LPRC - SPECIAL RE-RELEASE: Episode 16 – The Offender Perspective ft. Stephanie Lin

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

This is a special re-release of a special early episode of the CrimeScience Podcast! The post Episode 16 – The Offender Perspective ft. Stephanie Lin appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to crime science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reed Hayes of the Lost Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of Control Tech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. In this episode, our very own, Stephanie Lynn, LPRC research scientists, discuss offender

perspectives, interviews, past projects, and much more with our co-hosts. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Use Bosch cameras onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch Online at Boschsecurity.com. All right. Well, welcome everybody again to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast brought to you by the loss prevention. Research Council, LPRC, and I'm Reed Hayes from the University of Florida, and I'd like to introduce my co-host today, Tom Meehan, Vice President of Control Tech and longtime LPAP practitioner.

Tom, if you'd go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey, Reed. Thanks for the intro. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening to everyone listening. I know that everybody's listening at different times. Welcome to another episode of the crime science podcast, and we're really excited to

today to have a member of the LPRC joining us and talking about the offender interview process. So I'll turn it over you for the introduction for Stephanie. Sounds good, Tom. So today we're joined by an LPRC team member, a colleague, Stephanie Lynn, and Stephanie is a research scientist at the LPRC. And in that capacity, our research scientists, of course, put together and design, conduct, analyze, and report research that is meaningful and hopefully is rigorous and, of course, most importantly, is actionable by LPRC members. And as many of you know, we're up at the 70 retail chain range right now and continuing to grow so the LPRC can. community is growing, as well as over 70 solution partners and half a dozen major manufacturers

like Procter & Gamble and Bacardi. And so in this capacity, as we mentioned, Stephanie, what she does is she facilitates working groups that are ongoing working groups of retailers and other practitioners throughout the year on special issues. They will come up with projects that they would like to know more about. hey we would like to better understand in store or online retail fraud in this particular situation or problem that we're having or we're having a we'd like to understand and be able to conduct better data analysis on our own things that we'd like to know about what's going on our business and

and what we can do to get better at reducing crime and loss and so then stephani can go and say look here are our options you know we can do as statistical analysis we can conduct surveys we We can, or focus groups, we can conduct an experiment maybe and see what's going on. But as well, or in combination with all the above, we can conduct offender interviews. We want to understand who the target audience is that we're trying to deter or disrupt or at least document as they initiate and progress crimes. And so Stephanie's become quite the specialist at offender interviewing on our team. So what I'll do is, Stephanie, can you very quickly, though, get it.

Give us an idea. When did you join the LPRC? And what was one of the first things that you took on after becoming a research scientist at LPRC? Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening to everyone that's listening to the LPRC Crime Science Podcast. This is Stephanie Lynn. I've been with the organization for a little over three years now.

I facilitate a couple working groups at the LPRC as well as conducting dozens of research over the past three years that I've worked here. The first thing that I took on as a research scientist after I joined the LPRC is probably facilitating a lot of working group and that's in simultaneous with some research projects that I conduct at the time within those working groups. So I do a little bit of each over the past three years and in summation I've conducted over, I think over three dozens of them

over the past couple years. Excellent. And so what are the working groups you're in right now, Stephanie, that you facilitate those working groups? I facilitate the violent crime working groups, the data analytics working groups, as well as the retail fraud working groups. And on top of that, I also facilitate the anti-violence innovation chain. So that's, yeah, that's it.

I appreciate that. Let me go over to you, Tom, and get your. your sort of opening thoughts and comments. So welcome, Stephanie. It's a very exciting topic for me, being in my past and interviewing folks. I'm always very interested in the difference of a controlled interview that you're setting up versus, you know, a more spontaneous event. So I know that the listeners are eager to hear about it as well.

I remember when you started and it's great to continue to work with you. I can't believe it's been three years. It feels like six months. So it's very exciting to have you on the podcast. And also want to give you some kudos to the recent article that you wrote about the self-checkout. It's great to see some of that research and the things that you're doing, getting out to a wider audience to really show the folks that aren't members of the LPRC what some of the value is. I think it did. I heard a lot of people talking about it.

You know, it's a small community, but it's a growing community, both in the industry of retail and asset protection. And I think the more exposure of the LPRC has the better people run through. I would love to just jump right into the offender interviewing portion and, you know, ask some questions. But, Reed, why don't, I know that you have some intimate knowledge of some of these interviews that I haven't. So why don't you get started and then I'll chime in. Absolutely, Tom. So what I'll do is kind of frame it up. And essentially what we're trying to do here is understand.

why people offend of course what kind of gets them started why did they become an offender in the first place why do they select certain types of theft or fraud or violent crime types why do they in this case gravitate to retail do they go to certain retailers or retail types or locations what what do they target cash merchandise why why not always always why why why not we're looking for opportunities to treat right just like in in medicine what is something we can learn so that we can change the equation so those so that future offenders uh decide not here not now i'm not going to initiate or i'm not going to keep going here um and so that's really what stephanie's doing you mentioned tom a recent article she put out on self-checkout we all know that the good shopper increasingly wants lower and lower friction, they want what they want when they want it, and they want to be able to get out quickly and get back to work or home or elsewhere. But that can come with a huge risk of unintentional losses, and these can be

huge numbers, as well as, of course, theft and fraud. And so Stephanie was probing in that. And Stephanie, let me start there and say, you know, we know that all research involves sampling. We're trying to understand from a sample that's representative what's going on and what they think about or do and so forth. We know that measurement is important. We're trying to measure the right things and that it's accurate. We don't want to, if we're measuring again, I've mentioned this before, the wind speed or air temperature. We don't want to accidentally measure body temperature or a vehicle speed. So instrumentation is huge.

and then how we analyze. Are we accurately assessing what we've got? Are we finding errors in the data? Are we correcting them or transforming the data so we can use them? So, Stephanie, in the case of self-checkout, tell me a little bit about how you thought through the project, what you were trying to find out and how you proceeded. So in that specific self-checkout research interview,

a retailer came up to us and identified that's one of the issues. that they're experiencing and they have start installing some technologies around the self-checkout areas to help them mitigate the risks of shoplifting, sweethearting, and any sort of theft that goes through self-checkout. So from there, I start some brainstorming process or brainstorming with the retail counterparts and draft up an interview questionnaire targeting some specific focal questions where we wanted to get answered for. The way that we, it can be one questions or several questions that we want to answer in this type of research. But the questions that we ask in the questionnaire should be the focal point of that survey.

So we develop one or several hypotheses that we want to test. The questions we include in our questionnaire aim at systemically testing these hypotheses. So the questions we develop are usually really clear, concise, and direct to ensure that our target audience, the offenders in this case, we can get the best possible answers from them. So we ask questions around, you know, how often they shoplift, from self-checkout, conduct self-checkout fraud, how is there any specific type of retailer they often visit, why those retailers what makes them so vulnerable that they would prefer this retailer rather than other retailers who have similar technologies or

provide similar services. We also ask them things around the lines of, you know, what are your methods of stealing, your methods of operation, and most importantly, we wanted to understand what are some sort of measures, countermeasures, and technologies or implementations of additional staff that the stores can do to kind of mitigate and prevent these people from, you know, shoplift from self-checkout in the future. So, and in terms of the recruiting process, it's a very interesting, it's a very interesting topic to research. Obviously, the self-checkout has gained a lot of prominence over the past couple years. Many more retailers are using it now than years before, especially in the

grocery chain. And there is a growing issue, apparently, with the growing number of self-checkout services providing by these retailers. So, and obviously with growing growing popularity, there is growing concerns over theft in these areas. So I start my recruiting process with, you know, really actually, the main venue that I recruit is using online platforms. Try to find out within this hidden population who the offenders are, and start a one-on-one pre-screening process with them and asking them questions about their past experience

before I actually start to interview them. So if they pass a pre-screening interview, then I will go ahead and interview them on site and take them through a set of questions that I have pre-composed and get their immediate feedback in that real store environment. So that's essentially how I go. about it in this project specifically.

Yeah, that's really excellent feedback and it helps us kind of think through. And I think thinking is a big part of what we try and do is really understand we'll read what other scientists have thought and done and what their research is found, in this case around front end fraud and around offender interviewing, you know, how they do it, what they've found and so forth. And we're, of course, trying to guard against bad data. We don't want to encourage them, get them the same things that aren't accurate, and they're pretty good at doing that on their own.

And so we try and weed that out and try and understand, no, that's, you know, we need the most accurate information we can. And so that's part of the interviewing process. We're trying to do a couple of things. One, we're trying to get them to recall things about their decisions and what has influenced. but they were also trying to put them mentally in that place and time where they might be thinking about and might go ahead and start to initiate and progress an act, a criminal act, trying to get them

in that place and time in their head and have them in their experiencing self as well as the recalling self. Tom, I'll go over to you, see what kind of questions or comments you might have for Stephanie Lynn. Thanks, Reed. Yeah, I think Stephanie, the self-checkout, study was actually really well received and people actually reached out to me on it. I have a couple of questions just in the whole process and specific to the self-checkout. Was there any surprises? Anything any offender said to you that you would have really not thought you would have heard?

I don't think there are a ton of surprises around this topic. However, I was surprised by how many offenders said about the same. things. So when I interviewed these people and when I asked them, why do you choose self-checkout as your method of theft, many of them indicated that they thought it is, first of all, easy to shoplift from, and second of all, they thought it's harder for them to prosecute or for the retailers to prosecute. So the easiness, I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but the harder to prosecutor was really surprising to me because that's not necessary the case. Many offenders indicated that even if they get caught, they can always say that, you know,

they have been distracted when they check out or they can always say that, you know, your self-checkout kiosk are too complicated and due to its complicity. I, you know, I thought I ringed this item up, but I didn't. It's not on me. This is on. your machine. And so they have this kind of mindset that they can always get out of these situations when they, even if they get caught. So I was really surprised that they thought that self-checkout theft, it's harder to prosecute than all the other crimes happening within the retail industry. So I know that, you know, I live this for almost 20 years. and when I hear Reed, say, the sea, fear, get like the perception of risk.

I always, you know, think of self-checkout. And back in the early 2000s and late 90s, I worked for Home Depot when they rolled self-checkout. And I remember some of the concerns and living it in that environment and really trying to figure out how it really comes into play. So throughout the whole entire process related to offender interviews, and self-checkout. What are the two or three key takeaways for retailers without, you know, getting into too in-depth because everybody should read it if they haven't already, based on what your offenders said, what are those some of the takeaways that retailers could

implement? I think the main thing that I wanted to point out is the role of employees in those situations. So many, many offenders have indicated that either the presence of, additional employees or presence of attentive self-checkout employees would deter them from theft. So that extra set of eyes on them is going to be really helpful when it comes to deter offenders from self-checkout fraud. Many offenders have also indicated that, you know, there's two schools of thoughts when it comes to employees' presence in deterring self-checkout theft.

So in one group of offenders, they indicated that, hey, as long as they're all employees there and they are attentive, they are, you know, overseeing and manning the area, as if they are, you know, paying attention to all the customers, you know, transactions and their actions in those situations, then it is a good enough deterrent for them to not to shoplift. In other cases, we have offenders indicated that, you know, if the employee comes up to me and asks if I need any help, ask if there's anything, if everything is okay, then that sort of, that level of customer service and engagement would definitely deter them from theft. So essentially, there are people just say, hey, just have employees there, and that's enough. and if they are attentive. And we also have a different group saying that, hey, customer engagement or customer service is a key to deter offenders in the self-checkout. And did you have any of the offenders when you're in a room talk about creative ways to steal or different ways to take advantage of that you were first time hearing, for instance? So a lot of times when I did interviews, they would actually educate the early adopters or theft, or was it all the common themes?

Yeah, definitely. There are two incidents that I recall really clearly about that. So first, I have a offender telling me that he will usually engage the employees to help her succeed in an event. So she will pretend to be a normal customer and ring up. items and you know for some reason there is some some stipulation that she does that will you know that will call for employee or employee's action so she will engage with the employees act as if she is a normal shopper and once employee left the scene or left that station and she will go about and you know start sweethearting through self-checkout another incident that I recall is this gentleman that I

interviewed in her in his um early 20s i would say that specifically said that he will usually hire somebody on the street um that's a lot younger probably around like you know eight nine 10 years old and uh and he will go in with this with this little kid because he indicated that the employee's attention will be totally different once you have a kid with you so he perceived or he think that employee were perceiving as a, you know, just a brother who's taking his little brother to a store to shop and wouldn't perceive him as somebody that would likely be stealing, therefore less attention will be diverted to this person who's trying to steal from self-checkout. So those are the two incidents that I think I recall really clearly that I thought their method of operation is very interesting.

Wow, that's a great insight. So, you know, I think the self-checkout study is a great segue into Fender interviewing, but I know that you've done a lot more than that. When you're thinking about developing the questionnaire, what's the process? How do you start developing questions from my perspective, you know, interview and interrogation from a retail side is very different. There's a very systematic, organized approach that really doesn't change that much. And then when you get into or senior reviews, there's questionnaires.

So from, you know, from your seat, how do you develop a questionnaire? What are some of the steps you take to come up with the questions? The first step when developing a questionnaire is definitely making sure that we understand the objective of this research. What are the hypothesis that we want to test? What are some of our suspicions that we wanted to maybe clear that out during this research process? What are some of the things that the retailers would like to know or that will help their overall mitigation strategies and deployment process of a solution? So the questions that we come up with usually are in relationship with those ideas and just making sure that our survey questionnaire are clear, concise, and direct.

so we try to avoid any complex statements or technical jargons as it will usually only confuse the offenders and lead to incorrect responses especially when we talk to some offenders who doesn't necessarily have a high level of education we want to make sure that we are delivered the statement or the question as brief as possible so that, you know, their memory spend won't, will last during those couple seconds that we state the question as well as making sure that they understand the question that we are asking in order for us to derive a consistent result from those people. And there are all sort of different questions that we asked during, during, in our survey

interviews. So we will sometimes ask dichotomous questions where it's yes and no, agree or disagree. It's the quickest and the simplest question to analyze, but not necessarily the highly sensitive measure. We, a lot of times, will ask, you know, open-ended questions. These questions will allow the offenders to respond in their own words, and they can be useful for gaining insights into the feelings of those offenders, but it can also be challenging when it comes to analyze the data. However, we do recommend a lot of those in our sampling because these are the questions that retailers tend to get the most insights from, and they will love to hear more about offenders' response in their own words rather than confining to a

a pre-existing set of answer choices. We also do, you know, multiple choice questions, rank order questions, and things in those nature. So, yeah, back to you, Tom. I've got a quick question here, Stephanie, for you. And as you well know, could you explain to the audience, you know, we have different places that we conduct interviews. We might conduct them in office.

We might conduct them in the wild, as we call it around in a place where there's context. a parking lot, a store, whatever's relevant. Can you explain the difference in an example of the different types of interview venues or locations and why one might be better than another, depending on what we're doing? Yeah, definitely. Depending on the scope of the project, the interviews can be conducted in our lab store or that's a real store lab or in our innovation lab or even in the parking law. as we have referred to, and I have actually conducted interviews on the streets because the scope

of the project requires me to go beyond the parking law. The interviews that were conducted in our lab is definitely more controlled. The interviews usually go really smoothly like we expect, but the innovation lab doesn't necessarily mirror a real store environment exactly. So offenders won't necessarily experience any commotion and even in some situation, hacktiveness when the holiday rolls around. For instance, there aren't any customer or staff, which will, in some sense, impact the way offender perceived the environment and the technology in that environment.

So in many cases, we will need to conduct interviews, especially offender interviews in the store, so that to get their most immediate feedback and reactions towards those technologies or in that environment. In terms of customer surveys that we do, we do them in parking lots as well as in store settings. And so I have also gone beyond parking lots to conduct customer, to conduct offender interviews in Los Angeles, where I interview a homeless population and get their feedback on a solution that we have, that we have implemented in the West. So, yeah. So you don't have to necessarily address this.

I know that we did. We had an earlier podcast episode where we talked to Dr. Mike Chiquitano of the University of Florida on some of his experiences, domestic and wild, with offender interviewing. but we discussed there the IRB or the institutional review board. And again, any time that any academic institution conducts human subject or participant research, we, of course, write up the protocol that we'll be using. We submit that to the IRB. At the University of Florida, we have four IRB.

So we go to IRB2, which is behavioral research. And so we're going to tell them what we're trying to find and how we're trying to find and they'll come back with some critiques and changes. Always, always, we're trying to protect the subjects that the research that we conduct cannot result in any harm to the participants or subjects. So the same thing, of course, with interviewing offenders. We've got to be very careful there. Stephanie, is there anything that you do regarding the IRB with a notification or anything like that?

Yes. And before I kind of answer that question, I wanted to bring up another interesting topic That is the challenges that we tend to incur when we do this type of recruiting and interviewing of the offenders. And so one of the biggest challenge is to ensure that there are trust between us. There is a lot of times lack of trust in us and in them because they have not previously worked with us before. They don't know why we are collecting this information, how we are going to use this information. and if we are going to use this information that we collect against them that will lead them to legal issues or even in some case prosecution.

Sometimes we need to set up additional calls with them to squirt away concerns, and we will provide IRB, that is the written consent that we just mentioned, to outline the objectives of the research, how the information that we could conduct it will be used and we'll essentially provide them with this form that will guarantee the information that we will be collecting will not be used to prosecute them, which is a major concern when they conduct the interviews with us.

They always have this uncomfortable, uneasy feeling before we provide these information to them. And sometimes, even in some cases, even if we provide this, they are still not willing to come forth and talk about their experience with us. Thanks for that, Stephanie. One other thing I want to touch on is, since we've talked about conducting interviews in that place that is relevant to get the real context and much more accurate data, we're in the wild, what are some safety precautions you've taken or that? our team takes, let's say if you're the interviewer, the researcher, to make sure that you're safe and secure. We've talked about making sure that the interviewee is protected, but from your standpoint. It's going to be dependent upon the project and the population that we are going

to interview. If it's customer and associates, obviously there wouldn't be any concern. We will be in the store, and there are securities all around the store to kind of protect our safety. But when it comes to offender interviews, again, depending on the population, we will be interviewing. We take different measures to protect our safety in those environments. So if it's only shoplifters, then we will have some sort of prior conversation with them. We'll chat with them before we start an interview with them, make sure that they are not verbally combative or abusive, and make sure that, you know, they are reasonable people to talk to. And usually in those cases, we will go ahead and interview them in either store or in our innovation lab where there

are either employees or my colleagues around the area that can ensure that, you know, the process goes smoothly. But when it comes to higher level offenders, including the past offenders that we have interviewed that are homeless and some of them are opioid users, these populations tend to be a little bit riskier when it comes to us interviewing them. But still, we will, you know, we will have another person there with us just to ensure our safety. Excellent. Tom, any follow-up or other? questions for Stephanie? I think

about everything. The only question I had was really left was related to the offender panel this year. And it was different, you know, at least from the ones I remember they were almost always externally driven.

In relationship to the internal panel, I was really intrigued because internal is always a little different having them come up and speak. If you could just, for the folks that weren't at the impact conference that are listening. One, everybody who's listening really should be there. It's the best conference out there.

Then, two, can you give some takeaways on maybe the top three takeaways that we learned from interviewing an internal offender versus an external directly related to the panel? Sure. So the idea of the internal offender panel actually came about our understanding of this growing issued of internal theft. employee theft is actually the second leading source of inventory shrinkage as conducted by a survey by Dr. Hollinger and even the main cause amongst the retailers. So we wanted to help our retailers to understand the underlying causes of these activities,

the psychology of these offenders, and why they choose to conduct theft from their employees. So at the conference, we brought to offenders with internal theft experience and interviewed them on stage to provide additional insights into this growing issue. We ask questions around the lines of, along the lines of, you know, why do you decide to steal from your employee? How did you take, you know, cash or merchandise from your employer? And what can the retailer, especially the store management can do to deter them from commitment? such deviant behavior in the future. I think one of the main takeaway for them to steal from their employer is that both of they indicated that when they are hired, they were promised more hours.

And along their employment period, their hours decreased little by little, and they, their hours decrease little by little and they try to talk to the management they try to you know to get additional job but it doesn't really work out so so the way they go about it is to default to a a less preferable um not so preferable um option is to steal from them to make up for that uh promise hour that you know the store management has originally scheduled for them to work you know and tom i was going to add that um because that's an excellent question a great way to harness and leverage what we're talking about here today on how you know offender interviews that how that type of data informs you know what we need to be doing and doing better here uh to prevent these incidents um and so

what stephanie's talking about and tease the one thing that she was able to tease out from them is some of the precipitating factors because we know that there are things that are always these somewhat stable differences between one individual and another. You know, what they, their genetics or genomics, you know, what they've been through in their life,

their peer groups and the pressures and things that they are experiencing themselves, you know, there's differences about a place. It could be one store versus another is different both the way it's built and what their assets are and so forth, but also the culture,

you know, the manager, the leadership in there and their style and then sort of the morale and other culture that's in there. Those, that varies. And then the situation itself, right then and there. So that person, they come to the party with whatever the way they think and process in the world and who they blame and so forth. And then they're in that particular location. Well, now according to them, and we're always skeptical of all data, in particular interview

data, what's the situation? Well, they're both separately. brought up on their own, hey, you know what? They didn't describe this, but here's a precipitating factor in my mind. In my mind, I was promised this, this was my expectation, that location, that person didn't meet my expectation, so I'm going to do something about it. And again, that kind of decision can happen immediately and opportunistically or it could take place over time.

And then finally, what method they used to carry it out what they did. And then, of course, what Stephanie or the rest of our team, we're going to now try trying to find out, okay, given this, that, and the other, what are things that we can do to change that condition? We can't change them, everybody's, you know, backgrounds or genomics and things like that, but we can change in effect any way, the built environment, of course, the culture

and how we treat people and what we do, and how are they compensated and so forth. We can try and vet people before they come into the workplace. So they are sort of naturally happy, healthy, productive, honest people, and good to work with. And then what are some technologies and tactics we need to enforce, you know, to maintain some control there in that place? So that's all the things that came from those interviews as opposed to what Stephanie

described before at the front end and how to protect it. So any last questions, Tom, from you? No, I, no last questions for me. I just want to thank you, Stephanie, for taking the time. I know that the listeners will enjoy it. Okay. So, Stephanie, I think what I'll do is one last question. have any interview projects coming up as far as theft or fraud or violence that are coming up in

2019? Yeah, I have a variety of projects on their horizon here. One of the things or one of the projects being an enhancement of the self-checkout research that I've done. So through my research from that from that self-checkout project I a lot of offenders have been reporting that the way a way to enhance the the solutions that we we were testing in the environment so I'm gonna use their feedback and adjust the technology and conduct additional offender interviews to see if that enhanced solution is make really making a impact on their behavior and and on whether or not they attempt to steal from the store.

So that's one of the things that I'll be working on in the next quarter or so. from the offender perspective about what they're seeing and how they're responding in a parking lot, in a store, in a distribution center, or whatever the environment might be. And then now we're looking for opportunities along with other data that we might get from the literature, you know, press research or from others, you know, practitioners. And now we're going to put together some things in trial. And now we can go back and then we can go back and talk to offenders and get an idea of, All right, how we may see on video, we may get an idea through other signatures or signals

out there what's going on, but we also go back and talk to offenders, sometimes the same ones and sometimes additionally some new ones, hey, what adjustments or tweaks do we need to make? Because it's not what you do, but how you do it, and even more importantly, how you keep it fresh. So I just want to thank everybody out there for joining Tom Ian, myself, my colleague, Stephanie Lynn, So reporting to you from Gainesville, Florida, from the Lost Prevention Research Council, and myself from the University of Florida. This is Dr. Reed Hayes. I want to thank our producer, as always, Mr. Kevin Tran.

And everybody have a fantastic time, and we appreciate you listening to Crime Science, the podcast. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science podcast presented by the Lost Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and value information at LPRse.org. the content provided in the crime science podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal financial or other advice views expressed by guests of the crime science podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the else prevention research council