Inviting groups of children between the ages of eight and 15 from two poor and predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Baltimore and Pittsburgh to paint, draw and collage their insights into community safety claims top-class research interest. But hopes that the “Visual Voices” model might provide a breakthrough in the growth area of community-based participatory research have yet to be justified.

From the Harvard academic who worried Western societies with warnings that the essential fabric of community life was wearing out comes something worse 15 years and 9/11 later: evidence that inequalities are tearing the US remnant in two.

“On Saturday, the bear joined me building a Kapla tower and, after that, we watched The Ice Age video that I got from my Mum and Dad as a comfort prize when I was ill…” Is a wandering teddy bear likely to get further under the skin of 21st century family life than the average prevention science researcher?

The UK city of Liverpool is the focus of an experiment that brings families and schools together in an effort to build mutually supportive neighborhood networks to help vulnerable families.

As social and emotional learning programs are introduced into the whole-school curriculum on both sides of the Atlantic, researchers in Illinois are beginning to establish which children may need them most.

Familiar statistics carry less familiar recommendations for policy and practice: to break the cycle of damaging effects that link disadvantage to maternal depression and to developmental disorders, government should invest in trials of mother and toddler therapy.

Ideas about character have been central to US developmental scientist Richard Lerner’s concept of positive youth development. Is “character education” now likely to find its way on to the policy agenda of a new UK government?

After almost a decade in the making, an impact study has come to the unsettling conclusion that the US Head Start program (uncle of the UK’s Sure Start) works … kind of …

Efforts to bring enduring peace to the Basque Country of northern Spain include an experiment with classroom teaching whose principles owe much to US-made "positive youth development" initiatives.

Research from one direction indicates that subjective reports of “life satisfaction” can be relied on as an accurate measure of well-being, but the verdict from another is that Americans are generally far adrift in their perceptions about the well-being of those around them. Back to the lab?

You there! What do you think you’re doing – improving protective factors and reducing behavioral risk, or peddling a cultural perspective that regards most forms of human experience as the source of emotional distress?

“Where politicians have deeply held beliefs about what is effective, it can be tempting to want to cherry pick the evidence that supports those beliefs – policy-based evidence, if you like…” The UK Institute for Effective Education looks ahead to the predictable perils of a General Election year.

A US economist makes the case for putting statistical effect sizes and the rudiments of cost benefit analysis into the same equation, and proposes a new interim “law” of prevention: that an intervention should be adopted only if there is no other way to create the same scale of improvement more cheaply.