ABSTRACT
During the last decade, a veritable explosion of books, articles, and media reports about at-risk minority youth and high-risk behaviors of minority youth have been published. In some cases these reports have made substantive contributions to our understanding of the escalating self-destructive behaviors of some minority youth whereas in other cases they have merely served to confuse and distort the phenomenon. Despite the increased scrutiny of scholars and policy analysts in a range of disciplines, the research on high-risk problematic behaviors in minority youth can be generally characterized as fragmented, lacking any coherent conceptual framework, and plagued by methodological difficulties, conceptual biases and analytical limitations (McKenry, Everett, Ramseur, & Carter, 1989; Taylor, 1995).
