NCJ Number
191229
Editor(s)
Baruch Fischhoff,
Elena O. Nightingale,
Joah G. Iannotta
Date Published
2001
Length
163 pages
Annotation
Articles in this report offer a new way of defining adolescent vulnerability, and include new methodological approaches to conducting research on the vulnerability of young people that could offer an effective base for policy and intervention.
Abstract
In September 1997 the Board on Children and Youth, and Families organized a planning meeting on indicators for the safety and security of adolescents. A number of important ideas developed in this workshop, including the need to reassess and redefine adolescent vulnerability in order to develop more effective policies and programmatic interventions to safeguard young people. Early in 2000, Elena Nightingale, Scholar-in-Residence with the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, and Baruch Fischhoff, Professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, initiated the development of a workshop to stimulate thinking about the meaning of adolescent vulnerability, the methodologies that can be employed to measure vulnerability and its disparate predisposing risk factors, and the steps that would advance the work necessary for setting priorities for policies and practices to reduce the burden of vulnerability for young people. With funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Workshop on Adolescent Risk and Vulnerability: Setting Priorities took place on March 13, 2001, in Washington, DC. The first session examined a new conceptual framework for understanding and moderating adolescent vulnerability. The second session focused on the social costs of adolescent risk taking and vulnerability. The third session proposed ways to assess the total burden of adolescents’ vulnerability and its components. The fourth session centered on perceptions of vulnerability by adolescents and by adults and how their accuracy can be measured and analyzed. The final session considered the implications of these approaches to adolescent vulnerability was well as opportunities they might provide to bridge research, policy, and practice. This report includes an introduction by co-chairs Fischhoff and Nightingale that summarizes issues raised at the workshop and the four papers prepared and presented by the planning group members.