Characteristics of sports-based youth development programs

The term "sports-based youth development programs" is coined and defined in the context of the community youth development framework. Sports-based youth development programs are out-of-school-time programs that use a particular sport to facilitate learning and life skill development in youth. Community youth development programs use a community youth development approach to create opportunities for youth to connect to others, develop skills, and use those skills to contribute to their communities. This, in turn, increases their ability to succeed. The authors describe how sports-based youth development programs can be contexts that promote positive youth development. The features of positive developmental settings for youth from the work of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, as well as the features identified by other researchers, are presented in the context of sports-based youth development programs. For example, a sports program that provides appropriate structure has delineated clear rules, expectations, and responsibilities for youth, parents, coaches, officials, and other organizers.     

Family Factors,Theft, Vandalism,and Major Deviance Among a Multiracial/Multiethnic Sample of Adolescent Girls

This article reports on a study of 503 African-American, Hispanic, and White non-Hispanic adolescent girls attending public schools in Miami, Florida. The primary objectives of the study were to determine the prevalence of 13 self-reported delinquent behaviors in the sample, to compare these rates among the three groups of students, and to explore the predictive influences of several family factors that correlate with delinquency. It was found that 37.5% of the sample engaged in one or more acts of serious delinquency, with African-Americans reporting they had engaged in significantly more of these behaviors. The best predictors of theft/vandalism were low family pride and family substance abuse for Hispanics, low family communication for African-Americans, and low family pride for White non-Hispanics. The findings indicate that traditional family factors that have been used repeatedly to understand delinquency by male adolescents were not strong predictors of delinquency among the adolescent girls in the sample.     

Elder Abuse in Portugal: Findings From the First National Prevalence Study

In this study, we present findings of the Portuguese national prevalence study, “Aging and Violence,” the purpose of which was to estimate the prevalence of abuse and neglect of older people in family settings over a 12-month period and examine the relationship between abuse and sociodemographic and health characteristics. Through a telephone survey of a representative probability sample (N = 1,123), we evaluated 12 abusive behaviors and demographic data. Overall, 12.3% of older adults experienced elder abuse in family settings. The prevalence rates of specific types were as follows: psychological, 6.3%; financial, 6.3%; physical, 2.3%; neglect, 0.4%; and sexual, 0.2%. Logistic regression was employed to determine the relationship between abuse and covariates. The study suggests that education level, age, and functional status are significantly associated with abuse. Accurate estimates of the prevalence of elder abuse and understanding of victim and perpetrator characteristics are fundamental to designing effective strategies for prevention and intervention.     

Who gains from information asymmetry?

This article considers an asymmetric contest with incomplete information. There are two types of players: informed and uninformed. Each player has a different ability to translate effort into performance in terms of the contest success function. While one player’s type is known to both players, the other is private information and known only to the player himself. We compare the Bayesian Nash equilibrium outcome of a one-sided private information contest to the Nash equilibrium with no private information, in which both players know the type of the other player. We show conditions under which uncertainty increases the investment of the uninformed player and the rent dissipation of the contest, while decreasing the expected net payoff of the informed player. In addition, we consider conditions under which the informed player—before knowing his own type—prefers that the uninformed player knows his type. Moreover, we show conditions for the existence/non-existence of equilibrium in a two-stage contest in which the informed player declares his type (or does not declare) in the first stage and in the second stage the two players play according to the information available to them.     

Confidence sets in a linear regression model for interval data

The construction of confidence sets for the parameters of a flexible simple linear regression model for interval-valued random sets is addressed. For that purpose, the asymptotic distribution of the least-squares estimators is analyzed. A simulation study is conducted to investigate the performance of those confidence sets. In particular, the empirical coverages are examined for various interval linear models. The applicability of the procedure is illustrated by means of a real-life case study.     

Status,National Culture and Customers’ Propensity to Complain

People’s ability to express their voice in different situation is an important facet of their quality of life. This study examines the relationship between social status, cultural characteristics and customers’ voice behavior in multiple cultures. We hypothesized that social status would be positively related to customers’ voice expression. The cultural dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance were expected to affect that behavior and to moderate the status–voicing relationship. Analysis of data concerning 8,479 customers from 12 countries showed that, as expected, customers with high status tended to register more service failures and to complain more frequently than customers of lower social status. All three social status distinctions explored in this study (gender, education, and age) correlated negatively with formal complaint, but only age correlated negatively with informal complaint. In addition, the two cultural dimensions had the expected negative effect on intention to complain, and moderated the relationship between social status and intention to complain. Theoretical contributions and applied implications are discussed.     

Sinic conundrum: A history of HIV/AIDS in the people's republic of china

China's HIV/AIDS case rate continues to grow despite national and World Health Organization efforts. Reports in Western journals are nearly nonexistent, and what is in print does not provide evidence of the infection's historical progress. I traced progress of the infection since my last report (1991) and based current findings on unobtrusive data [HIV blood screening (assays)] provided by State epidemiology‐prevention stations and on ethnographic interviews conducted with public health officials from the Center for AIDS Surveillance, Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, and epidemiology personnel in Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Shanghai during fieldwork in China in 1992 and 1993. Cultural, social, economic, and political factors involved in China's historical attempts to manage a growing HIV case rate are discussed. Together, data reveal a widening geographic and social distribution of the virus over time, which, in conclusion, should now qualify China's HIV status as epidemic.     

Socioemotional characteristics of minors in foster care: A comparison between the estimation of parents,teachers and children

During the child's first few years, it's of fundamental importance the presence of a strong emotional base as long as it creates the possibility to open themselves to physical and social world with confidence, and as it acts as a facilitator of cognitive development. For this reason, if the family cannot ensure such base, social services are forced to resort to foster care, a resource that has a lot of difficulties, leading to different implications in the development of the child and of the foster family. It is therefore important to analyze in depth the socio-emotional variables that characterize children who are in a situation of foster care in order to provide adequate assistance to optimize their development. For this 32 minors in foster care, 31 foster parents and 28 teachers from the city of Valencia, were administered the BASC. The results highlight that parents are evaluating children, in general, worse than tutors. Specifically they consider children more aggressive, they detect more behavioral and attention problems and recognize in them a greater tendency to externalize the problems, while the teachers consider these children as with more social and adaptive skills. There were no significant differences between the scores of parents, teachers and children. High levels of psychopathology (which are clinically significant in various cases) and the fact that host parents evaluate minors as more problematic, are indicators of parents' and minors' need of support from public organizations.