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Objective: Male allies play an important role in sexual assault prevention, yet many college sexual assault prevention programs struggle to recruit and retain men. This study aims to identify barriers to recruitment and retention of male sexual assault prevention peer educators. Participants: Seventeen undergraduate male student leaders participated in this study during summer 2018. Methods: Semi-structured phone interviews were conducted, recorded, and transcribed. Response data were thematically analyzed. Results: Barriers to recruitment include perceived gender norms and discomfort with the topic of sexual assault. Barriers to retention include male peer educators' perception that women are resistant to men discussing sexual assault. Suggestions for improving recruitment and retention efforts are also identified. Conclusions: Recruitment and retention of male sexual assault prevention peer educators may require recruitment approaches that are tailored to men and programmatic changes that position men as allies in sexual assault prevention.

Background: Foreign-born children rarely use traditional school mental health services. Comprehensive programs that combine mental health services with academic, economic, and socioemotional supports reach more foreign-born children and improve wellbeing. However, little practical guidance exists regarding how to best combine these diverse services., Methods: To identify essential service components and their organization, we interviewed 92 parents, school staff, mental health providers, and community agency staff from 5 school-linked mental health programs designed specifically to serve immigrant and refugee youth., Results: Foreign-born parents did not distinguish between academic, behavioral, and emotional help for their children; these western categorizations of functioning were not meaningful to them. Consequently, programs needed to combine 4 components, organized in a pyramid: family engagement, assistance with basic needs, assistance with adaptation to a new culture, and emotional and behavioral supports. Family engagement was the foundation upon which all other services depended. Assistance with economic and cultural stressors directly promoted emotional wellbeing and helped parents trust clinical mental health interventions., Conclusions: Specific strategies to implement the 4 essential components include home visits by program staff, a one-stop parent center located in the school to help with basic needs, working with cultural brokers, and informed consent procedures that clearly explain recommended care without requiring immigrant and refugee parents to internalize western conceptualizations of psychopathology. Future evaluations should assess the cost and effectiveness of these strategies. These data are essential to advocate payment for these nonclinical services by traditional funding mechanisms., (© 2019, American School Health Association.)

Over 60% of US school districts implement court diversion programs to address chronic unexcused absenteeism, yet the effectiveness of these programs is not known. We evaluated whether the Truancy Intervention Program (TIP) improved the school attendance of students in grades 7-10 in a metropolitan county in the Midwestern USA. Similar to most truancy court diversion programs, TIP consisted of three increasingly intrusive steps: (1) a parent meeting, (2) a hearing to develop an attendance contract, and (3) a petition to juvenile court. The intervention group consisted of students from the intervention county who had been referred to TIP between 2006 and 2009. The comparison group was drawn from a contiguous, same-sized, and socio-demographically similar county that petitioned truant students directly to court. To construct the comparison group, we applied multi-level matching procedures to linked, individual-level administrative data from eight state and local agencies for all public school students in the state between 2004 and 2015. Using the matched samples, we conducted difference-in-differences analyses to identify program effects for two intervention groups: all students referred to TIP and students whose family participated in the group parent meeting. In the 4 years after the intervention, the intervention groups had similar or slightly lower attendance than the comparison groups. However, most coefficients were not statistically significant, and there was no consistent pattern of effects across different samples and different specifications of the intervention. This pattern of findings was not robust enough to conclude that the program influenced school attendance.

We used data from a nationally representative sample of US adolescents in school grades 7 through 12 to explore the effects of public and private religiosity on initiation, escalation, and cessation of smoking. We found that adolescents' decisions to experiment with smoking are influenced by both their individual practice of their faith and by participation in a larger faith community. However, the effects of private and public religiosity are specific to different decision points on the smoking uptake process. Private religiosity was protective against initiation of regular smoking among nonsmokers. It also was protective against initiation of experimental smoking but only when the young person frequently attended religious services or a religious youth group. Although private religiosity appeared to discourage the uptake of smoking, it was unrelated to reduction or cessation once a young person has become addicted to cigarettes. In contrast, public religiosity did predict reduction and cessation of cigarette use among regular smokers. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the domains in which religiosity are important extend beyond the individual and include religious institutions.

Increasing evidence shows that when adolescents feel cared for by people at their school and feel like a part of their school, they are less likely to use substances, engage in violence, or initiate sexual activity at an early age. However, specific strategies to increase students' connectedness to school have not been studied. This study examined the association between school connectedness and the school environment to identify ways to increase students' connectedness to school. Data from the in-school and school administrator surveys of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (75,515 students in 127 schools) and hierarchical linear models were used to estimate the association between school characteristics and the average level of school connectedness in each school. Positive classroom management climates, participation in extracurricular activities, tolerant disciplinary policies, and small school size were associated positively with higher school connectedness.

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND The US education system must find creative and effective ways to foster the healthy development of the approximately 2 million newly arrived immigrant and refugee adolescents, many of whom contend with language barriers, limited prior education, trauma, and discrimination. We identify research priorities for promoting the school success of these youth. METHODS The study used the 4-phase priority-setting method of the Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative. In the final stage, 132 researchers, service providers, educators, and policymakers based in the United States were asked to rate the importance of 36 research options. RESULTS The highest priority research options (range 1 to 5) were: evaluating newcomer programs (mean = 4.44, SD = 0.55), identifying how family and community stressors affect newly arrived immigrant and refugee adolescents' functioning in school (mean = 4.40, SD = 0.56), identifying teachers' major stressors in working with this population (mean = 4.36, SD = 0.72), and identifying how to engage immigrant and refugee families in their children's education (mean = 4.35, SD = 0.62). CONCLUSION These research priorities emphasize the generation of practical knowledge that could translate to immediate, tangible benefits for schools. Funders, schools, and researchers can use these research priorities to guide research for the highest benefit of schools and the newly arrived immigrant and refugee adolescents they serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]