Neighborhood influences on adolescent cigarette and alcohol use: mediating effects through parent and peer behaviors

The influence of neighborhoods on adolescent behaviors has received increasing research attention. In the present study, we use structural equation models to specify pathways from neighborhoods to adolescent cigarette and alcohol use through parental closeness, parental monitoring, parent substance use, and peer substance use. We use a national sample with 959 adolescents 12 to 14 years of age whose residential addresses were matched with 1990 Census tracts to provide neighborhood characteristics. We found that for adolescent cigarette use low socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods were associated with increased parental monitoring, which was further associated with decreased adolescent cigarette use. For adolescent alcohol use, high SES neighborhoods were associated with increased parent drinking, which was further associated with increased adolescent alcohol use. Low SES neighborhoods were associated with increased parental monitoring and increased peer drinking, which were in turn associated with decreased and increased adolescent alcohol use, respectively.     

Weight changes, exercise, and dietary patterns during freshman and sophomore years of college

Weight gain and behavioral patterns during college may contribute to overweight and obesity in adulthood. The aims of this study were to assess weight, exercise, and dietary patterns of 764 college students (53% women, 47% men) during freshman and sophomore years. Students had their weight and height measured and completed questionnaires about their recent exercise and dietary patterns. At the beginning of freshman year, 29% of students reported not exercising, 70% ate fewer than 5 fruits and vegetables daily, and more than 50% ate fried or high-fat fast foods at least 3 times during the previous week. By the end of their sophomore year, 70% of the 290 students who were reassessed had gained weight (4.1+/-3.6 kg, p < .001), but there was no apparent association with exercise or dietary patterns. Future research is needed to assess the contributions of fat, muscle, and bone mass to observed weight gain and to determine the health implications of these findings.     

"We just happen to live here": two social workers share their stories about Oregon's Death with Dignity Law

This article is written more like a conversation with the reader rather than a strictly academic piece. The purpose is to share from a more personal perspective the unique circumstances and challenges faced by two social workers in Oregon as they grappled with the Death with Dignity Law. The law has been in effect for six years and a May 2004 decision from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court allowed the law to remain a legal end-of-life option. Each writer has a unique voice on the process of social work involvement in practice, research, and policy since the law was originally passed in 1994.     

Sexual Politics in the Workplace: The Interactional World of Policewomen

This paper examines the dynamics of male-female interaction in one work setting—the backstage region of a police department—and explores the variety of ways that policewomen are pressured to “stay in their place” by male coworkers. Policewomen face interpersonal dilemmas because as police officers they are expected to behave like colleagues (i.e. as status equals); as women they are expected to behave as status subordinates. This paper investigates a number of the techniques by which female officers' gender is made salient and male officers assert dominance over female officers. The verbal techniques employed include the use of euphemisms, affectionate terms of address, cursing, joking and putdowns, and gossip. Non-verbal messages are transmitted by the use of personal space, touch, and chivalrous ceremonies. In addition the problems posed by sexuality and sexual harassment in the workplace are discussed. Data are based on nine months of participant observation and 55 interviews with officers in one police district in Washington, D.C.     

Weber's Concept of Causality and the Modern Critique

Weber's concept of causality established a middle ground between the extremes of the causality debate in his day by developing a concept that was unique in two respects: it was tailored to the needs of the distinctive subject matter of the social sciences, meaningful human action, and it utilized the legal model of causal analysis. Interpreted in this light, Weber's concept meets several of the criticisms of the use of causal analysis in the social sciences recently advanced by Peters and Winch.     

Dynamic Assignment of Flexible Service Resources

Resource flexibility is an important tool for firms to better match capacity with demand so as to increase revenues and improve service levels. However, in service contexts that require dynamically deciding whether to accept incoming jobs and what resource to assign to each accepted job, harnessing the benefits of flexibility requires using effective methods for making these operational decisions. Motivated by the resource deployment decisions facing a professional service firm in the workplace training industry, we address the dynamic job acceptance and resource assignment problem for systems with general resource flexibility structure, i.e., with multiple resource types that can each perform different overlapping subsets of job types. We first show that, for systems containing specialized resources for individual job types and a versatile resource type that can perform all job types, the exact policy uses a threshold rule. With more general flexibility structures, since the associated stochastic dynamic program is intractable, we develop and test three optimization‐based approximate policies. Our extensive computational tests show that one of the methods, which we call the Bottleneck Capacity Reservation policy, is remarkably effective in generating near‐optimal solutions over a wide range of problem scenarios. We also consider a model variant that requires dynamic job acceptance decisions but permits deferring resource assignment decisions until the end of the horizon. For this model, we discuss an adaptation of our approximate policy, establish the effectiveness of this policy, and assess the value of postponing assignment decisions.     

Patterns of child maltreatment referrals among Asian and Pacific Islander families

Much of the available data on Asian American families who become involved with the child welfare system relies on global ethnic categories, such as the category Asian/Pacific Islander. To explore the diversity of experience that is hidden by such categories, this article analyzes two years of child maltreatment referrals for Asian and Pacific Island families in Washington state. The study findings show that considerable variation exists within the Asian and Pacific Islander population with regard to child protection referrals. Although Asian Americans as a whole were less likely to be referred to child protective services than other groups, the within group picture that these data capture is considerably more complex. Some Asian/Pacific Islander ethnic groups, particularly those which have experienced higher levels of social and economic stress, were more at risk of child welfare involvement than other groups. Such findings underscore the need for child welfare policies and practice that are sensitive to the considerable variability within the Asian/Pacific Islander community.     

Framing youth issues for public support

The insights from one state illustrate the challenges of working to shape public will to favor support for out-of-school learning opportunities for youth ages nine to fifteen. With the leadership of the Frameworks Institute, local and national research and refraining concepts were used to develop a strategy to help advocates communicate the value of these learning opportunities in ways the public is less likely to dismiss out of hand. Messages reinforcing the developmental need to practice skills using the illustration of brain architecture and emphasizing the important role of community contribution on future leadership proved to be important aspects of the communication strategy.