Contact: Diana Strand, Phone 541-485-2711
WASHINGTON, D.C. – For the fourth year, OSLC Research Scientists Dr.’s J. Mark Eddy and Charles Martinez, Jr. chaired the Sloboda and Bukoski Society for Prevention Research (SPR) Cup Competition, held at the annual meeting yesterday. Teams of early career prevention scientists competed for the honor of winning the traveling cup, named for two of the founders of SPR, Dr. Zili Sloboda and Dr. Bill Bukoski. Teams applied this winter, and four teams were accepted to compete: the Standard Deviants, from the Southern California Academic Center of Excellence on Youth Violence Prevention, University of California, Riverside; Penn State Pride, from the Prevention Research Center, College of Health and Human Development, Pennsylvania State University; the Blue Devils, from the Prevention Research Center at Arizona State University and the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Panthers Preventing Risky Residuals, from the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University. Two months before the meeting, teams were given a data set, the U.S. Department of Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, which follows a national sample of young people from their sophomore high school year onward, and examines outcomes for youth, such as academic achievement and school dropout, as well as possible predictors of those outcomes. The task for each team was to choose variables of interest, conduct a literature review, develop hypotheses, conduct analyses, and create a 10-minute presentation. After each presentation, a panel of four judges and audience members rated the quality of the work of the team and their presentation style. The judges were Dr. Felipe Gonzalez Castro from the Department of Psychology, Arizona State University; Dr. Rick Heyman from the Family Translational Research Group, Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Stony Brook; Dr. Pat Tolan from the Institute of Juvenile Research, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago; and Dr. Lisa Ulmer from the Department of Community Health and Prevention, Drexel University School of Public Health. The team with the highest combined judge and audience rating was Penn State Pride. Team members Beau Abar, Caitlin Abar, Melissa Lippold, Liz Manning, and CJ Powers accepted the Cup on behalf of their team. Next year, a representative of the winning team will return to the SPR Annual Meeting in Denver, CO to pass the Cup on to the 2010 winning team.