Linking Life Skills and Norms With Adolescent Substance Use and Delinquency in South Africa.

We examined factors targeted in two popular prevention approaches with adolescent drug use and delinquency in South Africa. We hypothesized adolescent life skills to be inversely related, and perceived norms to be directly related to later drug use and delinquency. Multiple regression and a relative weights approach were conducted for each outcome using a sample of 714 South African adolescents ages 15 to 19 years (M = 15.8 years, 57% female). Perceived norms predicted gateway drug use. Conflict resolution skills (inversely) and perceived peer acceptability (directly) predicted harder drug use and delinquency. The "culture of violence" within some South African schools may make conflict resolution skills more salient for preventing harder drug use and delinquency.

Multiculturalism and subjective happiness as mediated by cultural and relational variables.

A diverse ethnic context and an increasing immigrant youth population will soon become the reality across the entire U.S. demographic landscape. Research has suggested that a multicultural context positively influences ethnic minority and immigrant youth by fostering ethnic identity and psychosocial development. However, it is unknown whether and how perceived multiculturalism can affect positive youth outcomes such as life satisfaction and subjective happiness. This study explored perceived school multiculturalism among 338 ethnic minority and immigrant youth, and found a positive relation between perceived school multiculturalism and subjective happiness with full mediation by ethnocultural empathy for African Americans, Asians, males, and females. Although school multiculturalism was also predictive of ethnocultural empathy for Hispanics, ethnocultural empathy in turn, was not significantly predictive of subjective happiness. Taken together, these results suggest that one way to facilitate psychological growth and flourishing among ethnic minority youth is to encourage multiculturalism in school settings.

Asian/Pacific islander youth violence prevention center: community mobilization efforts to reduce and prevent youth violence.

Although youth violence is a serious concern in the United States, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) youth have generally been neglected as a demographic group for scholarly inquiry or community mobilization efforts. This lack of attention in the violence prevention field is indicative of two perceptual impediments with which AAPI communities have struggled for decades: (1) That AAPIs represent a relatively small portion of the United States population, and (2) That AAPIs are stereotyped as "model minorities" who do not encounter serious social obstacles and who lack ethnic heterogeneity. This paper challenges these concerns, and describes two community mobilization efforts to prevent youth violence in AAPI communities. Both of these efforts were carried out from 2000 to 2003 by the University of Hawaii, Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center. Findings from these mobilization efforts highlight the need for long-term university-community commitments, in which university entities take a leadership role in disaggregating AAPI juvenile justice data. Another critical need is to work with previously marginalized ethnic groups within the AAPI population.