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Introduction
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January 2008 - February 2016
September 1998 - August 1999
Publications
Publications (83)
This study examined the impact of the Head Start Research‐based, Developmentally Informed (REDI) preschool intervention on high school outcomes and explored longitudinal mediation. 356 children (58% White, 25% Black, 17% Latinx; 54% female, 46% male; M age = 4.49 years) were recruited from Head Start classrooms which were randomized to intervention...
The coparenting relationship plays a central role in family interactions. However, Brazil lacks information on the psychometric properties of internationally recognized instruments to assess coparenting. Escala da Relação Coparental (CRS-BR) is the Brazilian version of the Coparenting Relationship Scale. In this study, we examine: (a) internal vali...
The present study examined the role of first-time fathers’ parenting stress during infancy in relation to children’s mean blood glucose via glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels during middle childhood while also exploring the mediating role of child sleep problems in this association. A total of 306 fathers self-reported on parenting stress when thei...
The Recipe 4 Success preventive intervention targeted multiple factors critical to the health and well‐being of toddlers living in poverty. This randomized controlled trial, which was embedded within Early Head Start home visits for 12 weeks, included 242 racially and ethnically diverse families (51% girls; toddler mean age = 2.58 years; data colle...
Background:
The transition to parenthood is a common yet stressful experience faced by many young and midlife adults, and the risk of cardiometabolic conditions also begins to rise at this time. Consequently, parenthood represents an opportune time to intervene with adults to support their psychological and physical health.
Purpose:
We examined...
Background
Across several sites in the United States, we examined whether kindergarten conduct problems among mostly population‐representative samples of children were associated with increased criminal and related (criminal + lost offender productivity + victim; described as criminal + victim hereafter) costs across adolescence and adulthood, as w...
Background:
Parent-child relationship quality (PCRQ) and parental monitoring (PM) are associated with adolescent behavior problems following child maltreatment (CM). Whether these associations are best characterized as between (trait) or within-person (state) differences is unknown.
Objective:
Disaggregate between and within-person effects for P...
Firstborn children have higher prevalence of obesity than secondborn siblings. The birth of a sibling typically results in resource dilution when mothers begin to divide their time and attention between two children. This mixed-methods analysis applies the family systems process of resource dilution to test the hypothesis that characteristics of th...
The aims of this pilot study are to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of a peer-delivered co-parenting program, Autism Parent Navigators (APN), for parents of children recently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thirty families (63 caregivers) participated in a mixed-method quasi-experimental test of the...
Objective:
The postpartum period is a key life stage, contributing to increased maternal obesity risk. Current lifestyle interventions do not consider the role of a woman's partner in reducing stress and supporting lifestyle change. The objective of this study was to assess the effect of an intervention that seeks to enhance coparenting relationsh...
Objective:
This study used a randomized clinical trial design to evaluate the success with which The Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills intervention (BaSICS) engaged the proximal mechanisms of poverty-related stress's impact on the psychosocial functioning and mental health of young adolescents living in high poverty contexts.
Method:...
Objective
To evaluate the benefits of the Fast Track Friendship Group program implemented as a stand-alone school-based intervention on the social cognitions, social behavior, peer and teacher relationships of peer-rejected students.
Method
Over four successive years, 224 peer-rejected elementary students (57% White, 17% Black, 20% Latinx, 5% mult...
The hypothesis was tested that some children develop a defensive mindset that subsumes individual social information processing (SIP) steps, grows from early experiences, and guides long‐term outcomes. In Study 1 (Fast Track [FT]), 463 age‐5 children (45% girls; 43% Black) were first assessed in 1991 and followed through age 32 (83% retention). In...
As the COVID-19 pandemic has been highly stressful for parents and children, it is clear that strategies that promote long-term family resilience are needed to protect families in future crises. One such strategy, the Family Foundations program, is focused on promoting supportive coparenting at the transition to parenthood. In a randomized trial, w...
Background: While postpartum is a key life-stage contributing to increased obesity risk for women, existing weight management interventions don’t consider the role of a women’s partner in reducing stress and supporting lifestyle change. Objectives: 1) To assess the effect of an intervention enhancing coparenting relationship quality on maternal bod...
The transition to parenthood is a common yet stressful experience faced by many young and midlife adults when the risk of many chronic diseases also begins to rise. Consequently, the transition to parenthood represents an opportune time to intervene with adults to support their psychological and their physiological health and well-being. Here, we e...
Background
Over 5000 community anti-drug coalitions operating in the USA serve as a cornerstone of federal drug prevention. These coalitions, however, have demonstrated effectiveness in preventing substance use only when they use technical assistance (TA) and implement evidence-based programs (EBPs). The absence of TA and EBP implementation by coal...
This randomized trial tested the impact of an established prevention program for first-time parents, Family Foundations, adapted for low-income mothers and fathers as a series of sessions provided to couples in their homes. To assess program impact, we recruited and randomly assigned a sample of 150 low-income adult mother-father dyads (not necessa...
Objectives:
In this study, we tested whether Recipe 4 Success, a preventive intervention featuring structured food preparation lessons, was successful in improving the following 4 protective factors related to overweight and obesity among families living in poverty: toddlers' healthy eating habits, toddlers' self-regulation, parents' responsive fe...
Social norms positively predict college students' alcohol use, but it is critical to explore heterogeneity in these patterns to identify which students are most susceptible to normative influences. The current study explored the nature of drinking norms within college student peer sport clubs. We examined the association between self-reported alcoh...
Background
Students' alcohol use behaviors are shaped by the attitudes and behaviors of others, especially the peers within students' proximal social groups. Explaining the association between perceived drinking norms and alcohol use, researchers propose contradicting pathways that focus on conformity (i.e., social norms predict alcohol use) and pr...
The negative impact of opioids on those who misuse them has been widely documented. Despite significant spillover effects in the form of elevated rates of child maltreatment and child welfare system (CWS) involvement for children affected by parental opioid misuse, the public costs of opioid misuse to the CWS remain largely undocumented. This work...
This study examined whether a leisure-focused intervention, HealthWise, was related to reduced youth polysubstance use and delayed sexual debut via reducing how often youth did leisure activities because there was nothing else to do. HealthWise was compared to a no-intervention control for 5,610 high school students from eighth to tenth grades in t...
Objective
This article examines whether family resilience can be enhanced among military families via an online prevention program for military couples at the transition to parenthood.
Background
Military families experience normative stressors similar to those of civilian families, as well as military‐specific stressors, such as deployment, frequ...
Early childhood education (ECE) interventions hold great promise for not only improving lives but also for potentially producing an economic return on investment linked to key outcomes from program effectiveness. Assessment of economic impact relies on accurate estimates of program costs that should be derived consistently to enable program compara...
Cross-sectional research has suggested that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity may be an important predictor of family violence perpetration; however, causal inference is limited by the absence of studies designed to prospectively predict family violence by PTSD symptoms. In the current study, PTSD symptoms were assessed among 25...
Objective: To investigate prospective, longitudinal associations between maternal prenatal cortisol response to an interpersonal stressor and child health over the subsequent three years.
Methods: 123 women expecting their first child provided salivary cortisol samples between 12-32 weeks gestation (M=22.44.9 weeks) before and after a videotaped c...
Fathers are more than social accidents. Research has demonstrated that fathers matter to children's development. Despite noted progress, challenges remain on how best to conceptualize and assess fathering and father–child relationships. The current monograph is the result of an SRCD‐sponsored meeting of fatherhood scholars brought together to discu...
To understand new fathers' experiences and well-being, we examine links between fathers and their partners' replenishing and stressful daily experiences-exercise, sleep, work, chores, general stress, and parenting stress-and their own and their partners' well-being and family relations. Fathers and mothers of ten-month old infants (N=143/140 mother...
This study examined the cost of implementing the Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE) for Teachers professional development program during a randomized controlled trial targeting a diverse sample of public elementary school teachers in New York City. Detailed budget information collected during the study was used to identify the...
The analysis of mediational pathways in intervention trials represents the strongest method available for establishing causal links between developmental factors and child outcomes. This article assesses mediation of the effects of Family Foundations on toddler emotional and behavioral adjustment through parent-related factors (parental stress, par...
Trauma exposure is a consistent correlate of intimate partner aggression (IPA) and parent-to-child aggression (PCA) perpetration, and difficulties with emotions (particularly fear and anger) are hypothesized to underlie these relations. However, the absence of knowledge of the immediate, contextual influence of emotions on aggression renders existi...
Objective:
To examine the impact from Family Foundations, a transition-to-parenting intervention, on parent and child outcomes 2 years after birth.
Background:
Couples transitioning to parenthood face many stressors and challenges that are not typically addressed through commonly available childbirth preparatory classes. The Family Foundations p...
Over a decade ago, the Society for Prevention Research endorsed the first standards of evidence for research in preventive interventions. The growing recognition of the need to use limited resources to make sound investments in prevention led the Board of Directors to charge a new task force to set standards for research in analysis of the economic...
This study assessed associations between both work demands (pressure, hours) and work resources (self-direction) and marital satisfaction in a sample of 164 African American dual-earner couples who were interviewed annually across 3 years. Grounded in the work–home resources and family systems frameworks, results from longitudinal actor–partner int...
Restricted public budgets and increasing efforts to link the impact of community interventions to public savings have increased the use of economic evaluation. While this type of evaluation can be important for program planning, it also raises important ethical issues about how we value the time of local stakeholders who support community intervent...
Long-distance dating relationships (LDDRs) and the dissolution of these relationships may have implications for day-to-day affect and behaviors. The current study examined the associations of relationship status, long-distance relationship dissolution, and daily location with daily positive affect, loneliness, university activity engagement, and al...
Purpose:
To inform efforts to reduce costly service utilization, the present study examined longitudinal trajectories of mental health-related outpatient and residential service use among at-risk youth with a history of early externalizing problems.
Methods:
A cohort of 809 children in the Fast Track Project, a multisite longitudinal study of ch...
Investing in strategies that aim to build a more nurturing society offers tremendous opportunities for the field of prevention science. Yet, scientists struggle to consistently take their research beyond effectiveness evaluations and actually value the impact of preventive strategies. Ultimately, it is clear that convincing policymakers to make mea...
Despite substantial rates of parent to child aggression (PCA) and intimate partner aggression (IPA) co-occurrence within families, the co-occurrence of PCA and IPA within incidents of aggression has not previously been examined. To do so, we developed the Children, Intimate Relationships, and Conflictual Life Events (CIRCLE) interview to simultaneo...
The transition to parenthood is a stressful period for most parents as individuals and as couples, with variability in parent mental health and couple relationship functioning linked to children's long-term emotional, mental health, and academic outcomes. Few couple-focused prevention programs targeting this period have been shown to be effective....
This study examined how the perception of the availability of leisure opportunities may prevent substance use initiation through HealthWise, a school-based program focused on reducing risky behavior. In this study, we specifically focused on whether HealthWise increased student perceptions of leisure opportunities between 8th grade and 10th grade (...
Prevention advocates often make the case that preventive intervention not only improves public health and welfare but also can save public resources. Increasingly, evidence-based policy efforts considering prevention are focusing on how programs can save taxpayer resources from reduced burden on health, criminal justice, and social service systems....
Sexual satisfaction is an important contributor to relationship functioning that is not well understood among first-time parents, at a time when relationship functioning is important for the well-being of parents as well as the child. The current study examined how several dimensions of individual and relationship functioning among first-time paren...
The prospect of improving “noncognitive” skills through intervention increases the need to understand how to represent them in evaluations. Economic assessment of such efforts rarely incorporates these factors, especially when a benefit-cost approach is employed. Programs targeting such skills are more likely to be assessed through approaches that...
Although maternal stress, anxiety, and depression have been linked to negative birth outcomes, few studies have investigated preventive interventions targeting maternal mental health as a means of reducing such problems. This randomized controlled study examines whether Family Foundations (FF)-a transition to parenthood program for couples focused...
We examined whether kindergarten teachers' ratings of children's prosocial skills, an indicator of noncognitive ability at school entry, predict key adolescent and adult outcomes. Our goal was to determine unique associations over and above other important child, family, and contextual characteristics.
Data came from the Fast Track study of low-soc...
This study examines long-term effects of a transition to parenthood program, Family Foundations, designed to enhance child outcomes through a strategic focus on supporting the coparenting relationship. Roughly 5 to 7 years after baseline (pregnancy), parent and teacher reports of internalizing and externalizing problems and school adjustment were c...
Although maternal stress and depression have been linked to adverse birth outcomes (ABOs), few studies have investigated preventive interventions targeting maternal mental health as a means of reducing ABOs. This randomized controlled study examines the impact of Family Foundations (FF)-a transition to parenthood program for couples focused on prom...
Purpose
Prescription drug abuse has reached epidemic proportions. Nonmedical prescription opioid use carries increasingly high costs. Despite the need to cultivate efforts that are both effective and fiscally responsible, the cost-effectiveness of universal evidence-based-preventive-interventions (EBPIs) is rarely evaluated. This study explores the...
The study examines whether anxiety or chronic relationship stress alter the way that couple conflict affects cortisol levels for women and men during the transition to parenthood. Saliva samples, assayed for cortisol, were collected before and after couple interaction from 128 heterosexual couples expecting their first child. Confirming prior resea...
In response to growing interest in economic analyses of prevention efforts, a diverse group of prevention researchers, economists, and policy analysts convened a scientific panel, on "Research Priorities in Economic Analysis of Prevention" at the 19th annual conference of the Society for Prevention Research. The panel articulated four priorities th...
Introduction
This paper describes the design, implementation and initial outcomes of the classroom-based REDI (Research-Based, Developmentally-Informed) preschool enrichment program when implemented in Head Start. The goal of REDI was to enrich Head Start programs with specific evidence-based curriculum components targeting children’s language, em...
Behavioral and emotional problems are common in early childhood and put children at risk for developing more serious problems. This study tested the mediating mechanisms through which a universal coparenting intervention implemented during the transition to parenthood led to reduced child adjustment problems at age 3 and explored child gender as a...
Purpose:
A growing body of research documents the significance of siblings and sibling relationships for development, mental health, and behavioral risk across childhood and adolescence. Nonetheless, few well-designed efforts have been undertaken to promote positive and reduce negative youth outcomes by enhancing sibling relationships.
Methods:...
Objectives:
We examined the independent and combined influence of major risk and protective factors on youths' alcohol use.
Methods:
Five large data sets provided similar measures of alcohol use and risk or protective factors. We carried out analyses within each data set, separately for boys and girls in 8th and 10th grades. We included interact...
To test the assumption embedded in state-of-the-art, community assessment and decision-making regarding prevention of underage drinking: that there is minimal variation in the way that risk and protective factors (RPF) are associated with underage drinking across communities. Three large datasets provided the same measures of adolescent alcohol use...
The current study examined developmental changes in the relative influence of risk and protective factors (RPFs) across individual, family, peer, school, and community domains on adolescent alcohol use. Using longitudinal data from two independent samples, multivariate cross-lagged models were used to estimate the unique influence of each RPF on su...
To prepare public systems to implement evidence-based prevention programs for adolescents, it is necessary to have accurate estimates of programs' resource consumption. When evidence-based programs are implemented through a specialized prevention delivery system, additional costs may be incurred during cultivation of the delivery infrastructure. Cu...
Despite advances in understanding the role that several physiological systems play in the occurrence of general violence, little progress has been made toward understanding biological correlates of intimate partner violence (IPV). We explored involvement of one physiological system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Among 137 heterosex...
We tested an integrative model of individual and dyadic variables contributing to intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration. Based on the vulnerability-stress-adaptation (VSA) model, we hypothesized that three "enduring vulnerabilities" (i.e., antisocial behavior, hostility, and depressive symptoms) would be associated with a "maladaptive proces...
This study investigated the ability of a psychosocial prevention program implemented through childbirth education programs to enhance the coparental and couple relationship, parental mental health, the parent-child relationship, and child outcomes. A sample of 169 heterosexual, adult couples expecting their first child was randomized to interventio...
This study uses data collected in the intervention classrooms (N = 22) of Head Start REDI (Research-based, Developmentally Informed), a randomized clinical trial testing the efficacy of a comprehensive preschool curriculum targeting children's social-emotional competence, language, and emergent literacy skills delivered by teachers who received wee...
Despite the public health burden of adolescent substance use, delinquency, and other problem behavior, few comprehensive models of disseminating evidence-based prevention programs to communities have demonstrated positive youth outcomes at a population level, capacity to maintain program fidelity, and sustainability. We examined whether the Communi...
We tested the impact of the Fast Track conduct disorder prevention program on the use of pediatric, general health, and mental health services in adolescence.
Participants were 891 public kindergarten boys and girls screened from a population of 9594 children and found to be at risk for conduct disorder. They were assigned randomly (by school) to i...
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the cont...
Service use patterns and costs of youth diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and comorbid conduct disorder (CD) were assessed across adolescence (ages 12 through 17). Featured service sectors include mental health, school services, and the juvenile justice system. Data are provided by three cohorts from the Fast Track eval...
Economic analyses of programs to prevent or treat behavioral health problems among children and youth are an important component of intervention research.
This study examines the cost-effectiveness of the Fast Track intervention, a multi-year, multi-component intervention designed to reduce violence in at-risk children. Analytic models estimate int...
This prospective longitudinal study examined the unique and combined effects of neighborhood characteristics on parental behaviors in the context of more distal and more proximal influences. With a sample of 368 mothers from high-risk communities in 4 parts of the United States, this study examined relations between race (African American or Europe...
To examine the cost-effectiveness of the Fast Track intervention, a multi-year, multi-component intervention designed to reduce violence among at-risk children. A previous report documented the favorable effect of intervention on the highest-risk group of ninth-graders diagnosed with conduct disorder, as well as self-reported delinquency. The curre...
We explored the economic implications of conduct disorder (CD) among adolescents in 4 poor communities in the United States. We examined a range of expenditures related to this disorder across multiple public sectors, including mental health, general health, school, and juvenile justice.
We used self- and parental-report data to estimate expenditur...
Economic analysis plays an increasingly important role in prevention research. In this article, we describe one form of economic analysis, a cost analysis. Such an analysis captures not only the direct costs of an intervention but also its impact on the broader social costs of the illness or problem targeted. The key question is whether the direct...
Children and adolescents with serious and persistent conduct problems often require large public expenditures. Successfully diverting one high risk child from unfortunate outcomes may result in a net savings to society of nearly $2 million, not to mention improving the life of that child and his or her family. This figure highlights the potential o...
During recent decades, the rate of nonmarital childbearing among women aged 20 and older has increased steadily. Despite this increase, little is known about the economic status of the women involved and how it compares with that of their married counterparts or of teen mothers. This study examines the experiences of a sample of women drawn from th...
