Risk Factors for Adolescent Pregnancy Reports Among African American Males

This study examined childhood and adolescent risk factors for males' reports of getting someone pregnant during adolescence. These questions were examined in an urban sample of 335 African American males involved in a prospective, longitudinal study. Childhood aggression significantly predicted reported pregnancies during adolescence. Boys who were stably aggressive across 3rd through 5th grades were at particularly high risk for reporting getting a female pregnant. Adolescent substance use and deviant peer involvement incrementally added to the prediction of pregnancy reports over and above the effects of childhood aggression. Adolescent aggressive problems did not contribute to reports of pregnancy once childhood aggression was accounted for in the model. These results highlight that precursors for males' pregnancy reports can be identified by as early as age 8. Findings also emphasize the importance of an expanded developmental focus to understand risk factors for adolescent pregnancy. The implications of these results are discussed for preventive interventions to reduce adolescent pregnancy.     

Editorial

This Issue begins with an article by Glen Laverack in an examinationof visual representations of strategies to build community capacity,which he sees as being closely aligned to the process of communitydevelopment. Drawing upon his experience in Fiji and KyrgyzstanLaverack assessing the value of using visual representationin what he describes as a ‘parallel-track’ approachin relation to capacity building and programme implementation.Laverack argues that the use of visual representations can beespecially beneficial to practitioners and the democratisationof information. Paul Henderson     

Antisocial Behavior of Adoptees and Nonadoptees: Prediction from Early History and Adolescent Relationships

This study examined the contribution of demographic characteristics, early maltreatment, and peer and family relationships during adolescence to the prediction of aggressive and nonaggressive antisocial behavior (AASB and NAASB, respectively) during young adulthood; and determined whether adoption status has additional ability to predict ASB, once background, early experience, peer, and family variables were controlled. Data from adolescent and parent interviews were used from Waves 1 (predictors) and 3 (outcomes) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The sample included 337 adopted and 10,339 nonadopted adolescents whose mean ages were 15.8 at W1 and 21.7 at W3. Although AASB and NAASB were predicted by background characteristics, early maltreatment, peer relations, and family relationships, adoption status had little to no additional predictive power once the other variables were controlled.     

National and local public relations campaigns during the 1946 steel strike

Although scholars recognize the importance of public relations in the process of negotiations between management and organized labor, few have attempted to document such efforts or to analyze their effects. This review of public relations activities at the local and national levels during the 1946 steel strike indicates that national public relations campaigns, conducted by the union and the steel trade association, had virtually no impact on the resolution of the strike at the local level, and local public relations programs, conducted by the union local and a small manufacturing company, did little to further management or union goals at the national level. If anything, the national programs only confused the community by offering messages that did not necessarily correspond to the local situation.     

Efficient computation of location depth contours by methods of computational geometry

The concept of location depth was introduced as a way to extend the univariate notion of ranking to a bivariate configuration of data points. It has been used successfully for robust estimation, hypothesis testing, and graphical display. The depth contours form a collection of nested polygons, and the center of the deepest contour is called the Tukey median. The only available implemented algorithms for the depth contours and the Tukey median are slow, which limits their usefulness. In this paper we describe an optimal algorithm which computes all bivariate depth contours in O(n ²) time and space, using topological sweep of the dual arrangement of lines. Once these contours are known, the location depth of any point can be computed in O(log² n) time with no additional preprocessing or in O(log n) time after O(n ²) preprocessing. We provide fast implementations of these algorithms to allow their use in everyday statistical practice.