Dan Romer, Ph.D., is director of the Adolescent Communication Institute (ACI) of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. He has conducted research at the Annenberg School and Policy Center since 1990, focusing on media and social influences on adolescent health with particular attention to the social transmission of risky behavior. He has studied the effects of local television news on race relations and inter-group tension. In addition, he has studied the role of education on the civic and political engagement of adolescents. He recently coordinated a four-city intervention using mass media to reduce unprotected sex in high-risk adolescents, a project done in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health. He is currently studying a cohort of adolescents in Philadelphia to understand the risk factors that underlie early use of drugs and other threats to healthy development, a project supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He is also studying the effects of pictorial warning labels for cigarettes, a project supported by the National Cancer Institute. He has served on numerous grant review panels for NIH as well as for NSF and is on the editorial board of Youth and Society and The Journal of Community Psychology. His edited volume, Reducing Adolescent Risk: Toward an Integrated Strategy (Sage Press, 2003), presents the findings of a conference held at APPC in 2002 to define a more comprehensive national strategy for healthy adolescent development. An edited issue of the American Behavioral Scientist (May 2003), "Suicide in Youth," focuses on strategies to reduce adolescent suicide. Subsequent conferences have led to additional volumes, including Adolescent Psychopathology and the Developing Brain, edited with Elaine Walker (Oxford, 2007), The Changing Portrayal of Adolescents in the Media since 1950, edited with Patrick Jamieson (Oxford, 2008), and The Dynamic Genome and Mental Health, edited with Kenneth S. Kendler and Sara Jaffee (Oxford, 2011). Along with Kathleen Jamieson, he coordinated the publication of the award-winning volume Treating and Preventing Adolescent Mental Health Disorders (Oxford, 2005) that is currently being prepared for its second edition. He has also directed the National Annenberg Survey of Youth, a biannual study of 900 youth ages 14 to 22 sponsored by ACI.
Current policies treat adolescent risk behaviours such as teen sex, substance abuse and gambling as separate problems requiring separate solutions, ignoring the overlap of many risk behaviours. This book seeks to move beyond the fractured approach of preventing one behaviour at a time and suggests more comprehensive prevention strategies. It challenges researchers who study risk behaviours as separate problems to identify what is known about common pathways and influences on adolescent risk behaviour to help build intervention strategies that can reduce more than one risk at a time.
