The study is aimed at examining the relationship between psychological empowerment of women volunteers and their clients in community volunteer projects in Israel. Based on an ecological approach, the study also aimed at examining whether the variables that explain empowerment of women who volunteer also explain empowerment of their clients. The…

Family-centered, community-based programs are particularly suited to support families with at-risk children or maltreated children and achieve family preservation or reunification. In these child protection and child welfare cases, assessment is of great importance to inform decision making. But the implementation of services to support the…

This project explores the beliefs and perspectives of urban adults and youth regarding community violence prevention strategies and identifies points of overlap and differences of opinion that can contribute to the development of successful youth violence prevention programs. We coded transcript data from adults and 10-16-year-old youth from the…

Recent discussions about the conduct of community interventions suggest the importance of developing more comprehensive theorizing about their nature and effects. The present study is an effort to infer how community interventions are theorized by the way they are represented in the peer-reviewed scholarly literature. A coding of a random sample…

Community-based prevention programs strive to foster the composition of positive life stories, in part, by promoting active participation in community settings. This article used life narratives of youth to explore the experience of community participation and showed how such participation influenced their lives. Youth aged 18-19 years who…

Prevention support systems (PSSs) are designed to help communities implement evidence-based practices (EBPs). Little is known about the factors that influence their adoption. In this article, we examined adoption of a PSS for substance abuse prevention called Getting To Outcomes (GTO)[R] among staff in two community coalitions with varying levels…

Self-help support groups (SHSGs) have a valuable role in civic society. However, it is difficult to measure their value through sole use of the positivist approaches that interest policymakers. This is because SHSGs are consumer-driven and voluntary. Thus, they cannot be regulated by research agendas or prescribed like treatment. Although social…

This study explores the relations between neighborhood social capital (neighbor support and social climate), safety concerns (fear of crime and concern for one's child), parenting (solicitation and support), and adolescent antisocial behavior in a sample of 952 parents (742 mothers) and 588 boys and 559 girls from five middle schools (sixth…

Translational research (Pentz, Jasuja, Rohrbach, Sussman, & Bardo, 2006; Woolf, 2008) is concerned with moving advances in prevention science into everyday practice in communities, yet there are few models for ensuring this transfer of knowledge. Communities That Care (CTC) provides a planned, structured, and data-driven system that trains…

Several acculturation theories note the importance of surrounding context, but few studies describe neighborhood influences on immigrant adaptation. The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among neighborhood immigrant concentration, acculturation, and alienation for 151 women aged 44-80 from the former Soviet Union who lived in the…

Few youth suicide prevention programs are theory based and systematically evaluated. This study evaluated the pilot implementation of a community-based youth suicide prevention project guided by an ecological perspective. One hundred fifty-seven adults representing various constituencies from educators to health care providers and 131 ninth-grade…

This study examined the practices of 24 community-based rape prevention programs. Although these programs were geographically dispersed throughout one state, they were remarkably similar in their approach to rape prevention programming. DiMaggio and Powell's (1991) theory of institutional isomorphism was used to explain the underlying causes of…

Youth-adult partnerships (Y-APs) are an innovation being used increasingly as a key strategy for promoting youth development, as well as for building strong programs and communities. This article discusses three pitfalls that can undermine their effectiveness: (1) the assumption that youth should do everything of importance; (2) the belief that…

We describe two interventions designed to encourage community action with youth in a school and a community service setting. The school intervention took place with a Year 10 class, while the community-based intervention took place with a group of same-sex attracted youth. Using a participatory action research framework, youth in both settings…

What distinguishes adolescents who are active in community and political life from those who are not? In an attempt to answer this question, students in their last years of secondary school completed a measure of community and political activities, along with measures of parent and peer interactions, identity development, and adjustment. Cluster…