Forging a Social Science of Prevention in the United States, 1950-2005

Abstract

This thesis offers a critical account of the rise of “prevention science,” a field that coalesced in the United States during the 1990s. Prevention scientists borrow methods from public health and evidence-based medicine to design preventative interventions for a range of problems they deem detrimental to healthy development—e.g. substance use, delinquency, violence, academic failure, mental illness and risky sexual activity. Where social critics have attributed the emergence of prevention science to the abstract workings of “neoliberalism,” this thesis tells a more processual and variegated story about the field’s past, present and potential future—one that highlights the plurality of preventive projects that have managed to survive through the broader political, economic and ideological shifts that have taken place since the 1950s. To do so, it traces the roots of prevention science back to a mid-century landscape comprised of distinct yet overlapping subcultures of preventive research and follows the dispersal of that landscape during the 1980s and 1990s. This thesis is structured around three localized subcultures of preventive research: the behavioral scientific Program on Problem Behavior at the University of Colorado; the positivist criminological Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington, Seattle; and the social justice-oriented Vermont Conferences on the Primary Prevention of Psychology at the University of Vermont, Burlington. After tracing the respective development of these communities between the 1950s and 1980s, it follows their interplay and eventual divergence through the formalization of prevention science during the 1990s.