Effects of the life skills programme 'Eigenständig werden' (Becoming independent) on life skills and on identified antecedents of adolescent health risk behaviour, childhood internalizing and externalizing behaviour were tested in an elementary school setting. A quasi-experimental controlled trial with five repeated measures was conducted. Participants were 919 students from 50 elementary schoo...

BACKGROUND There is an emerging focus on adolescent health within the global health community as we come to recognize that the adolescent years are formative in determining health and health-related behaviours across the life-course. Such attention is not only relevant on the global scale but is imperative in Canada as well. MAIN BODY This commentary provides a brief review of recent investme...

The timing of education across the life cycle is differentially associated with older-age health outcomes and socioeconomic status among military retirees, a subpopulation with common levels of adolescent health but variation in educational timing. A year of education obtained before military service lowers the probability of poor health in retirement by 2.5 percentage points, while a year obta...

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between Hispanic adolescents’ academic aspirations and thoughts on teen parenting. Hope and gender were examined as potential moderators of this association. Participants included 130 students between the ages of 14 and 19 (M = 16, SD = 1.22) who were recruited from a charter high school located in a large, Midwestern city. Adolescents pr...

A phone survey of 504 teen (age 16-20) and 409 adult (age 25-45) drivers in the US state of Alabama was conducted to examine the relationships among risk perception, positive affect and risky driving. Male drivers reported engaging in risky driving behaviors more frequently than female drivers and teen drivers reported engaging in risky driving behaviors more frequently than adult drivers. Posi...

We have compared the unique features of teen tobacco cessation programs developed internally by community-based organizations (N=75) to prepackaged programs disseminated nationally (N=234) to expand our knowledge of treatment options for teen smokers. Internally-developed programs were more likely offered in response to the sponsoring organization's initiative (OR=2.16, p<0.05); had fewer train...

Novice teen drivers have disproportionally elevated crash rate compared to older drivers’. The high crash rate among novices is generally attributed to multiple risk factors, including driving inexperience, young age, risky driving behavior, vehicle accessibility, time of day, and driving with teenage passengers. The current naturalistic driving study with novice-teenagers evaluated the associa...