Stresses the need to align policy with what is known about the importance of certain behaviors in reducing poverty and inequality, focusing on ideology versus reality; the importance of work; behavior as a matter of choice versus opportunity; the influence of marriage on poverty; and how public policy can prevent a widening of the country's…

Summarizes research that shows the benefits of avoiding corporal punishment, putting recent defenses of corporal punishment in perspective, explaining a paradox concerning trends in corporal punishment, and concluding with an estimate of the benefits to children, parents, and society as a whole that could occur if corporal punishment were to…

Examines the literature on preventing firesetting behavior in preadolescents and adolescents, suggesting the need for policies and programs designed to help juveniles by providing community support and stability. Alternatives to juvenile justice interventions include making changes in the home environment, acquiring a greater sense of self, and…

Examines the victimizing behaviors of incarcerated juvenile and young offenders. It was found that 50.9% of all respondents reported victimizing others, with verbal assaults and threats being the most common form of such behaviors. Furthermore, staff-identified "victimizers" were significantly more likely to report victimizing behavior…

The Second Step Violence Prevention Program was implemented and evaluated in a rural elementary school with a population of mostly poor, white students. Teacher ratings indicated that there were significant improvements in ratings of social competence and antisocial behaviors at the intervention school when compared with students at the…

Investigated the connection between emotion and behavior, examining the connection between the construct of emotional intelligence and criminal behavior. Data collected from a group of men and women on probation from prison indicated that people received different socialization with regard to emotions based on gender and race. Results suggest that…

The purpose of this study was to replicate the "basic training" structural model in Patterson's (1982) coercion theory, extending its scope to single-mother families with younger (six- to eight-year-old) boys. Significance of the successful replication was seen to lie in implications for the generalizability of the model across family…

Believing that many antisocial behaviors are symptoms of underlying social/emotional conflicts, a group of Georgia educators chose a therapeutic approach to handling unruly teens. They designed the Gateway Program to focus on academic study, daily group counseling, journal writing, and a system for earning privileges. Placements are decided by an…

Randomly assigned 147 families with aggressive child (age 4 to 9 years) to standard family treatment (SFT) focusing exclusively on parental management or to enhanced family treatment (EFT) that also promoted discussions of adult issues. EFT produced significantly lower dropout rate than SFT overall but particularly for high-adversity families.…

Compared REST (Real Economy System for Teens) program, which combines behavioral treatment and cognitive restructuring, with traditional talk therapy, which uses primarily cognitive restructuring, in treatment of oppositional defiant adolescents. Results showed significantly greater improvement on all target behaviors (room care, personal hygiene,…

A sample of 104 juvenile offenders completed the Gates-McGinitie Reading Test, Stanford Test of Academic Skills, and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. Delinquent youth exhibited deficient academic skills, low average IQs, low socioeconomic status, and disruptive behavior charges. (SK)

Used data on attitudes toward deviance during adolescence to illustrate assessment of psychometric properties of instrument for studying change, compare adequacy of linear and curvilinear growth models, control for time invariant and time-varying covariates, and link overlapping data cohorts. Findings suggest that prodeviant attitudes increased…

Surveyed and interviewed 53 clinicians who work with prison inmates. Results indicated that clinicians used diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder liberally among inmates and felt majority of inmates could be so diagnosed. Large minority of clinicians went beyond Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria and reported…

An analysis of sibling data from the National Youth Survey shows the pitfalls of ignoring issues of independence and demonstrate how conventional covariance structure software can be easily adapted to handle hierarchical models, providing a new approach that models within-level and between-level covariance matrices in familial antisocial behavior.…

Tested the hypothesis that friends are more similar in proactive aggression than in reactive aggression with 185 fourth- to sixth-grade boys and examined interpersonal processes that may account for this similarity. Suggested that proactively aggressive boys tended to select proactively aggressive peers as friends; however, mutual influence…