Very young adolescents (VYAs) between the ages of 10 and 14 represent about half of the 1.2 billion adolescents aged 10–19 in the world today. In lower- and middle-income countries, where most unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, maternal deaths and sexually transmitted infections occur, investment in positive youth development to promote sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is increasing. Most interventions, though, focus on older adolescents, overlooking VYAs. Since early adolescence marks a critical transition between childhood and older adolescence and adulthood, setting the stage for future SRH and gendered attitudes and behaviours, targeted investment in VYAs is imperative to lay foundations for healthy future relationships and positive SRH. This article advocates for such investments and identifies roles that policy-makers, donors, programme designers and researchers and evaluators can play to address the disparity.

The health belief model became one of the most widely recognized conceptual frameworks of health behavior, focusing on behavioral change at the individual level. The model suggests that decision‐makers make a mental calculus about whether the benefits of a promoted behavior change outweigh its practical and psychological costs or obstacles. That is, individuals conduct an internal assessment of the net benefits of changing their behavior, and decide whether or not to act. The model identifies four aspects of this assessment: perceived susceptibility to ill‐health (risk perception), perceived severity of ill‐health, perceived benefits of behavior change, and perceived barriers to taking action. The concept of self‐efficacy, or the perceived ability to actually take a recommended action, was later recognized as an important component or factor.

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Background to the debate: Uganda is one of the few African countries where rates of HIV infection have fallen, from about 15 percent in the early 1990s to about five percent in 2001. At the end of 2005, UNAIDS estimated that 6.7 percent of adults were infected with the virus. The reasons behind Uganda's success have been intensely studied in the hope that other countries can emulate the strategies that worked. Some researchers credit the success to the Ugandan government's promotion of “ABC behaviors”—particularly abstinence and fidelity. Uganda receives funds from the United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which promotes the ABC approach with a focus on abstinence-driven public health campaigns. Other researchers question whether the ABC approach was really responsible for the decline in HIV infection. Critics of the ABC approach also argue that by emphasizing abstinence over condom use, the approach leaves women at risk of infection, because in many parts of the world women are not empowered to insist on abstinence or fidelity.

The present study examined the predictive effects of five impulsivity-like traits (Premeditation, Perseverance, Sensation Seeking, Negative Urgency, and Positive Urgency) on driving outcomes (driving errors, driving lapses, driving violations, cell phone driving, traffic citations, and traffic collisions). With a convenience sample of 266 college student drivers, we found that each of the impulsivity-like traits was related to multiple risky driving outcomes. Positive Urgency (tendency to act impulsively when experiencing negative affect) was the most robust predictor of risky driving outcomes. Positive Urgency is a relatively newly conceptualized impulsivity-like trait that was not examined in the driving literature previously, suggesting a strong need to further examine its role as a personality trait related to risky driving. These findings generally support the multidimensional assessment of impulsivity-like traits, and they specifically support the addition of Positive Urgency to a list of risk factors for risky driving behaviors.