Leveraging science to inform social policy: How Ed Zigler created a movement.

Ed Zigler believed that developmental science should be applied to policy, programs, and practices to improve the lives of children and families. He shared this belief with others and paved the way for alternative career pathways. This paper describes how Ed influenced others to connect science with program development, evaluation, and policy, and created networks of applied scholars.

Prioritizing research for integrated implementation of early childhood development and maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and nutrition platforms.

Background: Existing health and nutrition services present potential platforms for scaling up delivery of early childhood development (ECD) interventions within sensitive windows across the life course, especially in the first 1000 days from conception to age 2 years. However, there is insufficient knowledge on how to optimize implementation for such strategies in an integrated manner. In light of this knowledge gap, we aimed to systematically identify a set of integrated implementation research priorities for health, nutrition and early child development within the 2015 to 2030 timeframe of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Citizenship attitudes and allegiances in diverse youth.

This study examined the relationships among three sets of variables in a sample of 299 diverse high school youth: (a) demographic variables such as ethnicity and immigrant status, (b) attitudes toward citizenship responsibilities, and (c) allegiances to three socializing institutions--family, school, and community. A measure of citizenship attitudes was found to identify two distinct constructs--Polity-Oriented and Civic-Oriented attitudes toward citizenship responsibilities, relating to the polity or nation-state, and to serving the community. European Americans were consistently lower on Polity-Oriented attitudes than Hispanic teens, and lower on family allegiance than other non-European American groups.

Affluent adolescents, depression, and drug use: the role of adults in their lives.

The present study examined the association between adult supports to whom affluent youth turn when personally troubled or upset and their self-reported depression and drug use. The sample consisted of 374 affluent seventh graders. Perceived parental closeness played a mediating role in reducing depressive symptomology and drug use.