Evaluator, Dr. Scott Plunkett
Scott Plunkett, Evaluator, Psychology:Dr. Plunkett has a long history in developing, supervising, and evaluating programs targeting at-risk youth and their parents, especially those from minority populations and low socioeconomic statuses. A few of the programs he has evaluated include (1) a comprehensive effective parenting campaign that served over 20,000 parents a year (mostly Latino) in Los Angeles county; (2) a conflict resolution and mediation program targeting Latino and African American youth in Pasadena; (3) a comprehensive sexuality education program for individuals with developmental disabilities in Oklahoma; (4) a book flood program to help students in low-income schools in the greater Los Angeles area; and (5) the Career Opportunities in Research program that helps underrepresented students who want to pursue a doctorate in mental health research. Besides his interest in program evaluation, Dr. Plunkett has a strong interest in identifying community, family, peer, and school influences on the mental health of minority youth. His research project, titled Adolescent Resiliency in Multi-Cultural Communities (http://www.csun.edu/plunk/armcc/index.html ) , utilizes data from adolescent self-report surveys, father self-report surveys, school-record data, and neighborhood data from students in high schools in California, Oklahoma, and North Carolina that have large populations of minority youth. Two of the primary target groups in the research are Latino and African American adolescents. The program evaluation and research project have resulted in over 100 hundred peer-reviewed conference presentations and 20 peer-reviewed journal articles (most with student co-authors).