Disruption in Parental Co-habitation and its Effects on Short-Term,Medium-Term,and Long-Term Outcomes of Adolescents

In this paper the relationships between a disruption in parental co-habitation and various categories of adolescent outcomes over multiple time horizons are explored. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we estimated the effects of a change from living with both parents to just one, on academic and employment outcomes, the likelihood to indulge in risky behaviors, mental health outcomes and body mass index measures, from less than 1 year to over 14 years after the change. Propensity score matching methods were used to control for individual characteristics and pre-existing differences in the family environment that may increase the chances of separation, and the results are compared to those obtained using ordinary least squares or probit methods. Results showed evidence of adverse effects of living with one parent in the short term, medium term and long term. Adolescents living with one parent had lower academic achievement in all term lengths, poor mental health in the short to medium term, and were more likely to engage in risky behaviors in the medium to long term.     

Introduction: “There Is a Person Here”: An Interview with Judith Butler

In this interview, the coeditors, along with other contributors, ask Judith Butler a variety of questions regarding queer theory, gender identities, scientific and legal discourse, bodily abjection, race and class positioning, and political organizing. This range of subject matter suggests not only the breadth of Butler's work, but also its applicability to any number of people, whose relation to theory ranges from highly politicized to politically indifferent. The interview demonstrates the responsiveness of Butler's work to cultural translation and political action.     

The Trouble With Triumph: Discourses of Governmentality in Mainstream Media Representations of Urban Youth

The Assets Coming Together for Youth project conducted a critical discourse analysis of mainstream media depictions of Jane-Finch to better understand the discursive strategies used to constitute urban youth. Although a substantive body of literature investigates the negative discourses, little analysis interrogates the nominally positive discourses deployed by mainstream media. The findings suggest that the sociopolitical significance of these nominally positive discourses may go uncontested and pose a challenge to communities advocating for policies to support urban youth development. These discourses are examined using governmentality theory to reveal how racialized narratives of individual triumph re/produce troubled communities.     

A cumulative ecological–transactional risk model of child maltreatment and behavioral outcomes: Reconceptualizing early maltreatment report as risk factor

The current analysis was designed to critically examine the tendency to focus on child maltreatment as a unique risk factor and test the resulting assumption of a direct causal relationship between early maltreatment and later behavioral problems. The variation seen in behavioral outcomes among children reported for maltreatment early in life led us to hypothesize that the cumulative level of risk facing children and their families can, at least in part, account for that variation in outcome. Participants were 242 mothers of predominantly at-risk newborn infants who were interviewed shortly after giving birth. The State Central Registry of Maltreatment was then reviewed over each child's first four years of life to assess for early maltreatment. Following the neonatal interviews, mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist when their children were 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 years-of-age. Although early maltreatment report does appear to be important to early child functioning, the cumulative level of risk more strongly predicts long-term clinical behavioral difficulty. High-risk children who were not reported for maltreatment by age 4 demonstrate greater behavioral problem trajectories than did low-risk children with a maltreatment report. Maltreatment itself may be best conceptualized as an important, but not singularly so, risk factor for later behavioral problems. In focusing directly on reported maltreatment, our child protective systems may be paying too little attention to what else is going wrong in the lives of children and targeting intervention efforts in the wrong direction. When it comes to early maltreatment our child protective policy and practice need to broaden their lenses to include greater emphasis on overall family functioning, stress and well-being. Early maltreatment, it seems, may be a symptom of more profound problems in the early environments of our most vulnerable children, rather than the problem itself.     

Marginal zero-inflated regression models for count data

Data sets with excess zeroes are frequently analyzed in many disciplines. A common framework used to analyze such data is the zero-inflated (ZI) regression model. It mixes a degenerate distribution with point mass at zero with a non-degenerate distribution. The estimates from ZI models quantify the effects of covariates on the means of latent random variables, which are often not the quantities of primary interest. Recently, marginal zero-inflated Poisson (MZIP; Long et al. [A marginalized zero-inflated Poisson regression model with overall exposure effects. Stat. Med. 33 (2014), pp. 5151–5165]) and negative binomial (MZINB; Preisser et al., 2016) models have been introduced that model the mean response directly. These models yield covariate effects that have simple interpretations that are, for many applications, more appealing than those available from ZI regression. This paper outlines a general framework for marginal zero-inflated models where the latent distribution is a member of the exponential dispersion family, focusing on common distributions for count data. In particular, our discussion includes the marginal zero-inflated binomial (MZIB) model, which has not been discussed previously. The details of maximum likelihood estimation via the EM algorithm are presented and the properties of the estimators as well as Wald and likelihood ratio-based inference are examined via simulation. Two examples presented illustrate the advantages of MZIP, MZINB, and MZIB models for practical data analysis.     

Marginal homogeneity,symmetry, and independence

A contingency table of the mc form provides a convenient summary of data when c individuals in a matched set9 each belonging to a different one of c classifications, are identified as belonging to one of m categories, A study in which matched sets (c=3) of 1 case, 1 hospital control, and 1 neighborhood control are classified into one of m=4 occupational categories would be an example, Independence in the cxm tables for each of the matched sets implies symmetry in the summary mc table with consequent marginal homogeneity. Adaptation of the Mantel-Haenszel procedure for testing independence to the case of many cxm tables so as to yield a chi square with (cl)(ml) degrees of freedom (DF) provides a test of marginal homogeneity in the summary mc table. This can be viewed as a test of symmetry directed against alternatives which would make for marginal inhomogeneity and can differ     

A lofistic rlgression analysis of response-time data where the hazard function is time dependent

A logistic-exponential model for analyzing response-time data involving regressor variables is modified to allow for non-consrarey of the hazard function. For the discrete observation case illustrated the logit of the probability of responding in a time interval cf arbitrary length is taken as the sum of a function of resressor variables and a function of the time variable. The particular functions chosen in the two medical examples analyzed are linear in the parameters involved. A polynomial function of time is employed in the absence of knowledge as to a more appropriate form. Various issues arising in the analysis made are discussed.     

Statistical methodology for assessing homology of intronic regions of genes

We consider the problem of statistically evaluating the similarity of DNA intronic regions of genes. Present algorithms are based on matching a sequence of interest with known DNA sequences in a gene bank and are designed primarily to assess homology among exonic regions of genes. Most research focuses on exonic regions because they have a clear biological significance, coding for proteins, and therefore tend to be more conserved in evolution than intronic regions. To investigate whether the intronic features of genes whose expression is highly sensitive to environmental perturbations differ from genes that have a more constant expression, a collection of oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes, and nonregulatory genes involved in energy metabolism are compared. An analysis of the features of these genes' intronic regions result in clustering by regulatory group. In addition, Billingsley's test for Markov structure (1961) suggests that 67% of the intronic regions in this collection of genes show evidence of nonrandom structure, indicating the possibility of a biological function for these regions. The result of Billingsley's test for homology is used as input to a clustering algorithm. The biological significance of this methodology lies in the identification of groups based on the intronic regions from genes of unknown function. With the advent of rapid sequencing techniques, there is a great need for statistical techniques to help identify the purpose of poorly understood portions of genes. These methods can be utilized to assess the functional group to which such a gene might possibly belong.     

Estimating the prevalence of adolescent gambling disorders: A quantitative synthesis and guide toward standard gambling nomenclature

This article reviews the extant published and unpublished studies that estimate the prevalence of adolescent gambling problems in North America. The nine nonduplicative studies identified by our literature search included data collected from more than 7700 adolescents from five different regions of the United States and Canada. In addition to comparing the conceptual and methodological differences that exist among these studies, this article employed a meta-analytic strategy to synthesize prevalence estimates from the existing studies. This analysis revealed that within a 95 percent confidence interval, between 9.9% and 14.2% of adolescents are at risk of developing or returning to serious gambling problems. Similarly, between 4.4% and 7.4% of adolescents exhibit seriously adverse compulsive or pathological patterns of gambling activity. Finally, the discussion proposes a generic multi-level classification scheme to reconcile the divergent classification methods and data reporting strategies. This new multi-level approach to reporting gambling prevalence will facilitate interstudy comparisons among existing estimates of gambling prevalence and help to provide a general data reporting system for future research.