Rebecca Dudovitz

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · School of Medicine

Objectives To better understand impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic and social disruptions on families, we analyzed qualitative data capturing perspectives from parents of young children. Methods This study analyzes interviews of parents of children aged 1-3.5 years at enrollment, recruited from four primary care systems servin...

Background Positive childhood experiences (PCEs) are supportive relationships and environments associated with improved health when aggregated into composite scores. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), a reciprocal measure to PCEs, are associated with worse health in aggregate scores and when disaggregated into measures of specific ACE types (her...

Importance Intergenerational cycles of adversity likely increase one’s risk of criminal legal system involvement, yet associations with potential contributors, such as parents’ adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and positive childhood experiences (PCEs), have not been explored. Objective To investigate the association of parents’ ACEs and PCEs w...

The success of personal non-pharmaceutical interventions as a public health strategy requires a high level of compliance from individuals in private social settings. Strategies to increase compliance in these hard-to-reach settings depend upon a comprehensive understanding of the patterns and predictors of protective social behavior. Social cogniti...

Background: Some patterns of cannabis use may presage risk for long-term negative effects. We examined associations between a novel adolescent cannabis misuse scale and early-adult life course outcomes. Methods: We performed a secondary data analysis of a cohort of Los Angeles, CA high school students from grade 9 through age 21. Participants re...

Purpose School social support is associated with improved adolescent wellbeing. However, positive school relationships were potentially disrupted when schools transitioned to distance learning in 2020 to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This study investigated associations among perceived distance learning school support, mental health, social-emot...

Objective : Expanding access to extracurricular activities (EA) may help address the growing mental health needs of children and caregivers. Evidence supports that EA may benefit child mental health, but few studies explore whether this association is influenced by child and EA factors. Further, the impact of EA on caregivers remains unknown. Meth...

The study identifies factors that limit effective institutional responses to domestic violence (DV) in Kyrgyzstan, in the context of recent legislative actions aimed at reducing DV through improvements in law enforcement, judicial processes and provision of social services. The study uses qualitative, grounded theory methods to analyse interviews a...

Background and objectives: Academic tracking is a widespread practice, separating students by prior academic performance. Clustering lower performing students together may unintentionally reinforce risky peer social networks, school disengagement, and risky behaviors. If so, mixing lower performing with high performing youth ("untracking") may be...

Background: Adolescent behaviors and academic outcomes are thought to be shaped by school climate. We sought to identify longitudinal associations between school climate measures and downstream health and academic outcomes. Methods: Data from a longitudinal survey of public high school students in Los Angeles were analyzed. Eleventh-grade health...

Importance Interventions directly targeting social factors, such as education, may have the potential to greatly improve health. Objective To examine the association of attending a high-performing public charter high school with rates of substance use disorder and physical and mental health. Design, Setting, and Participants This cohort study use...

“Bring Change 2 Mind” (BC2M) high school clubs may destigmatize mental illness among club members, but clubs’ (1) reach and impact on non-club members at the same school, (2) connection to student help-seeking attitudes, and (3) mechanisms by which they destigmatize mental illness, are unknown. This community-partnered evaluation involved pre/post...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0251332.].

Background Early childhood represents a sensitive developmental period when trauma-informed care may mitigate the effects of trauma on developmental and health outcomes. However, few interventions use a low-literacy scalable approach to improve child trauma knowledge and attitudes among parents and early childcare and education caregivers. Methods...

Background: Little is known regarding utilization of school-based health centers (SBHCs) during prolonged school closures, such as those that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. We sought to compare SBHC utilization before and after pandemic-related school closures across a network of SBHCs affiliated with a large Southern Californian urban sch...

Background Youth are arrested at high rates in the United States, however long-term health effects of arrest remain unmeasured. We sought to describe the sociodemographic characteristics and health of adults who were arrested at various ages among a nationally representative sample. Methods Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Ad...

INTRODUCTION The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic substantially disrupted well-child visits and vaccinations in the United States.1,2 Parent hesitancy for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines3 and widespread vaccine misinformation during the pandemic may have affected parent confidence in routine childhood vaccines. Little is known beyond two st...

Objectives: National data on the health of children and adolescents exposed to commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) are lacking, during both adolescence and adulthood. Using nationally representative data, we examined the health of male and female adolescents in grades 7-12 who experienced CSE exposure and subsequent adult health outcomes and acce...

Adolescence is a critical transition period that sets the stage for adulthood and future health outcomes. Marked by key developmental milestones in brain maturation, increasing independence from parents, and greater connections to peers, adolescence is also a time of heightened risk for behavioral health problems, including substance use, violence,...

Youths who are negatively affected by social determinants of health suffer adverse effects like increased risks of chronic health conditions and mental health issues. Part 2 of this series describes the adverse effects social determinants of health can have on vulnerable children around the world. Available for purchase at https://shop.aap.org/pedi...

Background and objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures may have disrupted school-related supports and services important to children's wellbeing. However, we lack national data about U.S. children's wellbeing and family priorities for school-related services. We sought to determine a) children's social-emotional wellbeing and...

Background: Chronic stress and depression disproportionately affect families experiencing poverty, and likely contribute to disparities in early childhood developmental outcomes. Developing strategies to address chronic stress and depression may help mitigate these disparities. Early Head Start (EHS) and Head Start (HS) programs provide an importa...

OBJECTIVES Discrimination has been shown to have profound negative effects on mental and behavioral health and may influence these outcomes early in adulthood. We aimed to examine short-term, long-term, and cumulative associations between different types of interpersonal discrimination (eg, racism, sexism, ageism, and physical appearance discrimina...

Purpose Understanding the full impact of COVID-19 on U.S. children, families, and communities is critical to (a) document the scope of the problem, (b) identify solutions to mitigate harm, and (c) build more resilient response systems. We sought to develop a research agenda to understand the short- and long-term mechanisms and impacts of the COVID-...

Objective Unstructured parental comments could solicit important information about children's asthma, yet are rarely captured in clinical asthma questionnaires. This mixed-methods study describes parents’ written responses to an open-ended question in a validated asthma questionnaire. Methods The Pediatric Asthma Control and Communication Instrume...

Background: School-based health centers (SBHCs) can integrate health and educational services to achieve common goals of student wellness and success. As no method exists to quantify the degree of integration for clinics and partner schools, this study aimed to design such a measure. Methods: Measure items were drafted from the literature. Eleve...

With 2.3 million individuals incarcerated in the United States, incarceration remains a pressing social influence on health. While risk factors for incarceration are known, research has been slow to identify protective factors. Characterizing adolescent protective and risk factors for incarceration outcomes can inform interventions to prevent incar...

Objective: The objective of this study was to examine parenting styles (observed parent-child interactions via the Two-Bag Task) associated with young children's socioemotional outcomes, comparing children from Mexican-American and African American families with children from their White counterparts. Methods: The Early Childhood Longitudinal St...

Objectives Although racial stigma in school is associated with adolescent risky health behaviors, there are no studies investigating how gender stigma relates to adolescent risky health behaviors among low-income, minority youth. We sought to determine whether gender stigma awareness is associated with adolescent risky health behaviors (delinquency...

Background and objective: Racial disparities in diagnosis and receipt of services for early childhood developmental delay (DD) are well known but studies have had difficulties distinguishing contributing patient, healthcare system, and physician factors from underlying prevalence. We examine rates of physician diagnoses of DD by preschool and kind...

BACKGROUND Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students and teachers have transitioned to online learning. The transition required changes in teaching practices to accommodate for an online learning environment. However, there are no studies characterizing physical educators' and school health experts' perspectives on physical education via distance lear...

Objectives School racial/ethnic segregation in U.S. schoolsDifferences in school racial/ethnic composition may increase health disparities by concentrating educational opportunities that confer long-term health benefits in schools serving predominantly wwhite students. For racial minority students, high concentrations of white students may increase...

Background Schools and school climate are thought to influence academic outcomes as well as child and adolescent development, health and well-being. We sought to examine the relationship between several aspects of the school climate with adolescent social-emotional health outcomes. Methods We analysed data from the Reducing Inequities through Soci...

IntroductionChildren may experience medical trauma when undergoing medical procedures even when procedures are minor. While virtual reality (VR) is effective for managing procedural pain and anxiety, few studies address how families feel about using VR. We explore pediatric patient and guardian views regarding the acceptability of using VR during p...

Objective Chaos in the home is associated with worse childhood behaviors. We hypothesize chaos in the school environment might also be associated with teen risk behaviors. Methods We analyzed data from the Reducing Inequities through Social and Educational change follow up (RISE-UP) Study, a natural experiment designed to examine the impact of hig...

Objectives: Children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are at increased risk for poor mental health. The etiology of this risk is not clear, though may be related to the disease, its treatment, and/or the experience of these. We sought to 1) describe the challenges that children with IBD and their families face in living with a chronic conditi...

Access to firearms and perceived unsafe school environments are associated with negative adolescent health outcomes. Whether widespread acceptance of firearms alters these associations, however, is unknown. To address this literature gap, we examined whether peer acceptance of firearms moderates associations between personal firearm access and heal...

Objectives: Parental low oral health literacy is thought to contribute to child oral health disparities. Few large-scale interventions can improve oral health literacy for diverse, high-risk populations. We sought to determine whether an oral health literacy intervention aimed at parents of children attending Head Start programs improved oral heal...

Objective: Although national asthma guidelines recommend use of validated questionnaires to improve asthma care, little is known about the extent to which these questionnaires are patient-centered. This qualitative study evaluated parent perceptions of a validated asthma questionnaire. Methods: We administered the Pediatric Asthma Control and Co...

Introduction: Untreated vision problems are associated with poor school performance. Whether providing glasses alone improves performance, however, remains unknown. We sought to test whether receiving glasses was associated with improved school performance for low-income minority students in Los Angeles. Methods: From 2017-2018, we analyzed achi...

In Reply We thank Wong et al and Riehm and Feder for their comments on our study¹ reporting the association of team sports participation in adolescence and long-term mental health outcomes among individuals exposed to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). To address the comments by Wong et al requesting clarification of the timing of the main varia...

Objectives. To test whether providing information to parents about their child’s academic performance and behavior in school will lead to lower rates of adolescent substance use. Methods. We performed a randomized controlled trial in Los Angeles, California. We enrolled 318 seventh graders and their parents in 2014 and collected data through 2016....

Importance Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with long-term poor mental health. Less is known about factors that improve long-term mental health among those with ACEs. Objective To evaluate, among those exposed to ACEs, whether team sports participation during adolescence is associated with better mental health in adulthood and w...

Objectives Schools are thought to have an important impact on adolescent behaviors, but the mechanisms are not well understood. We hypothesize that there are measurable constructs of peer- and teacher-related extrinsic motivations for adolescent behaviors and sought to develop measures of school culture that would capture these constructs. Methods...

In Reply In a Letter to the Editor, Odom insightfully notes that school mobility is an understudied factor that may influence adolescent health by disrupting adolescent social networks and reducing their social capital. Alternatively, mobility may be a marker for risky behaviors, as students often change schools because of academic or behavioral di...

Importance Although school environments are thought to influence health behaviors, experimental data assessing causality are lacking, and which aspects of school environments may be most important for adolescent health are unknown. Objective To test whether exposure to high-performing schools is associated with risky adolescent health behaviors....

Objective: We sought to quantify the association between child incarceration in the U.S. and subsequent adult health outcomes. Methods: We analyzed National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health data from 1,727 adult (Wave IV) participants first incarcerated at age <25. Using Chi-squared tests and multivariate logistic regression mode...

Objectives: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by challenges in social communication and interaction and restricted or repetitive behavior, interests, or activities. Although ASD symptoms generally manifest in early childhood, many individuals experience delays accessing an autism diagnosis and related se...

Objectives: Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) face competing demands when caring for their child and fulfilling family commitments. It remains unknown whether family obligations and parental stress might decrease the use of intervention services for young children with ASD. Methods: The current study is a secondary analysis...

Purpose Although incarceration may have life-long negative health effects, little is known about associations between child incarceration and subsequent adult health outcomes. Design/methodology/approach We analyzed data from 14,689 adult participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to compare adult...

Purpose: Parenting style is strongly associated with adolescent health. However, little is known about how school disciplinary style relates to health. We categorized adolescents' perceptions of their schools as authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, or neglectful, and test whether perceived school disciplinary style is associated with health....

Objectives: Although dental decay is preventable, it remains the most common pediatric chronic disease. We describe a public health approach to implementing a scalable and sustainable school-based oral health program for low-income urban children. Methods: The Los Angeles Trust for Children's Health, a nonprofit affiliated with the Los Angeles U...

Purpose: We examined whether standardized test scores and grades are related to risky behaviors among low-income minority adolescents and whether social networks and social-emotional factors explained those relationships. Methods: We analyzed data from 929 high school students exposed by natural experiment to high- or low-performing academic env...

Objective: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" is a simple, commonly asked question that might provide insight into adolescent well-being. Career aspirations might reflect an adolescent's sense of identity, hope for the future, and self-efficacy, all of which are critical to identifying at-risk youth and intervening on risky behaviors. Howe...

Objective: Studies suggest adolescent substance use aligns with academic and behavioral self-concept (whether teens think of themselves as good or bad students and as rule followers or rule breakers) as well as peer and adult social networks. Schools are an important context in which self-concept and social networks develop, but it remains unclear...

Background and objectives: Despite the widespread epidemic of mass incarceration in the US, relatively little literature exists examining the longitudinal relationship between youth incarceration and adult health outcomes. We sought to quantify the association of youth incarceration with subsequent adult health outcomes. Methods: We analyzed dat...

Background: Poor academic (eg, "I am a bad student") and behavioral (eg, "I am a troublemaker") self-concepts are strongly linked to adolescent substance use. Social networks likely influence self-concept. However, little is understood about the role teachers and athletic coaches play in shaping both academic and behavioral self-concepts. Methods...

Background and objectives: Current recommendations emphasize developmental screening and surveillance to identify developmental delays (DDs) for referral to early intervention (EI) services. Many young children without DDs, however, are at high risk for poor developmental and behavioral outcomes by school entry but are ineligible for EI. We develo...

Objectives: Up to 20 % of school-age children have a vision problem identifiable by screening, over 80 % of which can be corrected with glasses. While vision problems are associated with poor school performance, few studies describe whether and how corrective lenses affect academic achievement and health. Further, there are virtually no studies ex...

Objective: Individual academic achievement is a well-known predictor of adult health, and addressing education inequities may be critical to reducing health disparities. Disparities in school quality are well documented. However, we lack nationally representative studies evaluating the impact of school quality on adult health. We aim to determine...

Purpose: Grit, defined as "working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress," is strongly associated with academic achievement and life success and may also be associated with health outcomes and behaviors. We examined predictors of grit, and the association betw...

Introduction: Studies suggest students who are substantially older than the average age for their grade engage in risky health behaviors, including substance use. However, most studies do not account for the distinct reasons why students are old for their grade (ie, grade retention vs delayed school entry) or for their pubertal stage. Thus, whethe...

At-school substance use is associated with increased rates of violence and delinquency. However, whether at-school substance use is a useful marker for other serious health risks and whether this association varies by gender or substance is still unclear. We analyzed data from the national 2011 Youth Risk Behaviors Survey of 15,698 ninth to 12th gr...

Objectives: We sought to understand incarcerated youths' perspectives on the role of protective factors and risk factors for juvenile offending. Methods: We performed an in-depth qualitative analysis of interviews (conducted October-December 2013) with 20 incarcerated youths detained in the largest juvenile hall in Los Angeles. Results: The ad...

Background: About 20% of school-age children have a vision problem identifiable by screening, over 80% of which can be corrected with glasses. Visual deficits have been posited as contributing to poor academic performance, disruptive behavior, and even school disengagement/dropout. However few studies investigate whether correcting vision is associ...

Introduction: Dental caries disproportionately affect low-income minority children, contributing to chronic disease and school absenteeism. To address this disparity, the Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health piloted a universal school-based oral health screening and fluoride varnishing program in two public elementary schools serving low-income...

Objectives: We examined whether exposure to high-performing schools reduces the rates of risky health behaviors among low-income minority adolescents and whether this is due to better academic performance, peer influence, or other factors. Methods: By using a natural experimental study design, we used the random admissions lottery into high-perf...

Text messaging is an increasingly common mode of communication, especially among adolescents, and frequency of texting may be a measure of one's sociability. This study examined how text messaging ("texting") frequency and academic performance are associated with adolescent sexual behaviors. A cross-sectional survey was administered to students at...

Background: Adolescence is a critical developmental period for self-concept (role identity). Cross-sectional studies link self-concept's behavioral conduct domain (whether teens perceive themselves as delinquent) with adolescent substance use. If self-concept actually drives substance use, then it may be an important target for intervention. In th...

• To improve insecticide-treated net use for the prevention of malaria by involving the community in the creation and implementation of an intervention. • Malaria is the leading cause of illness and death in children younger than 5 years and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. • If used, ITNs reduce malaria cases by more than half and all-cause m...

Malaria is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in children younger than 5 years old and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) reduce clinical malaria by more than 50% and all cause mortality in young children by 15% to 30%. However, use of these nets is poor across sub-Saharan Africa, limiting the potential...

Ebstein anomaly of the tricuspid valve is an uncommon congenital heart defect. We report two unrelated patients with Ebstein anomaly and duplication of the distal long arm of chromosome 15 (15q22 --> qter and 15q24 --> qter). Duplication of 15q is a well-described phenotype that includes congenital heart defects, and these are the first cases with...