Rebecca L. Collins

Biography

Rebecca Collins is a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation and director of the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention program within RAND Health. She also sits on RAND's Human Subjects Protection Committee. Her research examines the determinants and consequences of health risk behavior. Several recent projects focus on the effects of media on health among children and adolescents. She was principal investigator for a national longitudinal study that explored associations between media use and adolescent sexual attitudes, behavior, and health; the study produced groundbreaking evidence linking exposure to some types of sexual content in the media and adolescent sex. Collins was also key investigator for a longitudinal study of the effects of alcohol advertising in media and in community settings on underage drinking. She was recently a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) task force investigating the sexualization of young girls in the United States. Collins has published a number of studies of adolescent risk, focusing on sex and on substance use in this population, as well as studies of sexual risk behavior in various samples of young adults in the United States. Her second area of study involves various aspects of living with HIV infection. Collins is a member of the APA, a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Personality and Self and Identity. Collins has a Ph.D. in social psychology from UCLA.