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This study examined personalization of college dormitory rooms. Walls in college dormitories were photographed on two occasions, at the beginning and end of the first quarter in which new students were in residence. Decorations were content analyzed in terms of the following categories: personal relationships, values, abstract, reference, entertainment, and personal interest materials. The results indicated that most people decorated early in the quarter, decorating increased over time, and students differentially personalized their rooms in terms of the preceding categories. In addition, exploratory analyses were undertaken of modeling among roommates and relationships of decorating to dropout rates from the university.

Teen drug use is a critical and timely health issue that deeply affects adolescent development in a number of important areas, including social, cognitive, and affective functioning, as well as long-term health and wellbeing. Trends indicate that drug use is starting at an earlier age, the potency of several drugs is much stronger than in the past, and more new drugs are illegally being manufactured to provide faster, heightened effects. In addition, illegal use of prescription drugs and drug diversion or the sharing of prescription medication is also on the rise amongst teens. Parenting and T

Teen drug use is a critical and timely health issue that deeply affects adolescent development in a number of important areas, including social, cognitive, and affective functioning, as well as long-term health and wellbeing. Trends indicate that drug use is starting at an earlier age, the potency of several drugs is much stronger than in the past, and more new drugs are illegally being manufactured to provide faster, heightened effects. In addition, illegal use of prescription drugs and drug diversion or the sharing of prescription medication is also on the rise amongst teens. Parenting and T.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a strategy for estimating an individual's risk of alcohol, cigarette and cannabis use that relies on an assessment of an adolescent's age, gender and attitude.Design/methodology/approachThe authors assembled surveys from 35,987 11-17 year-olds from 36 databases to examine the relationship between attitude and behaviour.FindingsAttitudes were strongly correlated with concurrent use of alcohol, drunkenness, smoking and cannabis, with correlations of −0.555, −0.517, −0.552 and −0.476, respectively. Logistic regression provided a means for using age, gender and attitudes to estimate an individual's risk of engaging in substance use behaviour. Developmental changes in attitudes were estimated by analysing changes in scores associated with percentile rankings for each age and gender group. Projected year-to-year changes in attitude were used as a heuristic for estimating future risk.Research limitations/implicationsAnalyses relied on cross-sectional panel data. Analyses would benefit from longitudinal data in which age-related changes in attitudes could be more precisely modelled.Practical implicationsInformation about estimated current and future risk may prove useful for motivating the adoption and implementation of effective prevention approaches by parents and care providers.Originality/valueThe authors present a novel method for estimating an individual's risk of substance use knowing attitude, age and gender.

This study examines psychosocial predictors of self-initiated substance use cessation among youths who have had recent substance use experience. Variables included those that are the focus of many primary prevention programs. Middle school and high school students who used either alcohol, cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, marijuana, or inhalants were surveyed on two occasions, one year separating the pretest and posttest. Pretest differences distinguished those who would quit versus those who would continue using alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, but not inhalants. The largest pretest differences were youths' normative beliefs, manifest commitments to not use substances, and perceived incongruence between drug use and their desired lifestyles. Those who continued to use had scale values for most mediators that continued to worsen in programmatic terms, whereas measures among those who quit significantly improved. School-aged users may benefit from programs that target some of the same mediators currently promoted as effective in primary prevention programs.

This study longitudinally examines the changes in key mediators for adolescent substance use. Previous research and intervention strategies typically target mediators as important foci for program intervention. Findings presented here indicate that while some deterioration of key mediators occurs developmentally among all adolescents, the deterioration is more severe for students that initiate substance use. Furthermore, the rate of deterioration associated with the onset of substance use is more evident for some mediators (e.g. normative beliefs, commitment and lifestyle incompatibility) than for others (e.g. goal-setting and self-esteem). Finally, evidence indicates that the mediators that suffer the greatest deterioration significantly vary across substance. In other words, the degree of deterioration in mediators that should have a substantial influence on adolescent substance use varies across alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and inhalant use. Implications for program development and intervention strategies are discussed in light of these findings.

Widely disseminated programs often fail to include experimental or quasi-experimental evaluation designs to test effectiveness. This article presents several data-analyzing strategies that may help evaluators assess program effectiveness under the conditions of natural experiments. The suggested methodology is to perform multiple independent analyses to demonstrate the degree of convergence or divergence on outcomes of the D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) prevention program. When used in combination, multiple analyses strengthen the estimate of program effect by minimizing potentially spurious results that may emerge due to a particular analytic strategy.

A meta-analysis of substance abuse prevention studies revealed that the mean proportion of subjects retained dropped from 81.4% at 3-month to 67.5% at 3-year follow-ups. Time from pretest alone accounted for less than 5% of the variance. Other available predictors of retention were not significant. Researchers are encouraged to interpret their results in light of these normative data and to adopt second-effort strategies to reduce attrition.

It is not always possible, especially in large-scale evaluation research, to ensure that random assignment will produce groups that are comparable on any number of potentially important factors. Typically, gaining comparability has been achieved only at the expense of random assignment. A method is presented that allows multivariate comparability while making only minimal restrictions on randomization. The procedure is demonstrated in the context of assigning 63 aggregated units (schools) to 28 experimental and control conditions. Good comparability of groups for all primary main effects and interactions was venfied for 15 individual variables.