Sexual risk behaviors among youth in the child welfare system

This study uses data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) to provide estimates of sexual risk behaviors for 877 youth, age 11–14 at baseline, in the child welfare system. It examines the association between baseline psychosocial risk and protective factors on engagement in sexual risk behaviors after 36 months. It further compares rates of sexual risk behaviors between youth placed in out-of-home care and those who remained with their biological family. Key findings include a high rate of pregnancy, a high percentage of youth who initiated sexual activity at or before age 13 as well as a limited role of protective factors in moderating sexual risk behaviors. A history of placement into out-of-home care is not significantly associated with greater engagement in sexual risk behaviors. Implications for intervention development and child welfare policy for this population are discussed.     

Modern and Postmodern Career Theories: The Unnecessary Divorce

Postmodern approaches to career counseling are becoming increasingly popular. Part of the impetus for the postmodern view has involved perceived problems in the assumptions and application of the modern approach. Two points of view have emerged: (a) the modern and postmodern approaches are incompatible, and the postmodern approach is superior to the modern approach and (b) the modern and postmodern approaches are compatible, each with specific benefits and limitations, and individual needs and cost‐effectiveness should govern the decision of which approach to use. Key issues to examine in this discussion are standardized career assessment, aggregate career information, matching, and cost‐effectiveness.     

Challenging racism through schools: teacher attitudes to cultural diversity and multicultural education in Sydney,Australia

How school teachers act to challenge racism in schools is a vital concern in an immigrant society like Australia. A 10% response from a self-administered online survey of government (public) primary and secondary school teachers across Sydney, Australia’s largest EthniCity, examines attitudes of classroom teachers towards cultural diversity, goals of multicultural education, and strategies to implement anti-racist strategies. Principal components analysis (PCA) of attitudes tease out the varied influence of opinion on multicultural education, diversity, and anti-racism. Classroom teachers are overwhelmingly supportive of cultural diversity, multicultural education and strategies to combat racism and discrimination, and these views hardly vary across the different geographic zones of the city, unlike attitudes within the general community. However, teacher knowledge about the implementation of multicultural policy does vary, and is positively associated with the extent of population diversity and socio-economic status (SES) of the communities surrounding the schools.     

Cyberbullying,conflict management or just messing? Teenage girls’ understandings and experiences of gender,friendship, and conflict on Facebook in an Irish second-level school

In recent years, there have been growing concerns worldwide about young people’s safety online, much of which focuses on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Moral panics about sexting and cyberbullying have constructed public discourses about social media as dangerous to adolescents’ safety and relationships. In the academic literature, there are conflicting perspectives on the nature of online relationships, behaviour, and risks, and on the causes and nature of cyberbullying. Less attention is paid—in both public and academic debates—to the role played by gender in online aggression, in spite of the fact that existing scholarship demonstrates that it is an important factor in the dynamics of young people’s online friendships and conflicts. This article presents the findings of an empirical, qualitative and quantitative study of teenage girls’ experiences and understandings of online friendship, conflict, and bullying in an Irish, single-sex secondary school. Questionnaires (n=116), individual in-depth interviews with students (n=26), and a focus group with teachers were used. Our study indicates that significant communicative phenomena within girls’ everyday lives remain unreported and frequently misunderstood.     

Proximate industrial activity and psychological distress

This paper examines the role that gender, occupational status, and family status play in moderating the effect of industrial activity on the psychological well-being of nearby residents. Using a unique spatial assessment of industrial activity and an environmental risk/social stressor framework in conjunction with individual-level data from the Detroit Area Study (DAS) and demographic data from the U.S. census, we find that residents of neighborhoods in close proximity to industrial activity report elevated levels of psychological distress compared to residents of neighborhoods removed from this type of activity. These influences are more pronounced among women but gender differences are also contingent upon occupational and family statuses. We show that specific combinations of work and family statuses make persons particularly vulnerable to the influence of this environmental stressor and women are two and a half times more likely than men to have these vulnerable statuses. This study makes an important contribution to the environmental health literature because it reminds researchers of the fundamental influence of social roles when examining the link between environmental risks and mental health.     

Knowledge translation strategies in a community–university partnership: examining local Quality of Life (QoL)

There is a growing interest in quality of life as an integrated approach to addressing key social, environmental and economic determinants of health. The University of Saskatchewan’s Community-University Institute for Social Research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grant #410-2004-0669) has examined the process and results of a multi-stakeholder approach to the ongoing sustainability of Saskatoon, Canada as a healthy city with an improving and a more equitably distributed quality of life. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, together with GIS technology, this research has examined the quality of life across three locales in Saskatoon—representing Low, Middle and High socio-economic status in both 2001 and 2004. The participatory action research approach used in this work ensures the value of the outputs to the stakeholders. Given the strong recognition of the importance of interfacing policy, research and community, and the growing impatience with the limited application of research findings to social and health practices and policies, this project has undertaken four major knowledge translation/transfer strategies, above and beyond the traditional academic channels: (1) engagement of local media on a consistent basis, (2) implementing community policy forums to ensure continued community readiness and uptake, (3) facilitation of and successful functioning of a steering committee, and (4) employment of an action researcher to operate as a policy entrepreneur. This paper will review and discuss each of these strategies and outline the evaluative research being done to document the success of these strategies.

Methodological issues with adaptation of clinical trial design

Adaptation of clinical trial design generates many issues that have not been resolved for practical applications, though statistical methodology has advanced greatly. This paper focuses on some methodological issues. In one type of adaptation such as sample size re-estimation, only the postulated value of a parameter for planning the trial size may be altered. In another type, the originally intended hypothesis for testing may be modified using the internal data accumulated at an interim time of the trial, such as changing the primary endpoint and dropping a treatment arm. For sample size re-estimation, we make a contrast between an adaptive test weighting the two-stage test statistics with the statistical information given by the original design and the original sample mean test with a properly corrected critical value. We point out the difficulty in planning a confirmatory trial based on the crude information generated by exploratory trials. In regards to selecting a primary endpoint, we argue that the selection process that allows switching from one endpoint to the other with the internal data of the trial is not very likely to gain a power advantage over the simple process of selecting one from the two endpoints by testing them with an equal split of alpha (Bonferroni adjustment). For dropping a treatment arm, distributing the remaining sample size of the discontinued arm to other treatment arms can substantially improve the statistical power of identifying a superior treatment arm in the design. A common difficult methodological issue is that of how to select an adaptation rule in the trial planning stage. Pre-specification of the adaptation rule is important for the practicality consideration. Changing the originally intended hypothesis for testing with the internal data generates great concerns to clinical trial researchers.     

Inference methods for saturated models in longitudinal clinical trials with incomplete binary data

In the longitudinal studies with binary response, it is often of interest to estimate the percentage of positive responses at each time point and the percentage of having at least one positive response by each time point. When missing data exist, the conventional method based on observed percentages could result in erroneous estimates. This study demonstrates two methods of using expectation-maximization (EM) and data augmentation (DA) algorithms in the estimation of the marginal and cumulative probabilities for incomplete longitudinal binary response data. Both methods provide unbiased estimates when the missingness mechanism is missing at random (MAR) assumption. Sensitivity analyses have been performed for cases when the MAR assumption is in question.     

The Timing and Pace of Health Transitions around the World

Estimates from some 700 mostly national studies of survival in the past are assembled to create a broad picture of regional and global life expectancy gains across space and time and to examine implications of that picture. At the initiation of their health transitions, most countries had a life expectancy between 25 and 35 years. Countries that began later made gains at a faster pace. Those faster gains are usually associated with the dissemination of Western medicine. But rapid gains occurred in the period 1920–50, largely before the availability of antibiotics or modern vaccines. Especially rapid gains came in the years immediately after World War II in countries where the leading causes of death were communicable diseases that could be managed with antibiotics but also in countries where the leading causes of death were degenerative organ diseases. Both periods of rapid gain await satisfactory explanation. The bibliography of more than 700 sources is published separately on the web at « http://www.lifetable.de.RileyBib.htm ».