Are peer educators really peers?

OBJECTIVE, PARTICIPANTS, AND METHODS: To determine whether peer educators are considered peers by their audiences, the authors compared 28 peer educators and 28 college students on their personal qualities using self-report surveys. RESULTS: Students who wanted to become peer educators reported higher self-esteem, greater leadership skills, and fewer risky health behaviors than did demographically similar college students. However, peer educators appeared similar to their colleagues in terms of personal values and personality temperament. CONCLUSIONS: Although peer educators are natural leaders with strong self-esteem and more healthy behaviors, they appear to be quite similar to their audiences in regard to values and temperaments, making them successful role models and arguably true peers.     

URBAN TRANSPORT AND CRIME: EVIDENCE FROM UNANTICIPATED MASS TRANSIT STRIKES

We examine the effects of mass transit strikes on criminal behavior in Los Angeles County utilizing a unique dataset of reported crimes between 2000 and 2007. Geocoded location and time information pertaining to each offense accommodates a fine grained difference‐in‐differences panel data analysis. We find that in locations affected by the strike, aggravated assaults rose by 18.7% while aggregate property crimes increased by 5.7%, relative to their mean. This increase in crime was disproportionately larger in lower income neighborhoods, which report higher usage of mass transit, suggesting local isolation of both criminals and victims as a mechanism. (JEL J52, K42, K31)     

Agency-Related Barriers Experienced by Families Seeking to Adopt From Foster Care

ABSTRACT

Although about 100,000 children in foster care await adoption, families approved to adopt encounter obstacles in the adoption process. This nationwide longitudinal study identified agency-related barriers faced by prospective adoptive parents. A pur-posively recruited sample of 300 families seeking to adopt from foster care completed an in-depth, semi-structured telephone interview and quarterly follow-up surveys until they either finalized a foster care adoption (n = 98) or discontinued (n = 102) the process, followed by an exit interview by telephone. Findings revealed the top barriers encountered were adoption process logistics (n = 185, 92.5%), agency communication and responsiveness (n = 159, 79.5%), agency emotional support (n = 130, 65%), availability of services (n = 65, 32.5%), and juris-dictional and interjurisdictional issues (n = 52, 26%). Policy and practice implications are provided with recommendations for improving procedures, services, support, and communication to better retain prospective adoptive parents and improve adop-tion outcomes.     

An exact semidefinite programming approach for the max-mean dispersion problem

This paper proposes an exact algorithm for the Max-Mean dispersion problem (\(Max-Mean DP\)), an NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problem whose aim is to select the subset of a set such that the average distance between elements is maximized. The problem admits a natural non-convex quadratic fractional formulation from which a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation can be derived. This relaxation can be tightened by means of a cutting plane algorithm which iteratively adds the most violated triangular inequalities. The proposed approach embeds the SDP relaxation and the cutting plane algorithm into a branch and bound framework to solve \(Max-Mean DP\) instances to optimality. Computational experiments show that the proposed method is able to solve to optimality in reasonable time instances with up to 100 elements, outperforming other alternative approaches.     

Mid-Adolescents’ and Adults’ Recognition of Vocal Cues of Emotion and Social Intent: Differences by Expression and Speaker Age

Previous research has suggested that the ability to recognize vocal portrayals of socio-emotional expressions improves with age throughout childhood and adolescence. The current study examined whether stimulus-level factors (i.e., the age of the speaker and the type of expression being conveyed) interacted with listeners’ developmental stage to predict listeners’ recognition accuracy. We assessed mid-adolescent (n = 50, aged 13–15 years) and adult (n = 87, 18–30 years) listeners’ ability to recognize basic emotions and social expressions in the voices of both adult and youth actors. Adults’ emotional prosody was better recognized than that of youth, and adult listeners were more accurate overall than were mid-adolescents. Interaction effects revealed that youths’ accuracy was equivalent to adult listeners’ when hearing adult portrayals of anger, disgust, friendliness, happiness, and meanness, and youth portrayals of disgust, happiness, and meanness. Our findings highlight the importance of speaker characteristics and type of expression on listeners’ ability to recognize vocal cues of emotion and social intent.     

Vocal Cues Underlying Youth and Adult Portrayals of Socio-emotional Expressions

Despite known differences in the acoustic properties of children’s and adults’ voices, no work to date has examined the vocal cues associated with emotional prosody in youth. The current study investigated whether child (n = 24, 17 female, aged 9–15) and adult (n = 30, 15 female, aged 18–63) actors differed in the vocal cues underlying their portrayals of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) and social expressions (meanness, friendliness). We also compared the acoustic characteristics of meanness and friendliness to comparable basic emotions. The pattern of distinctions between expressions varied as a function of age for voice quality and mean pitch. Specifically, adults’ portrayals of the various expressions were more distinct in mean pitch than children’s, whereas children’s representations differed more in voice quality than adults’. Given the importance of pitch variables for the interpretation of a speaker’s intended emotion, expressions generated by adults may thus be easier for listeners to decode than those of children. Moreover, the vocal cues associated with the social expressions of meanness and friendliness were distinct from those of basic emotions like anger and happiness respectively. Overall, our findings highlight marked differences in the ways in which adults and children convey socio-emotional expressions vocally, and expand our understanding of the communication of paralanguage in social contexts. Implications for the literature on emotion recognition are discussed.     

Alcohol control and foster care

Parental alcohol consumption is often associated with an increased likelihood of child abuse. As consumption is related to price, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the propensity for increases in the full price of alcohol to influence entry rates and the length of time spent in foster care. Using alcoholic beverage prices and a measure of availability in combination with data on foster care cases, we find that higher alcohol prices are not effective in reducing foster care entry rates; however, once in foster care, the duration of stay may be shortened by higher prices and reduced availability.     

Community and Individual Factors Associated with Cigarette Smoking Among Young Men Who Have Sex With Men

Young men who have sex with men (YMSM) have higher rates of cigarette smoking than their heterosexual counterparts, yet few studies have examined factors associated with cigarette smoking among YMSM. The present study sought to understand how different types of gay community connection (i.e., gay community identification and involvement, gay bar/club attendance) were associated with smoking among YMSM recruited through venue-based sampling in Los Angeles, California (N = 526). Structural equation modeling was used to isolate direct and indirect effects of gay community connection on smoking through cognitive and psychological mediators (i.e., psychological distress, health values, internalized homophobia). Findings indicate YMSM cigarette smoking prevention and intervention must be tailored to address the direct and indirect influences of the gay community.     

Brazilian version of an assessment tool for the evaluation of work organizational aspects (AOT) by the NIOSH WMSD Research Consortium: translation and application in industrial sectors

Work organization affects the production of a company as well as the health of employees. It is a challenge to create sustainable production systems with the least harm to the health. An observational assessment tool was developed by the NIOSH--WMSD Research Consortium and adapted by the SHARP study. The objectives were to translate this assessment tool into Brazilian Portuguese (as the Avalia??o de Aspectos Organizacionais do Trabalho--AOT) and to evaluate its applicability in an industrial setting. The AOT final translated version was obtained after a consensus by the research team. Difficulties arose in applying the translated version due to technical terms with no direct equivalents in Portuguese, nonexcluding or similar alternatives, and questions that gave room for various interpretations, besides the great complexity of the tasks performed in the sectors. Despite that, the results suggest that AOT was sensitive for discriminating differences between sectors. Nevertheless, for better application of this tool in complex industrial environments, it is necessary: training and consensus among evaluators, familiarity with organizational aspects of the occupational settings evaluated. Also for assuring the internal validity of the analysis, might be necessary, the creation of subdivisions in the sectors evaluated if the tasks vary significantly intra-sector. The present report can help to understand the difficulties inherent to the evaluation of organizational aspects on a collective level and also the possible implications related to the translation of this assessment into other languages.