Implementation and Outcomes of the Trauma Ambassadors Program: A Case Study of Trauma-Informed Youth Leadership Development.

Community-based programs serve a critical need for vulnerable youth and families. In recent years, researchers and practitioners have urged programs to adopt a trauma-informed care (TIC) approach to address adversity in young people's lives. The purpose of this article is to describe the implementation and outcomes of the Trauma Ambassador (TA) Program, a pilot youth leadership program guided by a community-university partnership that utilized a TIC approach in an underserved East North Philadelphia neighborhood.

Promoting the Well-being of Urban Youth through Drama-based Peer Education.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to examine youths' perceptions of a drama-based peer education approach to promote adolescent well-being.

Methods: High school students facilitated workshops on one of 7 topics (eg, dating violence) for 4733 urban elementary, middle, and high school students. Audience members' perceptions of workshop content and implementation were examined.

Objective and perceived community factors: exploring responses to context.

Objectives: To study the neighborhood context, researchers typically use (objective) archival measures and (subjective) self-reported data of neighborhood conditions. The current study compared these measures and explored whether internalizing symptoms influences how individuals perceive their neighborhoods.

Methods: The sample was 112 African American young adults living in 27 neighborhoods.

The protective function of neighborhood social ties on psychological health.

Objective: To examine relations between neighborhood characteristics and psychological health, specifically whether neighborhood trust and cooperation buffers the effects of neighborhood disorder on depression and aggressive behavior.

Methods: The sample was composed of 127 urban, African American young adults from Trenton, NJ.

Results: The protective function of neighborhood social interactions depended on the outcome, such that trust and cooperation among neighbors moderated the effect of neighborhood disorder on aggression but not depression.

A longitudinal examination of serious adolescent offenders' perceptions of chances for success and engagement in behaviors accomplishing goals.

We examined antisocial adolescents' perceptions of the importance of and their ability to accomplish positive life outcomes (e.g., employment) and avoid negative ones (e.

Understanding the school outcomes of juvenile offenders: an exploration of neighborhood influences and motivational resources.

As a group, delinquent youth complete less education and show poor academic outcomes compared to their non-delinquent peers. To better understand pathways to school success, this study integrated individual- and neighborhood-level data to examine academic functioning among 833 White, Black, and Hispanic male juvenile offenders (age 14-17) living in two urban communities. A multilevel path analysis confirmed that youth in relatively more affluent communities report greater access to opportunities in the areas of education and employment, and that these opportunities are associated with higher expectations to succeed and better grades.

Service use after court involvement in a sample of serious adolescent offenders.

The juvenile justice system faces a difficult challenge when providing services to serious adolescent offenders, having to balance community safety concerns with hopes for successful intervention. Increasing the effectiveness of this system rests partially on having a clearer picture of the regularities of current service provision to these adolescents. This study describes the types of services received by a large (N=868) sample of adjudicated serious offenders from two metropolitan areas over a two-year follow-up period after adjudication in court, and examines whether indicators of need for services determine the types of services received in the juvenile justice system.

AN EMPIRICAL PORTRAIT OF COMMUNITY REENTRY AMONG SERIOUS JUVENILE OFFENDERS IN TWO METROPOLITAN CITIES.

This study examined the community reentry process among 413 serious adolescent offenders released from juvenile court commitments in two metropolitan areas. Data are provided about postrelease court supervision and community-based services (CBSs) during the first 6 months in the community as well as indicators of antisocial activity, formal system involvement, school attendance, and employment. Findings indicate that a far greater proportion of offenders reported receiving supervision than CBSs, but when utilized, the frequency of CBS use was high, and intensive services reduced the odds of formal system involvement.

Relations between neighborhood factors, parenting behaviors, peer deviance, and delinquency among serious juvenile offenders.

The present study examined relations among neighborhood structural and social characteristics, parenting practices, peer group affiliations, and delinquency among a group of serious adolescent offenders. The sample of 14-18-year-old boys (N=488) was composed primarily of economically disadvantaged, ethnic-minority youth living in urban communities. The results indicate that weak neighborhood social organization is indirectly related to delinquency through its associations with parenting behavior and peer deviance and that a focus on just 1 of these microsystems can lead to oversimplified models of risk for juvenile offending.

REENTRY OF YOUNG OFFENDERS FROM THE JUSTICE SYSTEM: A Developmental Perspective.

This article presents a developmental perspective on the reentry of young offenders into the community. We begin with a discussion of the psychosocial tasks of late adolescence. Next, we discuss contextual influences on the successful negotiation of these psychosocial tasks.

Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays.

In the first study using point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine children's understanding of verbs, 3-year-olds were tested to see if they could perceive familiar actions that corresponded to motion verbs (e.g., walking).