Reducing Truancy and Fostering a Willingness to Attend School: Results from a Randomized Trial of a Police-School Partnership Program.

Truancy is a major social issue that is linked to a range of poor outcomes across the life course, including poor educational outcomes, drug and alcohol abuse, and antisocial behavior. Interventions that seek to reduce truancy problems range from school-based police officers to programs that reward good attendance to community-based interventions. This study reports primary outcome results of a randomized trial of a collaborative, police-school partnership that sought to reduce truancy and increase students' willingness to attend school.

Assessing the effect of the Queensland "Summer of Disasters" on perceptions of collective efficacy.

The collective efficacy literature suggests that neighborhoods with higher collective efficacy have fewer problems of disorder, increased volunteerism, and higher levels of life satisfaction and wellbeing, along with the increased potential for resilience in the face of a disaster. Although perceptions of collective efficacy typically remain stable over time, rapid or sudden social change, such as experiencing a natural disaster, has the potential to disrupt the neighborhood and the individuals within - including their perceptions of the regulatory mechanisms of collective efficacy. Still, the effect of a major disaster on perceptions of collective efficacy remains relatively unexamined.

Nonresponse bias in randomized controlled experiments in criminology: Putting the Queensland Community Engagement Trial (QCET) under a microscope.

Objectives: The goal of this article is to examine whether or not the results of the Queensland Community Engagement Trial (QCET)-a randomized controlled trial that tested the impact of procedural justice policing on citizen attitudes toward police-were affected by different types of nonresponse bias.

Method: We use two methods (Cochrane and Elffers methods) to explore nonresponse bias: First, we assess the impact of the low response rate by examining the effects of nonresponse group differences between the experimental and control conditions and pooled variance under different scenarios. Second, we assess the degree to which item response rates are influenced by the control and experimental conditions.