Biomedical subjects

R H Hoyle

Publications and source records attributed to R H Hoyle.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

Evaluation of the All Stars character education and problem behavior prevention program: effects on mediator and outcome variables for middle school students.

The effects of All Stars, a character education and problem behavior prevention program, on variables theorized to mediate problem behaviors and on the problem behavior variables of substance use, sexual behavior, and violence among middle school students are reported. In an independent, randomized, single-cohort, longitudinal evaluation of the program, 1,655 students completed pretest, posttest, and 1-year follow-up surveys measuring demographics, mediating variables, and behavioral outcome variables. Results indicate that the All Stars program, when administered by teachers, had an immediate effect on mediating variables that did not persist over time. Inclusion of ethnicity in the design showed that the program, when administered by specialists, had delayed effects on mediating variables for African American and Hispanic students. However, no consistent effects were found for student problem behaviors in either condition. Implications for prevention practice and directions for future research are discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2001

Television campaigns and adolescent marijuana use: tests of sensation seeking targeting.

OBJECTIVES: This study evaluated the effectiveness of targeted televised public service announcement campaigns in reducing marijuana use among high-sensation-seeking adolescents. METHODS: The study used a controlled interrupted time-series design in 2 matched communities. Two televised antimarijuana campaigns were conducted in 1 county and 1 campaign in the comparison community. Personal interviews were conducted with 100 randomly selected teenagers monthly in each county for 32 months. RESULTS: All 3 campaigns reversed upward developmental trends in 30-day marijuana use among high-sensation seekers (P < .002). As expected, low-sensation seekers had low use levels, and no campaign effects were evident. CONCLUSIONS: Televised campaigns with high reach and frequency that use public service announcements designed for and targeted at high-sensation-seeking adolescents can significantly reduce substance use in this high-risk population.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2000

Personality processes and problem behavior.

This article introduces the special issue of Journal of Personality on personality and problem behavior. There is growing evidence that various dimensions of personality are associated with a broad range of problem behaviors such as drug and alcohol use, sexual risk-taking, interpersonal violence, and gambling. To date, research on personality and problem behavior has focused almost exclusively on documenting simple, direct associations between personality traits and problem behaviors. This article proposes an expanded research agenda, a second generation of research and theory on the role of personality in problem behavior. The agenda specifies two major classes of second-generation hypotheses. Moderator hypotheses concern the conditions under which the influence of personality on problem behavior is magnified, weakened, or eliminated. Mediator hypotheses concern the causal processes that underlie the influence of personality on problem behavior. Articles in the special issue, which are summarized in this introduction, exemplify the proposed second generation of research on personality and problem behavior.

Health Behavior↗

PubMed2000

Personality and sexual risk taking: a quantitative review.

Findings from a quantitative review of the empirical research literature on normal personality and sexual risk taking are reported. The review focuses on domains identified in major models of normal personality representing the psychobiological and taxonomic perspectives. Focal sexual risk-taking behaviors were number of partners, unprotected sex, and high-risk sexual encounters (e.g., sex with a stranger). A comprehensive search produced 53 studies relevant to the review. A striking feature of the results is the paucity of research on domains of normal personality and sexual risk taking for all domains other than sensation seeking, which accounted for 64% of the effect sizes. The preponderance of studies (81%) took the psychobiological perspective and were published since 1990 (75%). Among the substantive findings were effects for sensation seeking, impulsivity, and agreeableness on all sexual risk-taking behaviors considered. Additionally, there were effects on specific behaviors for neuroticism and conscientiousness. The implications of these findings for future research on normal personality and sexual risk taking are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1999

Sensation seeking and drug use by adolescents and their friends: models for marijuana and alcohol.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the prospective influence of individual adolescents' sensation seeking tendency and the sensation seeking tendency of named peers on the use of alcohol and marijuana, controlling for a variety of interpersonal and attitudinal risk and protective factors. METHOD: Data were collected from a cohort of adolescents (N = 428; 60% female) at three points in time, starting in the eighth grade. Respondents provided information about sensation seeking, the positivity of family relations, attitudes toward alcohol and drug use, perceptions of their friends' use of alcohol and marijuana, perceptions of influence by their friends to use alcohol and marijuana, and their own use of alcohol and marijuana. In addition, they named up to three peers, whose sensation seeking and use data were integrated with respondents' data to allow for tests of hypotheses about peer clustering and substance use. RESULTS: Structural equation modeling analyses revealed direct effects of peers' sensation seeking on adolescents' own use of both marijuana and alcohol 2 years later. An unexpected finding was that the individual's own sensation seeking had indirect (not direct) effects on drug use 2 years later. CONCLUSIONS: These findings indicate the potential importance of sensation seeking as a characteristic on which adolescent peers cluster. Furthermore, the findings indicate that, beyond the influence of a variety of other risk factors, peer sensation seeking contributes to adolescents' substance use.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1997

The role of parental involvement in youth sport participation and performance.

This research examined the association of parental involvement, both parental support and parental pressure, with enjoyment, performance, self-esteem, and other characteristics of young tournament tennis players. Male and female players (median age = 13 years) attending a regional tennis academy provided information about the role their parents play in their tennis game, their own view of their game, their self-esteem, and their state, regional, and national rankings. This information was used to examine the association of parental support and parental pressure with players' enjoyment of tennis, their performance, and their self-esteem. It was found that parental support was significantly associated with enjoyment, with an objective measure of performance (but not players' self-reported level of performance), and with the importance players' ascribed to their tennis game. Players who reported a high level of parental support tended to report greater enjoyment of tennis, view tennis as a more important part of their lives, and fall lower in state rankings than players who reported a lower level of parental support. In addition, parental support appeared to mediate relations among several player characteristics. The data provided no evidence that parental pressure is an important influence on participation and performance of young tournament tennis players.

Achievement↗

PubMed1994

Introduction to the special section: structural equation modeling in clinical research.

Clinical research hypotheses are becoming increasingly more complex and specific. As a result, clinical research studies often include multiple independent, intervening, and dependent variables in a single study. Nevertheless, a sampling of studies from 3 decades of research published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology reveals that the statistical models adopted by clinical researchers have failed to keep pace with the increasing complexity and specificity of hypotheses and research designs. This article introduces a special section on structural equation modeling, a statistical model well suited for complex and specific hypothesis tests in clinical research studies that include many variables.

Humans↗

PubMed1994

Formulating clinical research hypotheses as structural equation models: a conceptual overview.

Structural equation modeling is a comprehensive, flexible approach to research design and data analysis. Although in recent years there has been phenomenal growth in the literature on technical aspects of structural equation modeling, relatively little attention has been devoted to conceiving research hypotheses as structural equation models. The aim of this article is to provide a conceptual overview of clinical research hypotheses that invite evaluation as structural equation models. Particular attention is devoted to hypotheses that are not adequately evaluated using traditional statistical models.

Humans↗

PubMed1993

Efficacy of abbreviated progressive muscle relaxation training: a quantitative review of behavioral medicine research.

A quantitative review was undertaken of recent research in which abbreviated progressive muscle relaxation training (APRT) was used as an intervention for psychophysiological and stress-related disorders. The strength of association between APRT and outcome measures was calculated for 29 experiments published after 1980. The average effect size across all experiments was moderate (r = .40). Moreover, for experiments that included a follow-up assessment, a similar effect size was noted at the first follow-up (r = .43). Additionally, experiments that used a prospective design (i.e., analyzed change) detected a stronger effect for APRT than those that used a cross-sectional design (i.e., compared groups). APRT was most strongly associated with improvement in experiments that delivered APRT on an individual basis and provided recipients with training tapes. Moreover, the treatment duration and number of sessions positively influenced the strength of association.

Arousal↗

PubMed1993

Development of level of institutionalization scales for health promotion programs.

This study was conducted to test an instrument for measuring the level of institutionalization (LoIn) of health promotion programs. Institutionalization occurs when a program becomes an integral part of an organization, and the LoIn instrument is a beginning effort to measure the extent of program integration into organizations. The instrument is based on theory that holds that organizations are composed of production, maintenance, supportive, and managerial subsystems. Institutionalization occurs when a program becomes imbedded into these subsystems. A questionnaire designed to test this construct was mailed to 453 administrators in 141 organizations that operate health promotion programs. Based on 322 usable responses (71%), a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted. The results support the hypothesis of an eight-factor model: four factors concern how routinized the program was in each subsystem and four factors concern the degree of program saturation within each subsystem. Correlations of the eight factors with the number of years the programs had been in operation, and managers' perceptions of program permanency, indicated that the four routinization factors were more highly correlated with program longevity than the four niche saturation factors, and the niche saturation factors were more highly correlated with managers' perceptions of program permanence than the routinization factors. The instrument, which is available from the authors, may be used as both a research instrument and a diagnostic tool in assessing the institutionalization of health promotion programs.

Community Health Services↗

PubMed1991

Evaluating measurement models in clinical research: covariance structure analysis of latent variable models of self-conception.

Indirect measures of psychological constructs are vital to clinical research. On occasion, however, the meaning of indirect measures of psychological constructs is obfuscated by statistical procedures that do not account for the complex relations between items and latent variables and among latent variables. Covariance structure analysis (CSA) is a statistical procedure for testing hypotheses about the relations among items that indirectly measure a psychological construct and relations among psychological constructs. This article introduces clinical researchers to the strengths and limitations of CSA as a statistical procedure for conceiving and testing structural hypotheses that are not tested adequately with other statistical procedures. The article is organized around two empirical examples that illustrate the use of CSA for evaluating measurement models with correlated error terms, higher-order factors, and measured and latent variables.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed1990

Clinical rheumatology training of primary care physicians: the resident perspective.

Because nonspecialized physicians provide care for the vast majority of patients with rheumatic disorders, we surveyed 327 internal medicine and family medicine residents with respect to the nature of their training in rheumatology. Although most internal medicine residents had access to rheumatologists for training and had taken formal rheumatology rotations, this was often not the case for family medicine residents. Deficiencies evident in both types of programs included limited access to rheumatology electives; insufficient exposure to certain major categories of rheumatic disease, e.g., the spondyloarthropathies and systemic autoimmune disorders; and lack of direct participatory experience in orthopedics, rehabilitation, and psychosocial aspects of rheumatology.

Curriculum↗