John W Graham

• Pennsylvania State University

Leisure is viewed worldwide as an important developmental context for adolescents. As leisure research and programs are shared across nations, it is crucial to examine the cultural equivalence of leisure-related constructs and how they are related. Grounded in self-determination theory, this study explored the influence of perceived parental contro...

This study extends a typology of parent–offspring drug talk styles to early adolescents and investigates associations with adolescent substance use. Data come from a self-report survey associated with a school-based, 7th grade drug prevention curriculum. Mixed methods were used to collect data across four measurement occasions spanning 30 months. F...

In South Africa (SA), addressing sexual risk behavior and substance use is extremely important. About 1/4 of HIV-infected individuals are under the age of 25 and AIDS is responsible for 71% of all deaths in those 15 to 49 years old, and 1 in 8 SA high school students begins drinking alcohol before the age of 13. To address these health risk issue...

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is commonly used to create latent variables from a set of manifest variables. When relationships between the manifest and latent variables are accurately specified and estimated, latent variables produce more reliable estimates of association between constructs by modeling measurement error. When there are a large...

Adolescents who use methamphetamine (MA) are a vulnerable part of the South African population. In a study of ninth graders at 30 high schools in Cape Town (South Africa), those who had used MA in the last 30 days were significantly more likely to have had sex (vaginal, oral or anal) in the past month, been pregnant or made someone pregnant and to...

Purpose: As interventions are disseminated widely, issues of fidelity and adaptation become increasingly critical to understand. This study aims to describe the types of adaptations made by teachers delivering a school-based substance use prevention curriculum and their reasons for adapting program content. Design/methodology/approach: To determ...

Introduction: Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) are common in prevention research where the treatment variable is defined at the cluster (e.g., school) level. Missing data are common in CRTs. The recommended strategies, such as normal-model (NM) multiple imputation (MI), are good in many applications. However, we now know that these methods are not...

Introduction. The dissemination of evidence-based programs raises important questions about the quality of program implementation across various sites. Poor implementation quality (IQ) is known to reduce program effects; thus, examining factors such as participant responsiveness, quality of delivery, and adherence to content are an important part o...

Methamphetamine (MA) use in Cape Town is steadily increasing. In 2009, nearly half of patients at Cape Town’s specialist substance abuse treatment centres received treatment for MA use, with 57% of MA patients aged 15-24 years. Only three previous studies examined the association between MA use and sexual risk behavior among youth in Cape Town. The...

We examined factors targeted in two popular prevention approaches with adolescent drug use and delinquency in South Africa. We hypothesized adolescent life skills to be inversely related, and perceived norms to be directly related to later drug use and delinquency. Multiple regression and a relative weights approach were conducted for each outcome...

Demonstrates the use of latent transition analysis (LTA), an extension of latent class models and similar to structural equation modeling (SEM), that provides a means of estimating and testing stage-sequential developmental models with longitudinal data. The model is tested on data examining gender differences in substance use onset in a sample of...

Missing data have long plagued those conducting applied research in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. Good missing data analysis solutions are available, but practical information about implementation of these solutions has been lacking. The objective of Missing Data: Analysis and Design is to enable investigators who are non-statisticia...

If you have some experience with simulation work, then much of what I say here in the early part of this chapter should be a review. However, even if you do have prior experience with this topic, I believe it will be good to see my take on the more traditional Monte Carlo approach to missing data. Also important is that having a good sense of the t...

In this chapter, I cover analyses with SPSS (v. 16 or lower) following multiple imputation with Norm 2.03. This chapter also applies to newer versions of SPSS that do not have the MI module installed. The chapter is split into three parts: (a) preliminary analyses for testing reliability, including exploratory factor analysis; (b) hypothesis testin...

In this chapter, I present older methods for handling missing data. I then turn to the major new approaches for handling missing data. In this chapter, I present methods that make the MAR assumption. Included in this introduction are the EM algorithm for covariance matrices, normal-model multiple imputation (MI), and what I will refer to as FIML (f...

Missing data in a field experiment may arise from a number of sources. Participants may skip over questions inadvertently or refuse to answer them; they may offer an illegible response; they may fail to complete a questionnaire; or they may be absent from an entire measurement session in a longitudinal study. The last is often called wave nonrespon...

In this chapter, I provide a little theory about multilevel data analysis and some basic imputation strategies that match up with the desired analysis. I then describe the automation utility for performing multilevel (mixed model) analysis with SPSS 15/16 and SPSS 17-19 based on Norm-imputed data. Finally, I describe the automation utility for usin...

Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) is considered the gold standard for BP measurement, compared to clinic BP measurements (CBP), which are a less valid predictor of target organ damage and cardiovascular events. However, ABPM is considerably more expensive than CBP, leaving BP researchers with a difficult dilemma: Use the less efficient CB...

Background HealthWise South Africa: Life Skills for Adolescents (HW) is an evidence-based substance use and sexual risk prevention program that emphasizes the positive use of leisure time. Since 2000, this program has evolved from pilot testing through an efficacy trial involving over 7,000 youth in the Cape Town area. Beginning in 2011, through 20...

This study examined a proposed mechanism by which exposure to cigarette advertising may mediate the subsequent smoking of youth. We hypothesized that children's exposure to cigarette advertising leads them to overestimate the prevalence of smoking, and that these distorted perceptions, in turn, lead to increased intentions to smoke. Children in Fin...

Health compromising behaviors, such as smoking and mental health problems tend to co-occur, and contribute to the leading causes of preventable death, disease, and disability among adolescents. Substance use and depression have been found to be predicted by similar contextual factors among African American adolescents. This study utilizes the Socia...

Communities That Care (CTC) is a prevention system designed to reduce adolescent substance use and delinquency through the selection of effective preventive interventions tailored to a community's specific profile of risk and protection. A community-randomized trial of CTC, the Community Youth Development Study, is currently being conducted in 24 c...

Research has supported a negative correlation between cigarette smoking and exercise; however, the temporal nature of this association is not obvious. We modeled the relationships among smoking, exercise, and self-perceived health over time, within a college population. We collected 5 waves of data from 1,023 undergraduate students over a 14-month...

This review presents a practical summary of the missing data literature, including a sketch of missing data theory and descriptions of normal-model multiple imputation (MI) and maximum likelihood methods. Practical missing data analysis issues are discussed, most notably the inclusion of auxiliary variables for improving power and reducing bias. So...

Sexual behavior and substance use represent major threats to the health and well-being of South African adolescents, especially in light of the high prevalence of HIV infection in this population. However, there is currently a lack of evidence-based school programs designed to address health risk behaviors. The current study details the evaluation...

Health compromising behaviors, such as smoking and other risk behaviors tend to co-occur, and contribute to the leading causes of preventable death, disease, and disability among adolescents and young adults worldwide. The present study assesses a model of the direct and indirect effects of maternal closeness with suicidal ideation on smoking and r...

This article describes rates of missing item responses in personal digital assistant (PDA) assessments as compared to paper assessments. Data come from the evaluation of a classroom-based leisure, life skills, and sexuality education program delivered to high school students in Cape Town, South Africa. Analyses show that the paper assessments had m...

Multiple imputation (MI) and full information maximum likelihood (FIML) are the two most common approaches to missing data analysis. In theory, MI and FIML are equivalent when identical models are tested using the same variables, and when m, the number of imputations performed with MI, approaches infinity. However, it is important to know how many...

The authors describe 2 efficiency (planned missing data) designs for measurement: the 3-form design and the 2-method measurement design. The 3-form design, a kind of matrix sampling, allows researchers to leverage limited resources to collect data for 33% more survey questions than can be answered by any 1 respondent. Power tables for estimating co...

This study evaluates the Drug Resistance Strategies (DRS) project, a culturally grounded, communication-based substance use prevention program implemented in 35 middle schools in Phoenix, Arizona. The intervention consisted of 10 lessons taught by the classroom teacher that imparted the knowledge, motivation, and skills needed to resist drug offers...

The Alcohol-related Harm Prevention (AHP) program is a normative education and skill-acquisition program designed to reduce serious, long-term alcohol-related harm in college students. Without admonishing students not to drink, which is likely to fail in many student populations, the AHP program attempts to give students the necessary perceptions,...

This chapter describes a general approach to handling missing data in psychological research. It provides a theoretical background in readable, nontechnical fashion. Our overall goal was to give practical, usable advice, rather than to give a detailed statistical treatment of issues surrounding analysis of incomplete data. We give an overview of th...

This paper examines the effect of pro- and antisocial opinions about communities on cigarette use by Black, Colored, and White 8th- and 11th-grade students in Cape Town, South Africa. This analysis consists of 1,328 students who completed a questionnaire in 1997 on sociodemographic characteristics, substance abuse, adolescent behaviors, and opinion...

Latent variable models assess the common variance across multiple indicators of a specific construct and are often used when measurement error may bias parameter estimates. However, care must be taken when interpreting the meaning of the latent construct when using item indicators that come from different measurement domains (e.g., self-report and...

This article explores the impact of the temporal design, i.e. the sampling of times of measurement, on the statistical and substantive conclusions drawn from longitudinal biomedical and social science research. It is shown that for a study of a given duration, if observations are spaced too far apart the resulting data can support misleading conclu...

Statistical procedures for missing data have vastly improved, yet misconception and unsound practice still abound. The authors frame the missing-data problem, review methods, offer advice, and raise issues that remain unresolved. They clear up common misunderstandings regarding the missing at random (MAR) concept. They summarize the evidence agains...

Statistical procedures for missing data have vastly improved, yet misconception and unsound practice still abound. The authors frame the missing-data problem, review methods, offer advice, and raise issues that remain unresolved. They clear up common misunderstandings regarding the missing at random (MAR) concept. They summarize the evidence agains...

The authors report the reliability and convergent validity in a sample of college students for 27 composite scales and two items covering alcohol use, cigarette smoking, marijuana use, and other drug use; beliefs relating to alcohol use; perceived norms for alcohol-related behavior; harm prevention skills; intentions to take prevention action; harm...

This study examined violent behavior from ages 13 to 21 and identified predictors at age 10. Logistic regression was used to assess predictors of developmental patterns of violence. The sample is from a study of 808 youth interviewed annually from age 10 to 16 years, and again at ages 18 and 21. Over 28% of the youth in the sample reported nonviole...

The efficacy of prevention programs is typically determined through analysis of covariance. To date, a growth curve modeling approach is not used extensively in program evaluation. However, for longitudinal data there are several advantages to using this approach as compared to methods comparing means at two time points in a piecemeal fashion. In t...

Considerable research suggests that social influences-based drug abuse prevention programming has produced the most consistently successful preventive effects. However, a common criticism of this literature is that most prevention intervention studies rely solely on self-reported substance use. The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of...

This study investigated the effects of change in exposure to peer and adult drinking on changes in positive alcohol expectancies during adolescence. Covariance and mean structure analysis were used to model change in the predictors and in alcohol expectancies in a sample of southern California schoolchildren followed from Grades 5 to 10 (N = 3,580)...

School-based drug prevention programs have been criticized on methodologic grounds because the unit of analysis is often not the unit of randomization, thus increasing the likelihood of Type I errors. Application of multilevel analytic strategies appropriately corrects this biasing tendency. This study demonstrates the practical use of such analysi...

This study examines whether the age of initiation of alcohol use mediates the effects of other variables that predict alcohol misuse among adolescents and also whether the age of initiation of alcohol use accounts for known gender differences in the severity of alcohol misuse. Data were taken from an ethnically diverse sample of 808 (412 male) stud...

An assumption of social inoculation theory is that adolescents are not motivated to begin using alcohol but that they lack the appropriate social skills to refuse it. Refusal skills may, therefore, predict subsequent alcohol use only when adolescents believe that drinking is inappropriate. Hypothesis 1, therefore, was that 7th-grade refusal skills...

The present study utilized a longitudinal design to assess whether self-consistency or self-enhancement motives are predictive of future smoking onset. Participants were 1,222 nonsmoking 5th through 8th graders who were followed into the next academic year. The results showed that teens who were above the median in similarity between their self-ima...

The present study utilized a longitudinal design to assess whether self-consistency or self-enhancement motives are predictive of future smoking onset. Participants were 1, 222 nonsmoking 5th through 8th graders who were followed into the next academic year. The results showed that teens who were above the median in similarity between their self-im...

Recent research suggests that the success of social influence prevention programs is due to enhancing an adolescent's ability to resist passive social pressure (e.g., social modeling and overestimation of peer use), and is not due to teaching refusal skills for combating active social pressure (i.e., alcohol and drug offers). Using 4 waves of longi...

Although previous studies have suggested the inadequacy of the two-factor models of positive and negative symptoms in schizophrenia, confirmatory testing of the putative three-factor models is needed. Using a sample of 193 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, this study tested the relative goodness-of-fit of one-, two-, and three-factor models...

In this study, the authors compared group members' and group outsiders' susceptibility to the influence of their friends' smoking. Ss were nonsmokers in Grade 7 who were observed for 1 year. Consistent with their hypothesis, the authors found that group outsiders (Ss who did not have reciprocal friends) were affected more by the smoking of their be...

Outcome research has shown that drug prevention programs based on theories of social influence often prevent the onset of adolescent drug use. However, little is known empirically about the processes through which they have their effects. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate intervening mechanism theories of two program models for preve...

In this study, the authors compared group members' and group outsiders' susceptibility to the influence of their friends' smoking. Ss were nonsmokers in Grade 7 who were observed for 1 year. Consistent with their hypothesis, the authors found that group outsiders (Ss who did not have reciprocal friends) were affected more by the smoking of their be...

Missing data problems have been a thorn in the side of prevention researchers for years. Although some solutions for these problems have been available in the statistical literature, these solutions have not found their way into mainstream prevention research. This chapter is meant to serve as an introduction to the systematic application of the mi...

The objective of this chapter is to introduce latent transition analysis (LTA) to the substance use prevention research community. LTA is a new methodological technique for testing stage-sequential models, such as models of substance use onset. LTA estimates several different sets of parameters. One of these sets is the transition probability matri...

The present study addresses diffusion of a psychosocial-based substance abuse prevention program, including: (a) teacher adoption, implementation, and maintenance; (b) teacher characteristics associated with implementation; (c) the relationship between integrity of program delivery and program outcomes; and (d) the effectiveness of teacher training...

Evaluations of psychological interventions are often criticized because of differential attrition, which is cited as a severe threat to validity. The present study shows that differential attrition is not a problem unless the mechanism causing the attrition is inaccessible (unavailable for analysis). With a simulation study, we show that conclusion...

This longitudinal investigation disentangles social projection from social conformity as mechanisms underlying the false consensus effect. Adolescent alcohol use was the context for the study. Self-reports of own alcohol consumption and estimates of the prevalence of peer use of alcohol were collected at two time points separated by approximately 1...

This study reports the results of a test of the quality of program delivery (program integrity) as a variable that may moderate the effectiveness of alcohol prevention programs. Two theory-based programs, Resistance Training and Normative Education, were delivered to fifth-grade students who were then tested on program relevant mediating variables....

Two strategies for preventing the onset of alcohol abuse, and marijuana and cigarette use were tested in junior high schools in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, California. The first strategy taught skills to refuse substance use offers. The second strategy corrected erroneous normative perceptions about prevalence and acceptability of use among pe...

Social influence is central to models of adolescent substance use. Nonetheless, researchers fail to delineate the various forms of social influence. A framework that distinguishes between active (explicit drug offers) and passive (social modeling and overestimation of friends' use) social pressure was tested. The effect of these processes on alcoho...

Social influence is central to models of adolescent substance use. Nonetheless, researchers fail to delineate the various forms of social influence. A framework that distinguishes between active (explicit drug offers) and passive (social modeling and overestimation of friends' use) social pressure was tested. The effect of these processes on alcoho...

This article illustrates the use of latent transition analysis (LTA), a methodology for testing stage-sequential models of individual growth. LTA is an outgrowth of latent class theory and is a particular type of latent Markov model emphasizing the use of multiple manifest indicators. LTA is used to compare the fit of two models of early adolescent...

One-year follow-up data from three seventh-grade cohorts of Project SMART were examined to assess the effects of two social psychology-based programs within each of six subgroups: males, females, Asians, blacks, Hispanics, and whites. The three cohorts (total N = 5,070) were those receiving curriculum or serving as controls as seventh-graders in 19...

Three methods of use of estimate tobacco products experimentation were examined in nineteen schools (thirteen junior high schools and six high schools). Convergent and discriminant validity of measures of student experimentation of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco were assessed using Campbell and Fiske's (1959) criteria to analyze a multitrait-mult...

The relationship between social environmental variables and psychological, physical, and speech dysfunction after laryngectomy surgery was examined. The relationships between these categories of dysfunction and the following three social environmental factors were examined: (1) acceptance and emotional support from family and friends; (2) disease-s...

Four activity participation variables (clubs, sports, church, and parties); two indices of "risk-taking" (preference for risk-taking, getting into trouble at school); three demographic variables (sex, ethnic group, socioeconomic status); and two drug use variables (trial of cigarettes and alcohol) were examined as correlates and prospective predict...

Research is needed to identify risk factors specifically associated with the development of substance abuse. The current study explored the possibility that adolescents classified as having a problem behavior prone orientation (Type II) are predisposed to more rapid alcohol use onset compared to more normally socialized (Type I) adolescents. It was...

Drug abuse prevention researchers are increasingly concerned with validating assessments of adolescent behavioral resistance skills. This paper describes a procedure in which five people representing three distinct perspectives observed a student's behavior in a role play alcohol offer situation. Each rater then evaluated the student's skill at ref...

Two drug abuse prevention curricula were tested to determine their efficacy in preventing the onset of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use among adolescents. The first program focused on prevention through social pressure resistance training. The second featured affective education approaches to prevention. Curricula were tested on seventh grade st...

This study examines the effects of alcohol use prevention curricula designed to have differential impact on hypothesized mediating variables. Three curricula, one which focused on teaching individuals social pressure resistance skills, one which focused on solidifying conservative group norms, and one which had a goal of increasing student understa...

The purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which the use of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana by young adolescents can be described using a common theoretical model. Structural models were created in which psychosocial variables hierarchically predicted the use of each substance. The fit of a model in which paths from predictor variable...

Even though resistance skills training is a fundamental component of many social influence prevention programs, few researchers have adequately evaluated whether such training results in improved resistance skills. This study evaluated the immediate effects of resistance skills training in Project AAPT, a school-based alcohol use prevention program...

Patients newly diagnosed with hematologic malignancies were followed for a 6-month treatment period to assess compliance with three regimen requirements for cancer therapy: anti-neoplastic medication self-administered intermittently, supportive medication self-administered daily, and monthly clinic appointments. The effect on compliance of three in...

92 patients (aged 18–86 yrs) newly diagnosed with hematologic malignancies were followed for 6 mo to assess compliance with 3 regimen requirements for cancer therapy: antineoplastic medication self-administered intermittently, supportive medication self-administered daily, and monthly clinic appointments. The effect on compliance of 3 intervention...

This study compared two strategies for preventing cigarette smoking among high-school students. One strategy emphasized social-pressure resistance skills, while the other focused on education about health concerns which are relevant to high-school students. Additionally, the use of same-age peer leaders and the use of familiar models in media prese...

We examined the effects of health locus of control beliefs (self-, doctor, and chance control) and expectations of treatment efficacy on short-term psychological adjustment in a sample of newly diagnosed cancer patients. The role of these beliefs and expectations in moderating the relation between (perceived and actual) disease severity and depress...

The purpose of this study was to examine psychosocial predictors of self-initiated smoking cessation among high school students. Students from nine high schools were pretested using a questionnaire which assessed smoking behavior, beliefs about positive and negative consequences of smoking, moral attitudes toward smoking, normative expectations abo...

It is not always possible, especially in large-scale evaluation research, to ensure that random assignment will produce groups that are comparable on any number of potentially important factors. Typically, gaining comparability has been achieved only at the expense of random assignment. A method is presented that allows multivariate comparability w...

The present article describes an evaluation of a self-report questionnaire administered to whole classrooms of 7th graders. Using the test-retest reliability matrix (based on concepts of Cronbach and Campbell and Fiske, eight of nine drug-use indices appeared to have acceptable to good reliability. The three measures included in the test-retest rel...

Based on the self-presentation assumption that behavior is designed to gain the approval and/or avoid the disapproval of others (Jellison & Arkin, 1977; Jellison & Gentry, 1978), it was hypothesized (1) that people imagining themselves failing to display an emotion that was situationally appropriate would expect less reward/more punishment from oth...