A large body of work has examined factors that push and pull youth to drop out. However, a relatively minimal amount of work has examined whether and how these factors cluster in individuals' lives preceding or concurrent to leaving school. This study used Latent Class Analysis with a national sample (N = 1,942) to examine how push, pull, and…

Video games have the potential to be contexts for moral learning. We investigated whether "Quandary," a video game designed to promote ethical thinking and moral considerations for decision-making, would help promote positive skills such as perspective taking and empathy in adolescents. We examined the effect of playing…

Surveys were administered to adolescents (N = 144) to determine if young people varied based on the type of long-term aims they held. Using cluster analysis, four groups emerged from the data: youth without clear long-term aims, youth with self-oriented long-term aims, youth with other-oriented long-term aims, and youth with both self- and…

Cluster analyses and hierarchical linear modeling were used to investigate the impact of perceptions of connectedness to family, school, and neighborhood contexts on academic and psycho-social outcomes for 437 urban ethnically diverse adolescents. Five profiles of connectedness to family, school, and neighborhood were identified. Two profiles were…

This multivariate panel study examines longer-term effects of a prevention program on trajectories of alcohol misuse and related risk factors. Analyses showed susceptibility, exposure, and alcohol misuse increased mostly linearly across adolescence and covaried positively within and across time, arguing that they exist in a mutually reinforcing…

This study applied individual growth trajectory analyses and person-oriented analysis to identify common profiles of out-of-school activity engagement trajectories among racially and ethnically diverse inner city teens (N = 1,430). On average, teens exhibited declining trajectories of participation in school-based and team sports activities and…

School readiness assessment is a prominent feature of early childhood education. Because the construct of readiness is multifaceted, we examined children's patterns on multiple indicators previously found to be both theoretically and empirically linked to school readiness: social skill, interactions with parents, problem behavior, and performance…