The Leadership Project uses community partnerships to initiate a systematic response to drug and alcohol use, violence, and crime among teenagers in Alexandria, New Zealand. Aspects of the project include adventure-based violence intervention and counseling in the high school and leadership training at an outdoor education center. Preliminary…

This paper describes how individual elementary schools can bridge the gap between research and practice in their beginning reading programs. Review of research based programs, instructional strategies, and school-based assessment is followed by reports of how two schools organized and used early reading assessment data to show reading growth,…

This article profiles SpecialCare training, a model of training for home- and center-based childcare providers that fosters collaboration between caregivers and early intervention and early childhood special education personnel to support successful placement of children with disabilities in inclusive child care settings. The training offers a…

Healthy Families Alaska is a program that identifies families at risk of having children with poor health outcomes and provides intensive paraprofessional home visitation services specific to individual family needs and culturally relevant to Native families. Program goals, elements of effective home visitations, enrollment procedures, service…

A study of 150 children and adolescents with reactive attachment disorder found that inpatient admission was related to limited psychosocial strengths, previous hospitalization, and history of sexual abuse. Most children admitted to inpatient care were rural and had never received community-based services. Implications for public health education,…

Presents a meta-analytic review of evaluations of state-funded preschool programs over 20 years. Identifies several methodological flaws but also suggests that pattern of findings offers modest support for positive impact in improving children's developmental competence, improving later school attendance and performance, and reducing subsequent…

Data were analyzed from 66 young children with autism served by 25 different early intervention consultants and receiving parent-managed interventions. Parent-managed intensive interventions resulted in progress for 60 children for mental age, adaptive behavior, and language skills. Interventions did not reproduce results from clinic-based…

This paper reports on assessment and treatment of food refusal for four inpatient boys (ages 2,3,3, and 9) receiving tube feedings. It used a contingency contacting procedure extended by a component analysis. Data suggest that food refusal appeared to be maintained primarily by negative reinforcement contingencies. Caregiver responses indicated a…

The association between perceptions about condom use among one's peers, beliefs about new HIV treatments, and HIV sexual risk behavior was examined in a large urban sample ( N = 454) of gay and bisexual men in the Southeast. Results partially confirmed the hypothesis that men who endorsed new HIV treatment beliefs would report lower norms for…

Cultural competency in the delivery of mental health services has gained considerable momentum. This momentum has been accompanied by questions about the meaning, usefulness, and precision of cultural competency. The author argues that cultural competency is composed of general processes (scientific mindedness, dynamic sizing, and culture-specific…

While psychology has tended to focus on urban issues in research and practice, rural areas have undergone a series of changes in recent years that have increased the need for behavioral health services. A variety of social and economic factors has contributed both to the increasing needs and to the inability of the existing services to meet them.…

Whereas mentoring programs are well received as support services, very little empirical research has been conducted to assess the effectiveness of these programs to meet the diverse needs of different special populations of youth. Potentially useful theoretical orientations (attachment, parental acceptance-rejection, social support, adult…

Through forming a collaborative relationship to develop, pilot and evaluate an innovative bio-psycho-behavioral (BPB) HIV prevention intervention, capacity was built in developing an effective intervention and conducting community based research at both the California Prostitutes Prevention and Education Project (CAL-PEP) and the University of…

We investigated the relationship between three potential markers for reading difficulties (phonemic awareness, verbal short-term memory, and rapid automatized naming) and students' responsiveness to Reading Recovery instruction. At pretest, students' most prevalent weakness was on phonemic awareness, but more than half were below average on rapid…

The purpose of this study was to contribute to and strengthen previous work that examined the long-lasting effects of Reading Recovery in statewide efforts aimed at bolstering early literacy achievement and reducing early learning difficulties. Specifically, the study explored the literacy achievement of Reading Recovery participants whose series…