First Published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Whether you are responsible for planning, implementing, and evaluating peer and prevention programs or simply an outside consultant or evaluator, this book will be an essential guide for your work. This user-friendly training manual provides a blueprint of a step-by-step approach to setting-up an evaluation program that guides you through the planning, development, implementation, data collection, and organization stages, and then communicating the results to others. The authors establish a rationale for program evaluation, explaining how it differs from research, and discuss ways to align the vision, mission, and goals of a program. They then describe several approaches to evaluation and methods for successfully collecting and analyzing data. Methods for reporting the results are also considered and numerous forms and charts are provided to assist with and illustrate the organization, evaluation, and reporting of data. An accompanying CD contains guidelines, handouts, and forms that can be reproduced for your own use in evaluation.

All across the United States, individuals, families, communities, and health care systems are struggling to cope with substance use, misuse, and substance use disorders. Substance misuse and substance use disorders have devastating effects, disrupt the future plans of too many young people, and all too often, end lives prematurely and tragically. Substance misuse is a major public health challenge and a priority for our nation to address. The effects of substance use are cumulative and costly for our society, placing burdens on workplaces, the health care system, families, states, and communities. The Report discusses opportunities to bring substance use disorder treatment and mainstream health care systems into alignment so that they can address a person's overall health, rather than a substance misuse or a physical health condition alone or in isolation. It also provides suggestions and recommendations for action that everyone-individuals, families, community leaders, law enforcement, health care professionals, policymakers, and researchers-can take to prevent substance misuse and reduce its consequences.

The understanding of how to reduce risk factors for mental disorders has expanded remarkably as a result of recent scientific advances. This study, mandated by Congress, reviews those advances in the context of current research and provides a targeted definition of prevention and a conceptual framework that emphasizes risk reduction. Highlighting opportunities for and barriers to interventions, the book draws on successful models for the prevention of cardiovascular disease, injuries, and smoking. In addition, it reviews the risk factors associated with Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, alcohol abuse and dependence, depressive disorders, and conduct disorders and evaluates current illustrative prevention programs. The models and examination provide a framework for the design, application, and evaluation of interventions intended to prevent mental disorders and the transfer of knowledge about prevention from research to clinical practice. The book presents a focused research agenda, with recommendations on how to develop effective intervention programs, create a cadre of prevention researchers, and improve coordination among federal agencies.

Learners complain that they do not get enough feedback, and educators resent that although they put considerable time into generating feedback, students take little notice of it. Both parties agree that it is very important. Feedback in Higher and Professional Education explores what needs to be done to make feedback more effective. It examines the problem of feedback and suggests that there is a lack of clarity and shared meaning about what it is and what constitutes doing it well. It argues that new ways of thinking about feedback are needed. There has been considerable development in research on feedback in recent years, but surprisingly little awareness of what needs to be done to improve it and good ideas are not translated into action. The book provides a multi-disciplinary and international account of the role of feedback in higher and professional education. It challenges three conventional assumptions about feedback in learning: That feedback constitutes one-way flow of information from a knowledgeable person to a less knowledgeable person. That the job of feedback is complete with the imparting of performance-related information. That a generic model of best-practice feedback can be applied to all learners and all learning situations It seeking a new approach to feedback, it proposes that it is necessary to recognise that learners need to be much more actively involved in seeking, generating and using feedback. Rather than it being something they are subjected to, it must be an activity that they drive.

Every year, about 30,000 people die by suicide in the U.S., and some 650,000 receive emergency treatment after a suicide attempt. Often, those most at risk are the least able to access professional help. Reducing Suicide provides a blueprint for addressing this tragic and costly problem: how we can build an appropriate infrastructure, conduct needed research, and improve our ability to recognize suicide risk and effectively intervene. Rich in data, the book also strikes an intensely personal chord, featuring compelling quotes about people's experience with suicide. The book explores the factors that raise a person's risk of suicide: psychological and biological factors including substance abuse, the link between childhood trauma and later suicide, and the impact of family life, economic status, religion, and other social and cultural conditions. The authors review the effectiveness of existing interventions, including mental health practitioners' ability to assess suicide risk among patients. They present lessons learned from the Air Force suicide prevention program and other prevention initiatives. And they identify barriers to effective research and treatment. This new volume will be of special interest to policy makers, administrators, researchers, practitioners, and journalists working in the field of mental health.

Bullying has long been tolerated as a rite of passage among children and adolescents. There is an implication that individuals who are bullied must have "asked for" this type of treatment, or deserved it. Sometimes, even the child who is bullied begins to internalize this idea. For many years, there has been a general acceptance and collective shrug when it comes to a child or adolescent with greater social capital or power pushing around a child perceived as subordinate. But bullying is not developmentally appropriate; it should not be considered a normal part of the typical social grouping that occurs throughout a child's life. Although bullying behavior endures through generations, the milieu is changing. Historically, bulling has occurred at school, the physical setting in which most of childhood is centered and the primary source for peer group formation. In recent years, however, the physical setting is not the only place bullying is occurring. Technology allows for an entirely new type of digital electronic aggression, cyberbullying, which takes place through chat rooms, instant messaging, social media, and other forms of digital electronic communication. Composition of peer groups, shifting demographics, changing societal norms, and modern technology are contextual factors that must be considered to understand and effectively react to bullying in the United States. Youth are embedded in multiple contexts and each of these contexts interacts with individual characteristics of youth in ways that either exacerbate or attenuate the association between these individual characteristics and bullying perpetration or victimization. Recognizing that bullying behavior is a major public health problem that demands the concerted and coordinated time and attention of parents, educators and school administrators, health care providers, policy makers, families, and others concerned with the care of children, this report evaluates the state of the science on biological and psychosocial consequences of peer victimization and the risk and protective factors that either increase or decrease peer victimization behavior and consequences.