Modeling the payoffs of interventions to reduce adolescent vulnerability.

Abstract

Public policy often has been blind to adolescents, except when it has focused on aspects of their behavior that trouble their elders. Too often, policy makers limit their attention to artificially narrow and isolated aspects of youth behavior. They consider only health, or only criminal, or only educational issues. In addition, the payoff of youth vulnerability and our failure to ameliorate it are rarely addressed. The few existing treatments of the cost of adolescent risk behaviors have likewise focused on single behaviors (e.g., teen childbearing— Burt 1985 Burt M.R. Teenage pregnancy. Center for Policy Options, Washington, DC1985 Google Scholar , Burt 1986 Burt M.R. Estimating the public costs of teenage childbearing. Family Planning Perspectives. 1986; 18: 221-226 Crossref PubMed Scopus (29) Google Scholar ; Burt and Levy 1987 Burt M.R. Levy F. Estimates of public costs for teenage childbearing A review of recent studies and estimates of 1985 public costs. in: Hofferth S.L. Hayes C. Risking the future: Adolescent sexuality, pregnancy and childbearing. Vol. II. National Academy Press, Washington, DC1987: 264-294 Google Scholar ) or narrowly defined patterns (e.g., being a career criminal— Cohen 1998 Cohen M.A. The monetary value of saving a high risk youth. Journal of Quantitative Criminology. 1998; 14: 5-33 Crossref Scopus (337) Google Scholar ). A just-released report identifying important future research issues related to youth ( Millstein et al 2000 Millstein S.G. Ozer E.J. Ozer E.M. Brindis C.D. Knopf D.K. Irwin Jr, C.E. Research priorities in adolescent health. University of California, National Adolescent Health Information Center, San Francisco2000 Google Scholar ) does not even mention cost, either as the cost of outcomes to society or the cost of interventions or approaches to produce better outcomes. The absence of cost concerns is even more striking as Millstein and her colleagues review and summarize a decade of published documents that in their turn summarize and integrate research on adolescence and make recommendations for future research.