Toward a Socioeconomic Equity in Combating Adolescent Substance Abuse: An Outreach and Drop-In Centre to Bridge the Gap.

This paper describes a case study of an Outreach and Drop-in Centre (ODIC) established under the National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India. In the quantitative part, data were gathered from the ODIC office documents and analysed using MS Excel. Linear regression analysis demonstrated a relationship between the number of in-centre clients and the number of Community Outreach Programmes (COPs).

Social groupwork for promoting psychological well-being of adolescents enrolled in sponsorship programs.

The dearth of data on adolescents highlighted in the UN's data disaggregation against the agenda 'no one left behind' calls for research on 'the second decade'. Moreover, India is a country with the world's largest adolescent population, and as such, studies and policies for developing competencies of adolescents are crucial to the country's development; interventions instilling confidence to aspire to a better future in underprivileged adolescents are vital to mitigate inequity. This intervention study adopted a quasi-experimental design to measure the effectiveness of social groupwork in raising the psychological well-being of adolescents in child sponsorship programs in Kerala.