Sibling Facilitation Mediates the Association Between Older and Younger Sibling Alcohol Use in Late Adolescence

Previous research has shown adolescent siblings are similar in their alcohol use and that this similarity is largely due to their shared environment. Using a genetically informed sibling sample (196 full‐biological pairs, 384 genetically unrelated pairs), we confirmed that the extent to which older siblings facilitate younger siblings' alcohol use (i.e., help them get alcohol) was one factor contributing to this shared environmental association. All analyses controlled for parent and peer influences. Findings were not moderated by sibling differences in genetic relatedness, gender, or ethnicity. Proximity in sibling age strengthened these associations, somewhat. Results were especially strong for sibling pairs where the older sibling was of legal drinking age. Implications for prevention and intervention are discussed.     

Disaster and response:science, systems and realities

The Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 2004 was one of the most significant natural disasters in modern history. The response that it drew was unprecedented at both local and international levels. While a range of specific impacts and losses may be predicted within the affected populations, there is substantial evidence that adverse impacts upon mental health may represent one of the most significant outcomes of such events. People from poorer countries are disproportionately exposed to such emergencies and may experience greater psychosocial burden in the aftermath, as well as a range of adaptations. This raises important questions regarding the current capacity of response agencies to mitigate negative impacts but also concerning the cultural context in which such mental health effects are defined. It also calls into question whether "indicated" interventions are both realistic and ecologically valid in non-Western settings. The science of Disaster Mental Health is a relatively new field, currently engaged in a number of such debates. However, there is some emerging consensus about what constitutes good public mental health practice throughout the phases of emergency response and across diverse cultural settings. Existing data and practice guidelines provide frameworks that may be adapted to allow health and recovery workers to identify and reduce mental health morbidity, support healing and harness the agency of those affected for the recovery process.     

Assurance in clinical trial design

Conventional clinical trial design involves considerations of power, and sample size is typically chosen to achieve a desired power conditional on a specified treatment effect. In practice, there is considerable uncertainty about what the true underlying treatment effect may be, and so power does not give a good indication of the probability that the trial will demonstrate a positive outcome. Assurance is the unconditional probability that the trial will yield a ‘positive outcome’. A positive outcome usually means a statistically significant result, according to some standard frequentist significance test. The assurance is then the prior expectation of the power, averaged over the prior distribution for the unknown true treatment effect. We argue that assurance is an important measure of the practical utility of a proposed trial, and indeed that it will often be appropriate to choose the size of the sample (and perhaps other aspects of the design) to achieve a desired assurance, rather than to achieve a desired power conditional on an assumed treatment effect. We extend the theory of assurance to two‐sided testing and equivalence trials. We also show that assurance is straightforward to compute in some simple problems of normal, binary and gamma distributed data, and that the method is not restricted to simple conjugate prior distributions for parameters. Several illustrations are given. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Binge drinking in female college students: the association of physical activity, weight concern, and depressive symptoms

As an initial step in building gender-specific binge drinking intervention programs, the authors investigated the relation of potentially modifiable factors (physical activity level, weight concern, and depressive symptoms) to binge drinking while controlling for the effects of previously established correlates of binge drinking (tobacco and marijuana use, GPA, and perception of peer alcohol use). Four-hundred-twelve college women completed an in-class survey. Multivariate analyses revealed that tobacco and marijuana use, GPA, and physical activity were significantly associated with binge drinking, whereas tobacco use and perception of peers' alcohol use were associated with more frequent binge drinking. The findings suggested that the variables associated with any binge drinking and frequency of binge drinking may differ and that binge drinking can be associated with positive health behaviors (ie, greater physical activity) as well as risky health behaviors (eg, tobacco use).     

The rural arena: The diversity of protest in rural England

In the past 15–20 years, the rural areas of England have been used by a wide diversity of groups as the stage for their protest activities. Some have argued that this is due the rise of a rural social movement; this paper contends that rural areas have become both available and advantageous as the locale of protest through a range of interlocking factors. Firstly, that the rise of the network society has repositioned the societal importance of rural areas. Secondly, that the governance of rural areas has changed, allowing the social stake of rurality to be more widely contested. Thirdly, that opportunities to protest have shifted in favour of rural spaces, in terms of technology and policing. Through a discussion of recent changes in rural England and three case studies, The Land is Ours, Farmers for Action and the Organic Food and Farming Movement, this paper examines these changes and what they mean for the future of rural England.