Moral Judgement and Delinquency in Homeless Youth

A family intervention to reduce sexual risk behavior, substance use, and delinquency among newly homeless youth.

PURPOSE We evaluate the efficacy of a short family intervention in reducing sexual risk behavior, drug use, and delinquent behaviors among homeless youth. METHODS A randomized controlled trial of 151 families with a homeless adolescent aged 12 to 17 years. Between March 2006 and June 2009, adolescents were recruited from diverse sites in Southern California and were assessed at recruitment (b...

Forgotten Youth: Homeless LGBT Youth of Color and the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act

Over the years, the rate of youth homelessness in America has steadily risen, prompting the creation and subsequent revision of corrective policies. One such policy is the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act of 1974. The Act is not a cure-all for homelessness, but it does provide services and programs specifically designed to aid homeless youth. It has had some success, but not all homeless youth be...

Temporal variability in moral value judgement

Moral judgments are known to change in response to changes in external conditions. But how variable are moral judgments over time in the absence of environmental variation? The moral domain has been described in terms of five moral foundations, categories that appear to capture moral judgment across cultures. We examined the temporal consistency of repeated responses to the moral foundations qu...

Social Stigma and Homeless Youth

A Computational Account of Complex Moral Judgement

In this paper, we analyze the task of complex moral judgement from a computational perspective. We present a theoretical framework that posits this process often involves the construction of a coherent explanation for observed behavior in terms of the mental states of the agents involved. We extend the framework to incorporate moral values as numeric annotations on cognitive structures and miti...