Objective: Peer support specialists (PSs) have personal experience in mental health recovery and are hired by service agencies to assist others struggling with similar challenges. Stress impacts work performance among helping professionals, and work-related stress is thought to be particularly detrimental to PSs’ performance given their history of mental illness. However, this topic has received little empirical attention. Furthermore, different forms of stress may be closely related, casting doubt on the utility of work-specific stress measurement. This dissertation examines severity of work-related and general stress in a large sample of active PSs (N=738), and, while accounting for psychiatric symptom severity, addresses their potential differential susceptibility to stress by comparing their responses to samples of clinicians and non-referred adults. The structure of stress-related phenomena is also examined to reveal shared variance among stress measures and their differential impact on work satisfaction and performance.

Method: This is cross-sectional, online survey of adult PSs in mental health service settings nationwide. Participants completed stress-related measures validated for use with health professionals and the general public: the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey, the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale, and the Perceived Stress Scale. Confirmatory factor analyses were applied to assess internal structure and scores were summarized and compared with samples of mental health service providers and non-referred adults. Comparisons were then stratified by level of psychological distress. Participants answered questions about work absences, job satisfaction, turnover likelihood and self-rated performance. Correlations between these work outcomes and original stress measures are compared to correlations between outcomes and randomized measures created from the stress instruments. Regression analyses revealed incremental utility of specialized stress measures on outcomes above the contribution of general stress.

Results: PSs experience low to moderate levels of work-related and general stress, though not all measures were suitable for use. Secondary trauma affects less than 15% of the sample, while 51.2% report a moderate or high level of emotional exhaustion. General stress scores were normally distributed. Though effect sizes were small, compared with other mental health providers, peer support specialists experienced less secondary trauma (d = -0.15) and general stress (d = .15), and more emotional exhaustion (d = .20). However, the subset of specialists with active psychological distress experienced much greater stress than comparison groups. Work-specific stress measures strongly associate with general stress and one another. General stress accounts for 43.4% of the variance in secondary trauma, and 38.7% of emotional exhaustion. Secondary trauma explains 47.2% of the variance in emotional exhaustion. Correlations between stress measures and work outcomes were weak to moderate. When compared to original measures, randomized stress measures often showed no difference or stronger associations with outcomes. Regression analyses revealed that turnover likelihood, job satisfaction, and absenteeism were best predicted by general stress and emotional exhaustion. Self-rated performance was impacted by general stress only.

Conclusion: The findings, while supporting links between stress and psychiatric symptoms, help allay concerns about peer support specialists’ “unique” susceptibility to different forms of stress. Despite their commonalities, specific forms of stress somewhat differentially associate with adverse employment outcomes and these measures may demonstrate some utility in planning the focus of remedial efforts.

The Positive Youth Justice (PYJ) paradigm is gaining traction in the juvenile justice system. This paradigm shifts focus from youths’ deficits to their strengths, opening new avenues to help young people build prosocial assets and desist from delinquent behavior. However, there is little conceptual or empirical guidance for translating the PYJ approach into real-world interventions. In this study, I focus on one promising construct within the Positive Youth Development framework—prosocial identity (i.e., the extent to which young people view themselves as prosocial)—and empirically test key hypotheses drawn from a conceptual model for intervention (Jian & Skeem, 2023). The central inquiries of the study include how prosocial identity should be defined as a treatment target in the juvenile justice context and under what conditions prosocial identity protects against reoffending. The primary aims are to first examine the basic protective effects of prosocial identity against reoffending in a justice-involved sample. Here, I include prosocial identity at the level of subcomponents—other-oriented (emphasizing benefits to others) and conventional (emphasizing law-abiding and conventional commitment), as well as holistically (prosocial identity as the combination of the two subcomponents). Second, I examine whether three factors—prosocial identity prominence (importance to the self), prosocial identity internal validation (confidence that the self can be achieved), and prosocial identity external validation (e.g., social support from peers and/or caregivers, school connectedness)—may moderate any protective effect of prosocial identity on recidivism. The secondary aim is to examine the generalizability of measures of prosocial identity that were developed with non-referred populations, to justice-involved youth.

I addressed these aims using data on a subsample of 760 court-referred youths. I conducted psychometric analyses and a series of progressively stringent analyses (from regression to causal modeling incorporating machine learning). The primary aims yielded three main findings. (1) Contrary to hypotheses, other-oriented identity, but not conventional identity, predicted recidivism independently. (2) There was no empirical support for the notion that prosocial identity causally protects against recidivism, after rigorously adjusting for covariates. (3) Among the proposed moderators, peer support (a form of external validation) significantly moderated the relation between prosocial identity and recidivism (OR=0.99) in logistic regressions. The predicted probability of recidivism decreased as prosocial identity increased, only for those with moderate or high level of peer support. The moderating effect of peer support remained significant even after rigorously adjusting for all covariates, but not after using causal modeling. For the secondary aim, results indicate that prosocial identity measures developed with non-referred youth can be generalized to justice-involved youth.

These findings provide mixed support for hypotheses derived from the identity-based conceptual model. Research that directly tests aspects of the model is necessary to advance our understanding of whether and how deliberately increasing prosocial identity among justice- involved youth will reduce recidivism.

In 2016, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors permanently repealed fees charged to youth in the county’s juvenile justice system. Unlike other types of monetary sanctions, like fines and restitution, fees are not intended to punish defendants or repair survivors. Instead, fees are imposed to recoup administrative costs. Increasingly, advocates are highlighting the harm that monetary sanctions can inflict on justice-involved youth and their families, and are calling for fees to be repealed. This study examines whether removing these fees has an appreciable effect on families’ overall financial burden by applying a rigorous causal-inference approach to data on 2,401 youth placed on probation before and after the fee repeal.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grants MRP-19-600774 and M21PR3278.

Objective: The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold. First, this project examines instability in psychopathic traits from adolescence to adulthood. The second goal is to examine how well psychopathic traits, assessed in adolescence, predict short- and long-term offending. Specific attention is paid to differences in stability and antisocial behavior between youth measured to be high and low in psychopathic traits as well as between psychopathy subtypes. Method: The first study uses various methods to assess personality stability (e.g. rank-order, mean-level, individual-level, ipsative, and predictive stability) to examine the potential for change in psychopathic traits from adolescence to adulthood. The second study addresses how well adolescent assessments of psychopathic traits predict risk for short- and long-term offending and aggression. Both studies examine a sample of former male juvenile offenders (n = 355) who completed a follow-up assessment within prison institutions or in the community (n = 94) six to eight years later. Results: The dissertation produced two key findings. First, the results revealed low-to-moderate stability in psychopathic traits from adolescence to adulthood, but stability estimates were particularly poor for youth that were high in psychopathy. Second, findings indicated that adolescent psychopathic traits performed quite well in identifying enhanced risk for offending and aggression in the short-term, but do not provide meaningful long-term predictive utility (between 6 and 8 years later) for antisocial behavior in adulthood. Measured changes in psychopathic traits over time appeared to be better suited for long-term prediction. Conclusion: Psychopathic traits are generally unstable across the transition to adulthood, particularly for youth high in levels of psychopathy. Characteristics associated with secondary psychopathy may exacerbate changes in psychopathic traits over time. In addition, the limited stability of these traits likely contributed to the poor long-term predictive utility for adolescent features of psychopathy on adult offending. Thus, the use of these assessments in forensic and legal practice to inform decisions regarding denial of treatment, harsher sentencing, and waiver to criminal court may not be appropriate applications of adolescent psychopathy measurement. Multiple assessments of psychopathy over time may also provide a stronger, dynamic picture of risk change over time.