Sustained mass media campaigns have been recommended to stem the tobacco epidemic in the United States. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to estimate the effect of awareness of a national smoking cessation media campaign (EX®) on quit attempts and cessation-related cognition....

This report presents interim findings from the Power4Kids evaluation. Conducted just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, the evaluation is assessing the effectiveness of either substantial parts or all of four widely used programs for elementary school students...

This article identifies depressive symptom trajectories and heterogeneity in these trajectories during pregnancy and through the first year postpartum, and examines the association between unintended pregnancy and depressive symptoms among low-income Hispanic immigrants. Three distinct...

Findings suggest that the SBP increases the likelihood that a student eats a substantive breakfast and that it also leads to a higher-quality breakfast.

Although experiments are viewed as the gold standard for evaluation, some of their benefits may be lost when, as is common, outcomes are not defined for some sample members. In evaluations of marriage interventions, for example, a key outcome—relationship quality—is undefined when...

We attempt to clarify, and suggest how to avoid, several serious misunderstandings about and fallacies of causal inference. These issues concern some of the most fundamental advantages and disadvantages of each basic research design. Problems include improper use of hypothesis tests for...

MatchIt implements the suggestions of Ho, Imai, King, and Stuart (2007) for improving parametric statistical models by preprocessing data with nonparametric matching methods. MatchIt implements a wide range of sophisticated matching methods, making it possible to greatly reduce the dependence of...

Although experiments are viewed as the gold standard for evaluation, some of their benefits may be lost when, as is common, outcomes are not defined for some sample members. In evaluations of marriage interventions, for example, a key outcome—relationship quality—is undefined when...