The effects of teenage fatherhood on young adult outcomes

This paper uses national longitudinal data and several new empirical strategies to examine the consequences of teenage fatherhood. The key contribution is to compare economic outcomes of young fathers to young men whose partners experienced a miscarriage rather than a live birth. The results suggest that teenage fatherhood decreases years of schooling and the likelihood of receiving a high school diploma and increases general educational development receipt. Teenage fatherhood also appears to increase early marriage and cohabitation, and has mixed short-term effects on several labor market outcomes.     

Revising a medication education program on an inpatient child and adolescent psychiatric unit

Adherence to a medication regimen can be challenging for children and adolescents with mental health disorders. Medication education can be a beneficial tool for nurses to help promote adherence to psychotropic medications. This article describes an initiative to improve medication education offered to children and adolescents and their families on an acute child and adolescent inpatient unit in a mental health facility. Strategies included adding a game to medication education groups, creating and distributing medication education handouts, and developing and implementing medication education sessions for parents. When used by the patients and families, the interventions were appreciated. Having successful interventions in place may help meet the diverse educational needs of this population as nurses seek to improve medication adherence.     

The incidence of metabolic risk factors in an inpatient psychiatric setting

Our study examines risk factors for metabolic syndrome on admission to an acute psychiatric facility and the incidence of medical referrals at discharge. Data on demographics, risk factors for metabolic syndrome, other health risk factors, medications, related diagnoses, and primary care providers and referrals were collected from 125 psychiatric patient charts. Comparison analysis was done for two groups: those with two or more risk factors for metabolic syndrome and those with less than two risk factors. Differences between groups were statistically significant for age, waist circumference, body mass index, high-density lipoprotein, triglycerides, and fasting glucose levels. Few patients were referred to their primary care provider for follow-up care. This study has clinical implications for improving assessment of psychiatric patients at risk for developing metabolic syndrome, for designing interventions to help patients adopt lifestyle changes to mitigate these risks, and for working toward fuller integration of psychiatric and primary care.     

Lessons learned about collaborative evaluation using the Capacity for Applying Project Evaluation (CAPE) framework with school and district leaders

Schools, districts, and state-level educational organizations are experiencing a great shift in the way they do the business of education. This shift focuses on accountability, specifically through the expectation of the effective utilization of evaluative-focused efforts to guide and support decisions about educational program implementation. In as much, education leaders need specific guidance and training on how to plan, implement, and use evaluation to critically examine district and school-level initiatives. One specific effort intended to address this need is through the Capacity for Applying Project Evaluation (CAPE) framework. The CAPE framework is composed of three crucial components: a collection of evaluation resources; a professional development model; and a conceptual framework that guides the work to support evaluation planning and implementation in schools and districts. School and district teams serve as active participants in the professional development and ultimately as formative evaluators of their own school or district-level programs by working collaboratively with evaluation experts. The CAPE framework involves the school and district staff in planning and implementing their evaluation. They are the ones deciding what evaluation questions to ask, which instruments to use, what data to collect, and how and to whom results should be reported. Initially this work is done through careful scaffolding by evaluation experts, where supports are slowly pulled away as the educators gain experience and confidence in their knowledge and skills as evaluators. Since CAPE engages all stakeholders in all stages of the evaluation, the philosophical intentions of these efforts to build capacity for formative evaluation strictly aligns with the collaborative evaluation approach.     

Collaborative evaluation and market research converge: an innovative model agricultural development program evaluation in Southern Sudan

In June and July 2006 a team of outside experts arrived in Yei, Southern Sudan through an AID project to provide support to a local agricultural development project. The team brought evaluation, agricultural marketing and financial management expertise to the in-country partners looking at steps to rebuild the economy of the war ravaged region. A partnership of local officials, agricultural development staff, and students worked with the outside team to craft a survey of agricultural traders working between northern Uganda and Southern Sudan the steps approach of a collaborative model. The goal was to create a market directory of use to producers, government officials and others interested in stimulating agricultural trade. The directory of agricultural producers and distributors served as an agricultural development and promotion tool as did the collaborative process itself.     

An approach to design long-term monitoring and evaluation frameworks in multi-actor systems--a case in water management

Learning-by-doing and adaptive management require careful monitoring and evaluation of the outcomes of environmental policies and programs under implementation. Selecting relevant indicators is difficult, especially when monitoring over a longer period of time. Further challenges arise when policies are developed as a collaborative effort among multiple actors. This paper discusses an approach to design frameworks for long-term monitoring and evaluation in multi-actor systems. It uses Dynamic Actor Network Analysis (DANA) as an actor-sensitive method to reconstruct program theories. This is combined with elements of assumption-based planning to identify critical assumptions and associated indicators to incorporate the dynamic aspects related to long-term monitoring. An application of this approach is described for a case of water management in the Netherlands. Here, mapping multiple perspectives and identifying critical assumptions helped to broaden the scope of monitoring in important ways. Identifying associated indicators and expectations on their development in response to policy implementation proved more difficult. From this case, it can be concluded that the approach is feasible, useful, but also demanding. However, with continuing trends of networked governance and adaptive management, additional efforts to reflect these trends in monitoring and evaluation, through this and similar approaches, are needed.     

Academic Performance of Subsequent Schools and Impacts of Early Interventions: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Head Start Settings

The role of subsequent school contexts in the long-term effects of early childhood interventions has received increasing attention, but has been understudied in the literature. Using data from the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), a cluster-randomized controlled trial conducted in Head Start programs, we investigate whether the intervention had differential effects on academic and behavioral outcomes in kindergarten if children attended high- or low-performing schools subsequent to the preschool intervention year. To address the issue of selection bias, we adopt an innovative method, principal score matching, and control for a set of child, mother, and classroom covariates. We find that exposure to the CSRP intervention in the Head Start year had significant effects on academic and behavioral outcomes in kindergarten for children who subsequently attended high-performing schools, but no significant effects on children attending low-performing schools. Policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

The relationship of intimate partner aggression to head injury, executive functioning, and intelligence

Measures of head injury, executive functioning, and intelligence were given to a community sample composed of 102 male perpetrators of intimate partner aggression (IPA) and 62 nonaggressive men. A history of head injury and lower mean score on a measure of verbal intelligence were associated with the frequency of male-perpetrated physical IPA as reported by male perpetrators and their female partners. Lower mean scores on a measure of verbal intelligence also predicted frequency of psychological IPA perpetration. Using the perpetrator subtypes outlined by Holtzworth-Munroe et al. (2000), analyses revealed that compared with other groups, the most severely aggressive subtypes (i.e., borderline-dysphoric and generally violent-antisocial) were the most likely to report a history of head injury and to have significantly lower mean scores on a neuropsychological test of verbal intelligence. The possible role of neuropsychological factors in IPA perpetration and implications for prevention and intervention programs are discussed.     

The Effects of First Occupation on Long Term Health Status: Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

In this paper, we use a longitudinal survey that has collected information for 50 years on a large cohort of Wisconsin high school graduates and their siblings to examine the long term impact of early occupational choice on health status. We find evidence that beginning a career in a blue collar occupation is correlated with several measures of poor health outcomes at ages 50–65. Since our dataset includes usually unobserved pre-labor market characteristics, including IQ and childhood health status, we can show that controlling for these variables is important for many results and suggests a high level of selection into occupation based on health and ability. We also provide evidence of gender differentials in the association between first occupation and later health. Then, we replace our basic measure of occupational categories with summary measures of job characteristics and find that employment at “bad jobs” at the beginning of an individual’s career predicts later health outcomes. Finally, we use sibling information in the dataset to show that unmeasured family background factors explain a large share of the effects of occupation on later health. Overall, the evidence points to limited, though heterogeneous, long term effects of health from blue collar employment.