal was to identify those factors in the lives of young people that increase or decrease the risk of violence. These analyses fill an important gap in the literature, as few studies have examined risk and direct protective factors for youth violence across multiple studies.