“hardwired”, rather than formed, such as rage, optimism, or general health. The micro factors include preferences taught and formed by the family, peers, community, and local institutions and the constraints imposed by the same, including household poverty. The macro factors include more general influences and constraints, such as gender/race discrimination, armed conflict, poverty and economic inequality. These factors are commonly classified into two groups: the set of personal, macro, and micro factors that increase the risk of negative behaviors (risk factors) and the set that prevent youth from engaging in negative behaviors, commonly called protective factors. Each person has a set of risk and protective factors that influence preference formation, constraints, and thus behaviors.

Most of the empirical testing of the ecological risk framework depends on correlations between current risky behaviors and personal, micro, and macro factors of the youth population. The literature in the US primarily focuses on identifying factors related to single risky behaviors (e.g. substance use).<sup>6</sup> Recent US literature has begun to take advantage of longitudinal data available in the US<sup>7</sup> to demonstrate that many of those factors correlated with risk taking behaviors are actually causal factors.

The few studies that have tested the model using data from Latin American and Caribbean find similar results to those in the US. Blum (2004) uses data collected in 11 Caribbean countries and finds that a positive relationship with a caring adult, whether in the family or in school, is a key factor that is positively correlated with less risky sexual behavior (sexual debut and condom use), contraception, pregnancy and childbearing. Lloyd (2005) identifies the positive effects of schooling and health on transitions to risk-free adulthood

> 6 There is an extensive literature in the US which is too large to cover here.  The US National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Health maintains a web page (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez), that lists hundreds of published articles that have used this methodology.  A few of the papers that motivated this paper include: Resnick et al. (2004) look at risk and protective factors related to youth violence; Blum et al. (2002) describe the ecological risk framework and provide empirical evidence for three risky behaviors (weapon related violence, ever had sexual intercourse and ever used cocaine); Scal et al. (2003) look at risk and protective factors related to smoking; Zweig et al (2002) identify methods of predicting risk profiles using risk and protective factors such as psychosocial development, school and family characteristics using OLS and multinomial logit regressions with cross sectional data; and Bernat and Resnick (2006) provides a comprehensive review of the resiliency framework and additional empirical support for this framework in promoting healthy youth development.

> 7These studies, which also appear on the NIH web site, use the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (ADDHEALTH) through the University of North Carolina, Carolina Population  Center, surveys youth in grades 7-12 with the first wave of interviews in 1994 (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/design). Follow-up waves were in 1996 and 2002, the latter enabling more detailed analysis.  This survey is school based and asks about risk and protective factors as well as behaviors.  The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1997 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, surveyed males and females born in 1980-1984 (http://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm) and focuses primarily on educational and employment outcomes. The previous NLSY was from 1979.

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