Karen Hennigan

Role of the self-image and smoker stereotype in smoking onset during early adolescence: A longitudinal study.

The present study utilized a longitudinal design to assess whether self-consistency or self-enhancement motives are predictive of future smoking onset. Participants were 1,222 nonsmoking 5th through 8th graders who were followed into the next academic year. The results showed that teens who were above the median in similarity between their self-image and smoker stereotype on coolness, sociability, and intelligence were almost twice as likely to show smoking onset at the 2nd measurement. This is supportive of a self-consistency motive for adolescent smoking. The results of this study provide an important extension to previous cross-sectional research in this area.

Gang Dynamics Through the Lens of Social Identity Theory

Based on the tenets of social identity theory, we interpret criminal and violent behavior among gang members as a group-based phenomenon, not in terms of engaging in these behaviors together at the same time (which may or may not happen), but rather in terms of one’s motivation to act. We examined intragroup dynamics of gangs and other peer groups that contribute to delinquency and violence. We found that group cohesion and group identification are associated with criminal and violent behavior among gang members, but not among members of other kinds of peer groups in the same neighborhoods. In the SEM models with gang-involved respondents, the relationship between gang cohesion with crime and violence was fully mediated by strength of social identity. These relationships were not found among nongang respondents where deterrence-related concepts were more important than group cohesion or social identity. We maintain that this difference is due to different normative expectations within street gangs versus within nongang peer groups. The stronger one’s identification with the gang, the stronger the individual is focused on the gang’s normative expectations (i.e., behavior at the group end of Tajfel’s continuum), regardless of individual concerns.

Possible Selves and Negative Health Behaviors During Early Adolescence

The relation of the possible selves to cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption was the focus for this study. Participants (1,606 students in Grades 6 through 9) listed their possible selves and reported their cigarette and alcohol use. The results revealed that adolescent cigarette smoking and alcohol use were related negatively to (a) the number of positive expected selves and (b) the balance between expected selves and feared selves. However, when both possible-selves variables were entered in the model simultaneously, only the number of positive expected selves consistently was related to negative health behavior. In addition, the number of positive expected selves was related more strongly to the negative health behavior of eighth and ninth graders than to that of sixth and seventh graders. The findings from the present study are contrasted with previous research. In addition, the utility of an intervention involving the possible selves is discussed.

Through a Mother’s Eyes: Sources of Bias When Mothers with Co-occurring Disorders Assess Their Children

Mothers are the principal informants on children’s emotional and behavioral functioning. Maternal assessments of child functioning can be influenced by a mother’s own psychological state. The magnitude and valence of distortion in maternal assessments associated with current maternal mental health and substance abuse symptoms were explored in a clinical sample of 253 mothers with co-occurring disorders and histories of trauma. Analyses estimated the correlation between current maternal symptoms and child assessments after controlling for maternal history of disorders, child’s history of service utilization for emotional and behavioral problems, and demographic characteristics. Current maternal psychological distress was associated with more pessimistic assessments on the problem-focused Child Behavior Checklist, whereas current maternal substance abuse problems were associated with more optimistic assessments on both problem-focused and strength-based measures. Clinicians and researchers may choose to take distortion into account when treatment plans or measures of change are based on maternal assessments.

The prospects and problems of integrating sketch maps with geographic information systems to understand environmental perception: a case study of mapping youth fear in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods

How people feel about places matters, especially in their neighborhood. It matters for their health, the health of their children, and their social cohesion and use of local resources. A growing body of research in public health, planning, psychology, and sociology bears out this point. Recently, a new methodological tack has been taken to find out how people feel about places. The sketch map, a once popular tool of behavioral geographers and environmental psychologists to understand how people perceive the structural aspects of places, is now being used in concert with geographic information systems (GIS) to capture and spatially analyze the emotional side of urban environmental perception. This confluence is generating exciting prospects for what we can learn about the characteristics of the urban environment that elicit emotion. However, due to the uncritical way this approach has been employed to date, excitement about the prospects must be tempered by the acknowledgement of its potential problems. In this paper we review the extant research on integrating sketch maps with GIS and then employ a case study of mapping youth fear in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods to demonstrate these prospects and the problems, particularly in the areas of (1) representation of environmental perception in GIS and (2) spatial analysis of these data.

Improving civil gang injunctions: how implementation can affect gang dynamics, crime, and violence

Civil gang injunctions (CGIs) are an increasingly popular street gang control technique. Although admired by criminal justice officials, we know relatively little about how differing implementation approaches might affect their efficacy. In this study, we interviewed youth in contrasting neighborhoods—some under a CGI and others not—to observe the ways gang injunctions may strengthen or weaken the gang as a group. We conclude that improved knowledge of social psychological processes will help policy makers more effectively craft gang injunctions to achieve sustained neighborhood change. Street gangs play a major role in the socialization of youth, the social and organizational context of neighborhoods, and the level of crime and fear of crime in many communities. In 2008, close to 774,000 gang members belonging to 27,900 gangs were reported

“Deterrability” Among Gang and Nongang Juvenile Offenders: Are Gang Members More (or Less) Deterrable Than Other Juvenile Offenders?

This study investigates the effect of the threat of legal sanctions on intentions to commit three types of offenses with a representative sample of 744 officially adjudicated youth with varying histories of offenses and gang involvement. In a departure from previous research, the authors find small severity effects for property crimes that are not negated by past offending experience, morality, or anticipated loss of respect from adults or peers. Gang members appear to be vulnerable to the effects of certainty of punishment for vehicle theft. These results challenge the current crime policy of increased reliance on punishment to deter gang crime but suggest that increasing gang members’ certainty of apprehension might hold some promise for reduction of some gang crime.

Clarification of Concepts and Terms Commonly used in Evaluative Research

It is useful to distinguish between evaluation in general and evaluative research in particular. In the broadest sense, evaluation is the process of generating information about the operations and impact of implemented programs or policies. When a particular program is being evaluated this general process is often called program evaluation. Evaluative research is the application of scientific, empirical research methods to program evaluation leading to logically defensible, causal statements about the effectiveness of a program. Thus, evaluative research can be considered a subset of the more general process of evaluation.

Overview of: “Improving Civil Gang Injunctions: How Implementation Can Affect Gang Dynamics, Crime, and Violence”

Research Summary The civil gang injunction (CGI) is an increasingly popular suppression strategy. Interviews with 416 youth in areas with and without a CGI suggest that suppression-oriented injunctions may have little useful impact on gang social dynamics. CGIs may have promise as part of a comprehensive strategy that uses enhanced sanctions both to suppress crime and to move individual gang offenders toward alternatives (such as education, personal development, and jobs), allowing them to imagine alternative social identities. Policy Implications Whether CGIs play a positive role in curtailing the activities of street gang members or whether they fuel it instead may depend on policy makers and criminal justice officials ensuring that (a) gang members are approached as individuals, (b) the safety zone is appropriately sized, and (c) police suppression activities are accompanied by gang-focused social services and a clear, transparent escape clause. Successful implementation depends on multiple city agencies being integrated into the CGI strategy early on.