There is growing concern that improving the academic skills of disadvantaged youth is too difficult and costly, so policymakers should instead focus either on vocationally oriented instruction for teens or else on early childhood education. Yet this conclusion may be premature given that so few...

Exposure to neighborhood danger during childhood has negative effects that permeate multiple dimensions of childhood. The current study examined whether mothers’, fathers’, and children’s perceptions of neighborhood danger are related to child aggression, whether parental monitoring...

Systemic challenges within child welfare have prompted many states to explore new strategies aimed at protecting children while meeting the needs of families, but doing so within the confines of shrinking budgets. Differential Response has emerged as a promising practice for low or moderate risk...

North Carolina is one of a growing number of states to implement family meeting models in child welfare as a way to engage families, while simultaneously addressing complex familial needs and child safety issues. However, much is still unknown regarding how family meetings actually operate in...

Matthew Hall, Ph.D., Associate Professor at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois, Chicago, IN, United States. Email: mshall@uic.edu Address: 601 S Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60607, United States.George Farkas, Ph.D., Professor at the School of Education, University...

The controversy over contextual effects is reviewed from the standpoint of specification analysis. The uselessness of ad hoc calculations of "variance due to" is demonstrated, and more careful examinations of goodness of fit are advocated. In this regard, it is demonstrated that techniques...

This article uses a hazards model permitting continuous covariates and fixed effects to estimate the effect of local employment opportunity and family background on the cohabitation and childbearing of black youths from low-income households. Support is found for W. J. Wilson's hypothesis that...