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Numerous schools are implementing youth violence prevention interventions aimed at enhancing conflict resolution skills without evaluating their effectiveness. Consequently, we formed a community-academic partnership between a New Haven community-based organization and Yale's School of Public Health and Prevention Research Center to examine the impact of an ongoing conflict resolution curriculum in New Haven elementary schools, which had yet to be evaluated. Throughout the 2007-08 school year, 191 children in three schools participated in a universal conflict resolution intervention. We used a quasi-experimental design to examine the impact of the intervention on participants' likelihood of violence, conflict self-efficacy, hopelessness and hostility. Univariate and multivariable analyses were utilized to evaluate the intervention. The evaluation indicates that the intervention had little positive impact on participants' violence-related attitudes and behavior. The intervention reduced hostility scores significantly in School 1 (P less than 0.01; Cohen's d = 0.39) and hopelessness scores in School 3 (P = 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.52); however, the intervention decreased the conflict self-efficacy score in School 2 (P = 0.04; Cohen's d = 0.23) and was unable to significantly change many outcome measures. The intervention's inability to significantly change many outcome measures might be remedied by increasing the duration of the intervention, adding additional facets to the intervention and targeting high-risk children.

This project examines the relationship between prosocial schema, beliefs about gender roles, and alcohol use among first-year engineering majors. I collected two waves of survey data from first-year engineering students at a large Midwestern university in the fall of 2014 (n = 359). Prosocial schema captures the belief systems of individuals in terms of how they identify themselves with positive, socially approved characteristics. I assessed patterns in the use of alcohol as they vary by prosocial schema and whether students use alcohol to cope with discrepancies between prosocial self-schemas and the prosocial characteristics attributed to typical engineers. Findings show that higher scores on prosocial self-schemas result in lower reported binge drinking. This relationship is further clarified by the mediating effects of progressive ideas about women in the workplace. Results suggest that these engineering students do not engage in the traditional style of college "life as a party" and that there is a type of "progressive teetotaler" that emerges as a means of impression management and framed by professionalism tensions in engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]