Reducing Adolescents’ Perceived Barriers to Treatment and Increasing Help-seeking Intentions: Effects of Classroom Presentations by General Practitioners

The Building Bridges to General Practice (BBGP) program is an outreach initiative. It aims to reduce young peoples’ perceived knowledge- and belief-based barriers to engaging in treatment and to increase their behavioral intentions to consult a general medical practitioner (GP) for physical and psychological problems. By increasing intentions, the BBGP program aims to increase actual consultations with a GP for both types of problem. A quasi-experimental nested design was used to evaluate the effect of the intervention in three Australian high schools. A Treatment group (n = 173, M = 16 years) and Comparison group (n = 118, M = 15 years) completed questionnaires of perceived barriers, intentions and self-reported consultations with a GP. Questionnaires were completed 1 week before the intervention, 5 then 10 weeks post-intervention. The Treatment group, but not the Comparison group, showed reductions in perceived barriers over time, increased intentions to consult a GP for psychological problems and a significant correlation between intentions and subsequent GP consultations. Results support the utility of the intervention for improving adolescents’ beliefs, intentions and behavior related to consulting a GP for physical and psychological problems.

How to make a dis-entrepreneur of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur: the impact of institutional settings on growth

Fiscal and monetary institutions are conspicuously omitted in the conventional theory of long-run economic growth. Moving from the Schumpeterian entrepreneur, who adopts new technology because its value, according to Tobin’s q, dominates the economic rents of existing capital, we argue that the Schumpeterian entrepreneur’s incentives to innovate change when he is transplanted into the public economy. We analyze two alternative institutional settings denoted as “long chain” and “short chain”. Through the “long chain” model we show that the Schumpeterian entrepreneur is driven towards “destructive creation” of new capital, thus becoming a political dis-entrepreneur, while the quasi-contractual “short chain” model provides incentives to innovate.     

Does incarceration-based drug treatment reduce recidivism? A meta-analytic synthesis of the research

This research synthesized results from 66 published and unpublished evaluations of incarceration-based drug treatment programs using meta-analysis. Incarceration-based drug treatment programs fell into five types: therapeutic communities (TCs), residential substance abuse treatment (RSAT), group counseling, boot camps specifically for drug offenders, and narcotic maintenance programs. We examined the effectiveness of each of these types of interventions in reducing post-release offending and drug use, and we also examined whether differences in research findings can be explained by variations in methodology, sample, or program features. Our results consistently found support for the effectiveness of TC programs on both outcome measures, and this finding was robust to variations in method, sample, and program features. We also found support for the effectiveness of RSAT and group counseling programs in reducing re-offending, but these programs’ effects on drug use were ambiguous. A limited number of evaluations assessed narcotic maintenance or boot camp programs; however, the existing evaluations found mixed support for maintenance programs and no support for boot camps.     

Youth Gangs: A 1990s Perspective

The juvenile gang in the 1990s differs in many significant ways from the gangs described in the “classical” gang studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Juvenile justice professionals should be aware of the changes in the nature, organization, motivation, and activities of gangs and plan intervention strategies accordingly. One important issue in gang research—one which has great implications for public policy—is defining “gang” and “gang-related crime.” The existence of a “gang problem” in a community may be more related to the definition of “gang” and “gang-related” than to the objective issue of whether, or not, a gang problem exists. Further issues relating to the gang of the 1990s involve changing age and sex distribution of gang members, increasing violence by gangs, and deeper involvement with drug distribution. Implications for public policy are discussed.     

Information transfer implications of development research administration in Nigeria

The study of research utilization and administration has been a growing field, but the emphasis in this field has been on industrialized countries. This article presents the results of a pioneering study of the use of research by senior officials in the Nigerian Federal Government. The article focuses first on Federal Government-sponsored research, it reviews how such research was initiated and conducted, how results were presented and what affected the use of the results. The article then describes expatriate-sponsored research, casts light on the conventional assumption about the amount of such research and points to the fact that there was comparatively less awareness of the results. The article not only provides significant information about the administration of research in Nigeria but emphasizes the need to give attention to this aspect of administration.