Allison Dymnicki

Allison Dymnicki
American Institutes for Research | AIR

PhD

About

39
Publications
97,289
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
10,155
Citations
Additional affiliations
June 2010 - June 2011
University of Illinois Chicago
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (39)
Article
Educator mental health and well-being have received increased attention in response to the additional stress experienced during the coronavirus pandemic. Cultivating mental health and well-being can be facilitated by enhancing adult social emotional competencies. However, relatively limited research has explored how prevention programs promoting so...
Article
School safety continues to be a concern in today’s schools, and comprehensive approaches to school safety are one way to address this concern. However, few comprehensive approaches have been rigorously evaluated. To address this gap, we evaluated the implementation and effects associated with Safe Communities Safe Schools (SCSS) comprehensive schoo...
Article
Accumulating evidence indicates that incorporating youth development (YD) principles, strategies, and supports into an organization promotes positive adult and youth outcomes. However, few validated measures assess this type of capacity. The YMCA commissioned a study to validate its Capacity Assessment for Youth Development Programming (Y-CAP), whi...
Article
This article examines organizational-level outcomes achieved during a technical assistance (TA) initiative designed to increase the capacity of local health departments (LHDs) to prevent youth violence (YV) via a multisectoral approach. This effort was designed to address the knowledge gap regarding how to provide effective TA to LHDs, specifically...
Article
Full-text available
Federal agencies and other funders seeking to maximise their impact aim to understand factors associated with implementing evidence-based interventions (EBIs) to address health problems. Challenges exist, however, in synthesising information from different disciplines and reaching agreement about these factors due to different terminology, framewor...
Article
Full-text available
Research consistently finds that a comprehensive approach to school safety, which integrates the best scientific evidence and solid implementation strategies, offers the greatest potential for preventing youth violence and promoting mental and behavioral health. However, schools and communities encounter enormous challenges in articulating, synthes...
Chapter
Positive youth development (PYD) is an assets‐based ecological approach focused on creating supportive environments that provide youth with opportunities to engage, develop, and demonstrate competence. We present a set of PYD skills, experiences, and behaviors that includes five internal assets (i.e., positive values, developed emotional processes,...
Article
Full-text available
The field of positive youth development (PYD) is at an important crossroads in terms of defining its scope and directions for future research. This paper describes an effective consensus-building process that representatives from 16 federal agencies engaged in to develop a research agenda focused on PYD and the product that resulted from using this...
Article
Full-text available
This chapter summarizes the results of nearly 100 years of research on school-based social and emotional learning (SEL). The SEL field has grown out of research in many fields and subfields with which educators, researchers, and policymakers are familiar, including the promotion of social competence, bullying prevention, prevention of drug use and...
Chapter
In a time when schools are experiencing the burden of multiple high-priority initiatives and, in many cases, tight budgets, federal priorities to increase evidence for programs and to promote educationally relevant research are increasing the research demands on schools. Given the increasing pressures experienced by schools, researchers need to car...
Article
There is a need to understand how environmental characteristics of a school influence the effectiveness of prevention efforts. Although researchers have discussed the importance of conducting needs assessments before implementing interventions, few of these types of assessments focus on the relational aspect. Furthermore, few assessments have the a...
Article
Qualitative methods potentially add depth to prevention research but can produce large amounts of complex data even with small samples. Studies conducted with culturally distinct samples often produce voluminous qualitative data but may lack sufficient sample sizes for sophisticated quantitative analysis. Currently lacking in mixed-methods research...
Conference Paper
Background/Purpose: The American Institutes of Research (AIR), in partnership with the Centers for the Disease Control, National Center of Injury Prevention and Control [CDC, NCIPC) is engaged in a second initiative focused around increasing the role and visibility of public health departments in preventing youth violence with 12 communities acro...
Conference Paper
Introduction: Community Violence Prevention Interventions such as Chicago’s CeaseFire Project rely on outreach workers and violence interrupters drawn from the neighborhoods they serve, who have credibility with youth likely to become involved in violence, and who thoroughly internalize the anti-violence ethos of the program they represent. Recruit...
Article
Full-text available
African-American youth, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, evidence high rates of negative outcomes associated with three problem behaviors, conduct problems, risky sexual behavior, and substance use. This study used a contextually tailored version of problem behavior theory (PBT) to examine predictors of the simultaneous development o...
Article
Full-text available
This study examined interdependent trajectories of sexual risk, substance use, and conduct problems among 12- to 18-year-old African American youths who were followed annually as part of the Mobile Youth Study. We used growth mixture modeling to model the development of these three outcomes in the 1,406 participants who met the inclusion criteria....
Article
This study examines to what extent baseline school climate moderates the effects of a randomized controlled trial of a universal violence prevention intervention. School climate was assessed by teacher ratings of the quality of relationships among school members and the seriousness of school problems. Cluster analysis revealed three climate types:...
Conference Paper
Introduction: Whereas a handful of studies have addressed the way that ecological characteristics (e.g., school, community factors) affect implementation of school-based prevention efforts (Farrell, Henry, & Bettencourt, 2011; Ozer, 2006), few studies have analyzed how ecological variables influence student intervention outcomes. This study examine...
Article
Predictive epidemiology is an embryonic field that involves developing informative signatures for disorder and tracking them using surveillance methods. Through such efforts assistance can be provided to the planning and implementation of preventive interventions. Believing that certain minor crimes indicative of gang activity are informative signa...
Article
Evidence suggests positive impacts of AIDS/HIV prevention approaches using outreach workers, but few studies have described the approaches taken by such workers to prevent or de-escalate serious violence. In this study, we used the Critical Incident Technique to elicit descriptions of positive and negative incidents from 53 outreach workers. Chicag...
Article
This study tested five hypotheses related to the accuracy of students' perceptions of school norms for aggression and nonviolent problem-solving strategies with two cohorts (ns = 852 and 968) of 6th-grade students in 12 schools. Students consistently overestimated peer normative support for aggression and underestimated peer normative support for n...
Chapter
Although a large body of research has focused on young children with learning disabilities (LD) and behavioral disorders (BD) in preschool and elementary school settings, there is considerably less information about this population during adolescence. Recent work suggests that youth with these disabilities experience challenges in areas such as soc...
Article
Full-text available
Several recent meta-analyses of universal school-based violence prevention studies indicate the overall positive impacts of these approaches on aggression. These studies, however, assess impacts on broadly defined measures of aggression. Furthermore, little research has analyzed the mechanisms through which these programs attempt to reduce overt ag...
Article
This study examined the levels and growth of specific and general normative beliefs about nonviolence (called norms for nonviolence). The sample consisted of 1,254 middle school students from four metropolitan areas who participated in the control condition of the Multisite Violence Prevention Project. We predicted that the association and endorsem...
Article
This study sought to understand school-level influences on aggressive behavior and related social cognitive variables. Participants were 5106 middle school students participating in a violence prevention project. Predictors were school-level norms opposing aggression and favoring nonviolence, interpersonal climate (positive student-teacher relation...
Article
Full-text available
During the past seventy years, the field of cluster analysis has emerged, accompanied by a plethora of methods, algorithms, concepts, and terminology that are used in cluster-related research. We refer to cluster analysis (CA) as a general approach composed of several multivariate methods for delineating natural groups or clusters in data sets. In...
Article
Full-text available
This article presents findings from a meta-analysis of 213 school-based, universal social and emotional learning (SEL) programs involving 270,034 kindergarten through high school students. Compared to controls, SEL participants demonstrated significantly improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behavior, and academic performance that reflec...
Article
Full-text available
Service-learning (SL) has become a popular teaching method everywhere from elementary schools to colleges. Despite the increased presence of SL in the education world, it is still unclear what student outcomes are associated with SL programs and what factors are related to more effective programs. A meta-analysis of 62 studies involving 11,837 stud...
Article
Full-text available
51-page PDF technical report which, "summarizes results from three large-scale reviews of research on the impact of social and emotional learning (SEL) programs on elementary and middle-school students — that is, programs that seek to promote various aocial and emotional skills. Collectively the three reviews included 317 studies and involved 324...
Article
Full-text available
A review of efforts at social system change in 526 universal competence-promotion outcome studies indicated that 64% of the interventions attempted some type of microsystemic or mesosystemic change involving schools, families, or community-based organizations in an attempt to foster developmental competencies in children and adolescents. Only 24% o...
Article
Full-text available
In Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning: What does the Research Say? Zins and his colleagues presented a new way to conceptualize the impact of social and emotional learning programs on students' school success by broadening the concept to include students' attitudes, behaviors, and performance. To build on Zins' ideas, we (a)...

Network

Cited By