Background: The use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarette) offers potential to facilitate cigarette smoking cessation, yet potentially increases risk of cigarette smoking initiation. This relationship has been primarily modeled in mathematical ways that often do not represent real-world complexities, which could inform decisions regarding local…

Background: Project Connect is a national program to build partnerships among public health agencies and domestic violence services to improve the health care sector response to partner and sexual violence. Pennsylvania piloted the first school nurse-delivered adolescent relationship abuse intervention in the certified school nurses' office…

COVID-19 has profoundly affected educational institutions across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as it has in the rest of the country and around the world. Since March 2020, school buildings statewide have been closed. Although many schools have worked hard to provide instruction remotely, it is likely that schoolchildren all over the state are…

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is being used increasingly to address health disparities and complex health issues. The authors propose that CBPR can benefit from a systems science framework to represent the complex and dynamic characteristics of a community and identify intervention points and potential "tipping points."…

In this report the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation (NIHCM) and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) focus on selective, exemplary collaborations between state health agencies and health plans to reduce overweight and obesity in children. The idea of collaboration is simple. Partner A agrees to…

In order to gauge youth perceptions of school violence, this study links two perceptual bias literatures: third-person perception and optimistic bias. The intersection of the two literatures may be especially beneficial in understanding how adolescents process and interpret public health messages and subsequently engage in risk behaviors or…

Youth violence and delinquency are problems that continue to challenge many communities across the U.S. For over a decade, Pennsylvania has been a national leader in confronting youth problem behaviors in a progressive and proactive fashion, investing heavily in supporting local community prevention coalitions and the use of proven-effective…