Research

A family cash transfer in childhood that had long-term effects on individual functioning did not impact the home environment of participants who became parents. Rather, parents in both groups were providing home environments generally conducive to their children’s growth and development.

Using data from surveys of Italian adolescents, researchers looked at the pattern of adolescent coping from just before the pandemic started and then for two more years. As adolescents reported feeling more stress about the pandemic, they reported more symptoms of anxiety and depression, and reported feeling less capable of coping with negative emotions. The findings are important for informing interventions to strengthen coping strategies for adolescents during stressful community-wide events.

COVID-19 has altered adolescents’ opportunities for developing and strengthening interpersonal skills and proficiencies. Using data from adolescents in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom, we examined the relation between internalizing symptoms assessed pre-pandemic or when pandemic-related restrictions were lifted and associated internalizing symptoms during a subsequent restrictive pandemic period.

Researchers studying predictors of adolescents’ adjustment have increasingly focused on temperamental characteristics of self-regulation (e.g., effortful control – EC) and negative emotionality (NE). This study contributed to understanding how different configurations of specific dimensions of NE and EC were associated with aggressive and prosocial behaviors and if these associations differed across genders and three different countries, two of which have seldom been examined.

Researchers examined whether kindergarten conduct problems among mostly population-representative samples of children were associated with increased criminal and related costs across adolescence and adulthood, as well as government and medical services costs in adulthood.

This project aims to advance research on the relationship between economic well-being, wealth, adolescent functioning and mental health.

This study demonstrates how data- and theory-driven methods can be integrated to identify the most important preadolescent risk factors in predicting adolescent mental health.

Food insecurity among adolescents is not static but varies from day to day. This daily variation is greater for economically disadvantaged youth.

This study advances understanding of the developmental paths between the contextual and individual factors critical for adolescent substance use across a wide range of cultural contexts.

Short video on co-regulation, the interactive process by which caring adults (1) provide warm supportive relationships, (2) promote self-regulation through coaching, modeling, and feedback, and (3) structure supportive environments.

In the APA Handbook of Adolescent and Young Adult Development, Jen Lansford and co-authors discuss how parents and their adolescent and young adult offspring observe and participate in parent–offspring interactions in their communities and hold expectations about their own relationships derived in part from culturally shaped expectations.

The purpose of this report is to highlight the insights from our first year that we can glean from plea tracking, describe the cases managed in the Durham Office, and draw attention to any emerging patterns in case characteristics and prosecutorial discretion.

Although there is a breadth of knowledge on child marriage in many low- and middle-income countries, little research and policy discussion exists surrounding child marriage within the United States. Using administrative data from several sources, this study examines how a range of different state-level variables, including political lean, academic performance, median household income, religiosity, population density, minimum age requirements and other state laws, such as parental and judicial consent, and median distance to an abortion clinic are related to variation in child marriage rates across states.

Parent and child endorsement of reactive aggression both predict the emergence of child aggression, but they are rarely studied together and in longitudinal contexts. The present study does so by examining the unique predictive effects of parent and child endorsement of reactive aggression at age 8 on child aggression at age 9 in 1456 children from 13 cultural groups in 9 nations.

The prevalence of arrests for crimes involving guns among young adults in North Carolina with a gun-disqualifying felony record acquired before age 18 suggests that the federal gun prohibitor conferred by a felony record is not highly effective as currently implemented in this population. From a risk-based perspective, these restrictions appear to be justified; better implementation and enforcement may improve their effectiveness.

This study examined whether a key set of adolescent and early adulthood risk factors predicts problematic alcohol, cannabis, and other substance use in established adulthood. Externalizing behaviors and prior substance use in early adulthood were consistent predictors of problematic alcohol and cannabis misuse in established adulthood across samples.

Building on the ongoing Parenting Across Cultures longitudinal study that began in 2008, this project will continue to follow participants in their early to mid-twenties.

This study will evaluate the impact of cognitive behavior therapy delivered through virtual reality on job creation and business outcomes in youth and female-led enterprises in Nigeria via improvements in depression, stress, and anxiety.

This study examined whether the childhood intervention program called Fast Track improves family life into the second generation.

This study provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand whether and how primals in early adulthood are predicted by childhood and adolescent experiences and how parents’ primals are related to their young adult children’s primals in the most diverse long-term longitudinal study ever conducted.

Juvenile justice involvement was associated with increased risk of adult criminality, with residential services associated with highest risk. Juvenile justice involvement may catalyze rather than deter from adult offending.

The purpose of this project is to support the development and evaluation of new evidence-based plea bargaining policies and practices in the Durham District Attorney’s Office.

Using a sample of 1338 families from 12 cultural groups in 9 nations, we examined whether retrospectively remembered Generation 1 (G1) parent rejecting behaviors were passed to Generation 2 (G2 parents), whether such intergenerational transmission led to higher Generation 3 (G3 child) externalizing and internalizing behavior at age 13, and whether such intergenerational transmission could be interrupted by parent participation in parenting programs or family income increases of > 5%.

Across countries, adolescents’ internalizing problems pre-pandemic predicted increased internalizing during the pandemic, and poorer well-being pre-pandemic predicted increased externalizing and substance use during the pandemic.

Historically, individualism vs. collectivism has been a main organizing framework for understanding cultural differences in family life. This study examines parents in nine countries to understand their individualism, collectivism and parenting attitudes. They found parenting attitudes are predicted by a range of sociodemographic factors.

Project to augment the longitudinal Great Smoky Mountains Study (GSMS) to create a national data resource, the Great Smoky Mountains Study of Rural Aging (GSMS-RA), for the study of early determinants of the aging experience in a rural context. The GSMS began collecting data on children, now participants are entering their 40s.

This project builds on the ongoing Parenting Across Cultures (PAC) longitudinal study that began in 2008 with recruitment of a sample of 1,417 8-year-old children and their mothers and fathers from nine countries. In 2020, COVID-19-related questions were added to assess behavioral and emotional functioning in relation to the rapidly-evolving situation in each country’s response to the pandemic.

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on alcohol and illicit substance use among adults without children, parents, and adolescents was investigated through two studies with five samples from independent ongoing U.S. longitudinal studies.

The objectives of this study are to understand mechanisms in the global context through which exposure to different types of adverse experiences in childhood increases risk of adverse behavioral and psychosocial outcomes into early adulthood.

This study evaluated how individuals’ own substance use and their perception of peers’ substance use predict each other across development from early adolescence to middle adulthood.

Many childhood interventions target low-income and high-risk children, with evidence that some early interventions improve adult health and wellbeing. This study asks whether children who benefit from early interventions grow up to become better parents and, subsequently, have children who experience fewer health problems, educational challenges, and emotional problems.

Using the most diverse, prospectively studied, multi-national sample to date, this study will generate empirical findings to develop a model of child- and family-level mediators and culture-level moderators of the role of childhood risk factors and young adult competence and maladaptation. Cross-cultural comparisons will inform domestic models of young adult maladaptation.

Project Description This longitudinal study is a collaboration among Auburn University, Indiana University, and Duke University that investigates children’s social development and adjustment by following 585 children from two cohorts recruited in consecutive years, 1987 and 1988, from Nashville, Tenn.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Bloomington, Ind. The children were recruited the year before they entered kindergarten; the…

Project Description The objective of this research was to explore the use of state-of-the-science brain imaging and analysis procedures in evaluating the effectiveness of Public Service Announcements (PSAs) used in the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. This objective was accomplished by pursuing three specific aims: 1) identifying and cataloging features of youth-focused PSAs featured in…

Project Description Hispanic youth represent a growing proportion of America’s future workforce. The vast majority are U.S.-born and raised in income-poor households, yet little is understood about the influence of social and income security policy on their well-being. Despite eligibility, Hispanic families are less likely to receive income assistance than their peers. Resulting differences in…

Project Description There is very limited cross-cultural evidence on the relationship among parenting practices, children’s emotions, children’s social behaviors, and children’s general well-being. I have teamed up with a young scholar, Dr. Laura DiGuinta, in Italy to examine how culture influences these factors. We collected data from 460 11- to 12-year-old children and their parents…

Project Description The harms of substance use and the specific public policies implemented for combating substance use are associated with societal costs estimated at over $500 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Prevailing debates on public policies for curbing substance use focus on the relative merits of employing a public health approach- awareness, prevention, and…

In collaboration with Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and grant funding from the Jacobs Foundation, Decision-Making in Everyday Life was an assessment of judgment, decision-making, and psychosocial development from over 350 participants in Durham and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The measures used were also being administered in China, Colombia, Cyprus, India, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, and Thailand. The assessment included questions about several aspects of development that affect the choices young people make, including choices to engage in risky and antisocial behavior. These aspects of development included impulsivity, foresight, sensation-seeking, planning, and reward salience.

Project Description The Week in the Life Study used mobile touchscreen devices to understand how adolescents’ daily experiences affect their mental and physical well-being in everyday life. Project Goals In doing so, the study aimed to answer the following questions: What are the most frequently experienced stressors (negative events) and uplifts (positive events) in adolescents’…

Project Description Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have devastating effects on health and behavior. But many children avoid such dire outcomes, even thrive, despite exposures to multiple ACEs. It is not known, however, whether this individual resilience will be sustained into adulthood and transmitted to the next generation. This project brings together a longitudinal, community…

Project Description Although prevention scientists have documented effective interventions to prevent adult substance abuse, antisocial behavior, and risky sexual behavior, these interventions have not been applied to optimize return on investment and thus have not yet been fully embraced by communities. We propose mapping the relations between early risk profiles (and preventive intervention) and adult…

Project Description The Safe Schools/Healthy Students program strove to reduce school violence and promote students’ healthy development. The Center’s work involved: Researching funding opportunities Assistance to secure $7.5M in federal funds to reduce school violence and promote student health Staff training and supervision to implement evidence-based programs to reduce school violence Evaluating programs in accordance…

Project Description Chronic truancy is prevalent among school children who are at risk. Truancy in primary school is predictive of truancy in later years, school dropout, and the closely associated problems of adolescence, including substance abuse and delinquency. Hence there is reason to believe that an effective program of truancy reduction in the primary years…

Project Description The Be CALM (Cool, Attentive, Logical, and Mature) intervention is guided by a theory of change that intentionally targets self-regulatory processes in need of support and development during early adolescence: immature cognitive controls, increased emotionality and stress reactivity, and responsivity to peers. This approach, which is delivered by teachers in health education classes…

Project Description This four-year study examined the prevalence, correlates, causes and consequences of the misuse and abuse of ADHD medications by college students at Duke University and The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The main reason that students reported using ADHD medication was to enhance their academic performance, primarily by improving their ability to…

Project Description This study examined a socio-cultural conception of marriage and childbearing by combining qualitative and quantitative analyses to understand the roles of marriage and fertility in the lives of adolescents and young adults. Project Goals To understand socio-cultural conceptions of marriage and childbearing. Results indicated that marriage and fertility are regarded as two separate…

Project Description This project evaluates the first phase of America’s Promise Alliance’s new nationwide effort to deliver five ‘promises’ to 15 million young people between 2008 and 2012. The first phase focuses on improving high school graduation rates through a series of school dropout summits. The Alliance has planned a series of 50 state-level and…

Project Description The Durham Family Initiative was a 12-year collaboration with the Center for Child and Family Health supported by the The Duke Endowment to improve family well-being and reduce child maltreatment in Durham County. The endeavor began by providing community-based efforts to help families support their children’s health, growth and development in stressed neighborhoods…

Project Description Key experts will be brought together to advance the economic analysis of substance abuse prevention. Project Aims Aims: cultivate a sustainable interdisciplinary research team identify analytic approaches for strengthening cost and benefit estimates, and provide guidance around employing benefit-cost analyses to build efficient prevention efforts. Project Results

Project Description A team of social policy researchers from the Center for Child and Family Policy and the Sanford School of Public Policy examined the connection between test scores and important outcomes that signaled or influenced the accumulation of human capital. The research had policy implications for high school graduation and post-secondary education rates, labor…

Project Description Center researchers have prepared three editions of the Survey of Substance Use and Abuse in Durham County, releasing the most recent in spring 2013, sponsored by Durham Together for Resilient Youth (TRY). The goal of creating the report was to better understand the dynamics of the substance abuse problem in the Durham community….

Project Description Although most children navigate the challenges of puberty and settle into adolescence without major problems, about 20% will experience at least one mental health disorder during their teenage years.  Why do some adolescents struggle so much more than others?  Decades of research in developmental science have demonstrated the mutual influence of genotype and…

Project Description There is very limited cross-cultural evidence on the relationship among parenting practices, children’s emotions, children’s social behaviors, and children’s general well-being. I have teamed up with a young scholar, Dr. Laura DiGuinta, in Italy to examine how culture influences these factors. We collected data from 460 11- to 12-year-old children and their parents…

Project Description The U.S. Government has made the collection of large-scale individual-level longitudinal data for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade and beyond a major national priority, and has to date invested $500 million (with another $100 million slated for awards during fiscal year 2012) in helping states to develop the capacity to collect, maintain,…

Project Description This project aims to discern how early conduct disorder leads to substance-use problems; to understand processes of resilience to substance use development among conduct problem children; and to test the efficacy of a conduct disorder prevention program in preventing substance use problems in young adulthood. Project Aims To describe comorbidity, growth, and cross-temporal…

Project Description This project built a Web-based data reporting system for describing trends in adolescent substance abuse indicators in North Carolina. The system was populated with data that is publicly available. This database included indicators of substance use from a large range of sources, including self-reported measures from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey and…

Project Description The GREAT Schools and Families Project – completed in 2007 – was a multi-site program to develop and evaluate violence prevention programs for middle school students. Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the University of Georgia-Athens collaborated on this project. The project was funded by the National Centers for…

Project Description The Duke University Fast Track Data Center provides all data files that are necessary to complete analyses to evaluate the impact of the Fast Track preventive intervention program, the factors that account for positive impact of the program, and processes in the development of healthy and problematic outcomes in high-risk youth. The study…

Project Description What features of adolescents’ neighborhoods, families, and peer groups trigger early substance use? How can contextual triggers of early substance use be targeted to promote healthy development during the transition to middle school? Exposure to alcohol and drugs during early adolescence carries significant costs to adolescents’ future lives. As a result,parents, teachers, and…

Project Description This project established and maintained databases for conducting study on high school reform and integrates the data with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. Project Goals The goal of this project is to investigate the Early College High School model and its impact on students. Project Findings

Project Description The Justice and Mental Health Collaboration was an outreach program designed to provide intensive follow-up to police service calls involving persons with mental health issues and to divert them into community-based treatment. The Center for Child and Family Policy contracted with the Durham Police Department to provide technical assistance, data analysis and development…

Project Description This project examined how cognitive control skills such as attention, working memory, and response inhibition relate to social-information processing skills and serious adolescent conduct problems (e.g., substance use and offenses). It also assessed the impact of computerized cognitive enhancement training on cognitive control and social information processing skills. Project Goals The primary goal…

Project Description This project represents the first efforts to ascertain the extent and potential repercussions of wealth and net worth poverty among minority youth. Project Goals 1. Analyze racial and ethnic disparities in wealth among households with children, and identify potential mechanisms that explain such disparities.2. Estimate levels and trends in net worth poverty for…

Project Description This Senior Scientist Award supported a portion of the principal investigator’s salary. Dr. Dodge’s research contributed to the societal prevention of serious problem outcomes, including substance abuse, behaviors that place one at risk for HIV/AIDS, and child abuse, in two related populations: multi-problem adolescents and young high-risk mothers. Project Aims The specific aims…

Project Description This five-year project examined adolescent outcomes of a population-based sample of individuals who had been diagnosed with ADHD five to six years earlier. This study represented the largest follow-up of a community-based sample of children with ADHD that has ever been conducted.  Project Goals Examine long-term academic and behavioral outcomes for children with…

Project Description We combined the quasi-experimental data we have constructed on mass job losses by month in every county in North Carolina and by quarter in every state in the US (Ananat, Gassman-Pines, and Gibson-Davis 2013) with local area statistics on mobility by cohort (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, and Turner 2014) to identify how changing local…

Project Description Center researchers Nicole Lawrence, Joel Rosch, Liz Snyder, and Anne-Marie Iselin helped Alliance Behavioral Healthcare secure a six-year $5.4 million federal grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). This grant builds upon the existing infrastructure of Durham’s child and adult System of Care by targeting transition-age youth (16-21) with…

Project Description This project provided a preliminary evaluation of the National STEM Career Platform, a web-based system for helping high school students identify STEM careers that match their interests and to become aware of the educational and career opportunities that are available to them. Researchers in the Center for Child and Family Policy created and…

Project Description The goal of the P30 Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center (TPRC) was to facilitate the translation of basic-science knowledge about regulatory processes and peer influences into innovative research efforts to prevent substance use and related problems in adolescents. As stipulated by the National Institutes of Health, a P30 Center does not directly conduct…

Project Description Substance use is a dynamic problem that impacts a community in a multitude of ways. In an effort to understand how substance use affects Durham, this project assembled information from a variety of local health and social service agencies. The report prepared by Center researchers documented information on geospatial and time trends, on…

Project Description The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports promising early-career researchers from diverse disciplines, who have demonstrated success in conducting high-quality research and are seeking to further develop and broaden their expertise. Selected as a 2010-11 Scholar, Dr. Elizabeth Ananat received funding from the W.T. Grant Foundation for this research. It will follow several…

Project Description Every summer, The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) works with four universities (Appalachian State, North Carolina Central University, East Carolina University, and University of North Carolina-Charlotte) to bring rising juniors and seniors from across North Carolina to their campuses for the opportunity to take part in a four week program…

Project Description Funding was received from Durham Public Schools to evaluate the Magic Johnson Bridgescape Academy, a new alternative high school program, on the academic engagement and performance of approximately 100 Durham area students who previously dropped out of high school and have enrolled in this new program. The evaluation consisted of qualitative methods including…

Project Description This three-year study set will evaluate four types of courts, general, driving while intoxicated (DWI), drug and hybrid drug. Drug treatment courts (DTC) represent a promising innovation for dealing with crimes committed by offenders who have an underlying addiction problem. Specialty courts combine standard deterrence efforts with treatment. Project Aims This study has…

Project Description This project brings together an interdisciplinary research team from Duke University, SRI International, Teachers College, and the Association of American Geographers to explore relationships between the socioeconomic status (SES) of students and their STEM learning outcomes. The motivations for this project are twofold (1) identify the links between SES and STEM Learning and…

Project Description This funding supported an interdisciplinary team of scholars from economics, electrical and computer engineering, medicine, psychology, public policy and sociology in developing the capacity to embed ‘intensive measurement bursts’ into two of the most widely accessed and cited cohort studies in the world that, collectively, have assessments spanning from birth to the fifth…

Project Description This project supported the Center’s effort to help 12 rural North Carolina counties secure evidence-based mental health services for children involved in the court system. Center staff also helped to create an evaluation plan for the project. Project Goals The purpose of this project is to aid children and their families who are…

Project Description Substance abuse is estimated to cost the nation over $180 billion annually, yet relatively little is known about whether current evidence-based preventive interventions can efficiently reduce these costs. In order to conduct high quality benefit-cost analyses of substance abuse prevention efforts, researchers will require (1) comprehensive cost estimates that account for the resources…

Project Description Students are expected to use their brain power to achieve academic, physical, and social success, although they receive no explicit instruction about how to care for and effectively use their brains. As neuroscientists and educators, we realize that recent advances in neuroscience about how the brain works have not yet been integrated into…

Despite many years of research and rising suicides and a nationwide opiates public health emergency, we lack accurate and appreciable predictions of who will succumb to deaths of despair and who will be shielded from them.

Lower family income during childhood is related to increased rates of adolescent depression, though the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood.

Edited by Jennifer Lansford and Drew Rothenberg with Marc Bornstein, this book shares findings from a study of parents and children in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand and the United States. Each chapter is authored by a contributor native to the country examined. Together, the chapters provide a global understanding of parenting across cultures.

Nationwide, school principals are given wide discretion to use disciplinary tools like suspension and expulsion to create a safe learning environment.

Charles T. Clotfelter, Steven W. Hemelt, Helen F. Ladd Education Finance and Policy (2019) 14 (3): 492–521. https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00258

The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the potential of an innovative high school neuroscience-based health course for implementation feasibility and impact on student outcomes.

Saint-Eloi Cadely et al. found longitudinal patterns for the perpetration of both psychological and physical intimate partner violence (IPV), including actively and minimally aggressive patterns.

We study the evolution of a campus-based aid program for low-income students that began with grant-heavy financial aid and later added a suite of nonfinancial supports.

Many advocacy organizations devote time and resources to increasing community awareness and educating the public in an effort to gain support for their issue.

This is the third in a series of four inter-related reports titled Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress.

According to the North Carolina (N.C.) Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services, approximately 18,000 adults and 1,000 children in Durham County abused or were addicted to illegal drugs, prescription medications, or alcohol in 2012(1). Substance abuse not only impacts the individual and his/her family, but also the community.

This report summarizes preliminary findings associated with the MHOP program that began in Durham County in January of 2011.

Approximately one quarter of U.S. students do not graduate from high school with their peers. Failing to complete high school severely limits opportunities for employment and future financial stability. High school dropouts earn lower wages through their lifetime and work for fewer years.1 The costs to society of high school dropouts are also high and…