Prevention scientists may fret all they like about the technical difficulties of rolling out evidence-based interventions sustainably on a large scale, but the Obama administration thinks it has the solution. It’s money – spend loads of it.

What does it take to get a professor of sociology jeered off a conference platform and earn him death threats when he gets home? Just encourage him to speak of domestic violence as being frequently mutual and often not entirely the fault of bullying men.

This year's US Society for Prevention Research conference in Washington DC is putting “intimate partner violence” into play as a replacement term for "domestic violence", signaling improving empirical evidence and new opportunities for effective intervention.

Multisystemic Therapy travels to New Zealand from South Carolina and passes its first “benchmark” test, but the findings would have been more convincing if they had emerged from a wayfinding randomized controlled trial.

"Sidelining prevention to the margins of society is a developmental step that Europeans may stand a better chance of avoiding if the messages we are bringing home are allowed to get around…" Seattle teaches its UK visitors what not to do.

In a Methadone clinic, a middle-class Seattle suburb and out in the country where academics fear to tread, study tourists see prevention in action – and out of the box.

“Publishers know how to market products, and they can market products to systems people – but they can't market systems to systems people…” Study tourists nose under the wrapper of the prevention program industry.

Once the streetcorner trade of the hard-boiled detective, “fidelity monitoring” of a nobler kind looks like becoming an essential aspect of wise program implementation.

Study tourists encounter the unsettling “Dr No-ski,” whose work in Washington suggests that less than competent clinicians are all too likely to make the lives of some children worse, no matter how robust the program.

Enlightened legislation that provided the Washington State juvenile court with the funding to introduce evidence-based programs to the judicial process has put a comprehensive “menu” of intervention options within reach of young people in trouble.

What’s the connection between a Ferrari, a Toyota Camry and a hardening of the arteries? They all spring to mind when US family therapies go under the metaphorical microscope.

Researchers in Wisconsin and New York have been struggling to find evidence that how well children fare in the early years when their mothers go out to work is not influenced by racial or ethnic difference.

Prevention Action takes eye witnesses to the birthplace of The Incredible Years, Communities that Care, Raising Healthy Children and other programs as successful to meet leading US exponents and practitioners.

After 40 years at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor of Sociology Frank Furstenberg is beginning to get the measure of the long journey into “full social adulthood”.

A Cornell study that suggests the chronic stress children endure as a result of poverty can lead to impairments in their “working memory” by the time they reach adolescence also indicates that even neuroendocrinology can be a politically divisive topic.

The UK authority on the diagnosis and treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders, Professor Eric Taylor, tells clinicians at the Peninsula Medical School how valuable behavioral approaches are proving.

Nurse Family Partnership's originator David Olds takes the argument for pre-natal intervention to Nottingham UK, where he shares a platform with the bottle-carrying founder of Worldwide Alternatives to Violence.

There's plenty of room in these pages for expertly contextualized social biography of the growing band of prevention scientists and their work. Just be aware of the historical pitfalls of confusing the science with the theorizing personality.