haggerty@uw.edu
Professional interests
- Unleashing the Power of Prevention
- Impact Science, Promotion of healthy behaviors
- Prevention of delinquency, violence, substance abuse, drop-out, teen pregnancy and depression
- Evidence based practice and Implementation science
- The role of family stressors on biological and behavioral functioning in young adulthood
- Testing prevention interventions; family, school and community
- Community based participatory research using Communities that Care
Kevin Haggerty
Emeritus Professor for Prevention
PhD, University of Washington
Kevin Haggerty specializes in prevention programs at the community, school and family level. For more than 30 years, he has focused on developing innovative ways to organize the scientific knowledge base for prevention so that parents, communities and schools can better identify, assess and prioritize customized approaches that meet their needs.
Dr. Haggerty is the director of the Social Development Research Group. In 2017 he became the holder of the Endowed Professorship in Prevention at the School of Social Work. Previously, he had been the assistant director and associate director of the research group as well as the School’s director of research. For more than two decades, he has been project director of the Raising Healthy Children study, a school-based approach to social development. He has been with the School of Social Work since 1985.
He is a principal investigator on a variety of projects, including Utah Communities That Care Training program, Staying Connected with Your Teen, Families Facing the Future (formerly Focus on Families) and a National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded study on Family Connections. He is an investigator of the Community Youth Development Study, which tests the effectiveness of the Communities That Care program.
In addition, he is researching the intersection of biological and environmental risks for drug abuse in a study that focuses on emerging adults. He has also been an active collaborator with other research groups, including Iowa State University’s Partnerships in Prevention Science Institute and Boy’s Town of Omaha, Nebraska.
His interest in the efficient and effective transition of tested programs into real-world settings has led to his involvement as principal investigator in two research grants that focus on adapting the Staying Connected with Your Teen program for use in drug-treatment and foster-care settings.
An expert on substance abuse and delinquency prevention, Dr. Haggerty speaks, conducts trainings, and writes extensively on this field. He has presented papers at many national and international conferences throughout Europe, United Arab Emirates, Australia, Canada and the United States. He has been a board member of the Society for Prevention Research and is a prevention science reviewer for periodicals such as Evaluation and Program Planning and the Journal of Adolescent Health, among others.
Published research
- Prevention: The missing link in our efforts to support families impacted by the opioid epidemic
- Predictors of Participation in a Voluntary Parenting Program for Foster Caregivers of Teens
- First Years Away from Home: Predictors of engagement in a self-directed prevention handbook for caregivers of transitioning college students
- Community-based child trafficking prevention in Ghana: A rights-based approach
- Supporting families after pediatric traumatic injury: Illuminating parent experiences of stress and coping
- “Letting Go and Staying Connected”: Substance use outcomes from a developmentally targeted intervention for parents of college students
- Translating grand challenges from concept to community: The “Communities in Action” experience
- Staying Connected with Your Teen® and the promise of self-directed prevention programs
- Risk and protective factors for adolescent marijuana use
- Prevention programs and policies (Chapter 3)
- Investigating the efficacy of a self-directed parenting intervention to reduce risky behaviors among college students: Study protocol for a multi-arm hybrid type 2 randomized control trial
- Assessing an adapted approach to Communities That Care for child maltreatment prevention
- Using Communities That Care for community child maltreatment prevention
- Use of Web and phone survey modes to gather data from adults about their young adult children: An evaluation based on a randomized design
- Time-varying effects of families and peers on adolescent marijuana use: Person-environment interactions across development
- Long-term effects of staying connected with your teen® on drug use frequency at age 20.
- HIV/Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention Messaging: Targeting Root Causes of Sexual Risk Behavior.
- Trajectories of handgun carrying in rural communities from early adolescence to young adulthood
- Helping individuals with firearm injuries: A cluster randomized trial
- Firearm-related behaviors following firearm injury: Changes in ownership, carrying and storage
- Fidelity assessment of a social work-led intervention among patients with firearm injuries
- Barriers to recruitment, retention and intervention delivery in a randomized trial among patients with firearm injuries
- Fostering Higher Education: Preliminary findings from a small randomized pilot study
- Family, mental health, and placement outcomes of a low-cost preventive intervention for youth in foster care
- Income, ethnicity, and equality: Assessing racial disparities in foster care using a self-sufficiency range
- Washington State retail marijuana legalization: Parent and adolescent preferences for marijuana messages in a sample of low-income families
- Using the social development strategy to unleash the power of prevention
- Using Facebook to recruit parents to participate in a family program to prevent teen drug use
- Two-year risk behavior outcomes from Connecting, a prevention program for caregivers and youth in foster care
- The usual, racialized, suspects: The consequence of police contacts with Black and White youth on adult arrest