Romantic Relationship Commitment and Its Linkages with Commitment to Parents and Friends during Adolescence

This five‐wave longitudinal study examines linkages between adolescents' perceptions of romantic relationship commitment and the development of adolescents' perceptions of commitment to parents and friends. A total of 218 early‐to‐middle adolescents (39.0 percent boys) and 185 middle‐to‐late adolescents (30.8 percent boys) participated. Multivariate growth curves showed that higher base levels of commitment and a stronger positive development of commitment to parents and friends were associated with higher levels of later commitment to romantic partners. The effects were equally strong in early‐to‐middle adolescence and middle‐to‐late adolescence. Also, commitment to parents and commitment to friends were associated equally strong to romantic relationship commitment. No gender differences were found regarding these linkages. Overall, this study shows the importance of parents and friends for boys and girls regarding committed romantic relationships. The results support the idea of one stable and general working model used in different types of relationships.     

Make Schools,Not War? Donors' Rewriting of the Social Contract in the DRC

The school being one of the most important ‘faces’ of the state at the local level in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, investment in education can play an important role in reconstructing the social contract between the population and the state after violent conflict. However, this is particularly difficult since the state has largely retreated from the education sector since the 1980s, and education is now organised through public‐private partnerships with religious networks. Moreover, schools have been turned into tax units, in response to the retreat of the state and the declining wages of school administrators. This has had a clear effect on donor interventions, which, instead of changing the current system, have become part of existing configurations and led to an expansion of the current system.     

Complex challenges should be approached by a multitude of theories and models

The ongoing pandemic may be regarded as a wicked problem. Therefore, it should be analyzed by a multitude of theories and models. Approaching the complex set of challenges posed to individuals and society by singular methods, can lead to suboptimal decisions. Good decisions must take into account the large set of uncertainties we are facing, by using well established procedures, as for example health technology assessment (HTA) and a nuanced ethical framework.     

Floods and maternal healthcare utilisation in Bangladesh

Population and Environment - Floods are a common natural hazard in Bangladesh, and climate change is expected to further increase flooding frequency, magnitude and extent. Pregnant women...     

The Norwegian police and victims of elder abuse in close and familial relationships

Over recent decades, domestic violence or family violence, violence against women and child abuse has received much attention in the media, in political discourse and in social research. However, abuse of older adults arouses limited interest. In government action against domestic violence and in police guidance manuals, the elderly receive little attention. The aim of this article is primarily to demonstrate how the police attempt to prevent elder abuse in close relationships, especially in parent-child relationships. This article highlights some contradictions between the need of the police to produce criminal cases (often contrary to the interests of the victims) on the one hand, and the police's duty to prevent further abuse on the other. Research has documented that help and prevention measures in question make the situation even worse for the victims they are meant to help.     

Model Reduction for Prediction in Regression Models

We look at prediction in regression models under squared loss for the random x case with many explanatory variables. Model reduction is done by conditioning upon only a small number of linear combinations of the original variables. The corresponding reduced model will then essentially be the population model for the chemometricians' partial least squares algorithm. Estimation of the selection matrix under this model is briefly discussed, and analoguous results for the case with multivariate response are formulated. Finally, it is shown that an assumption of multinormality may be weakened to assuming elliptically symmetric distribution, and that some of the results are valid without any distributional assumption at all.     

Shared decision making from the service users’ perspective: A narrative study from community mental health centers in northern Norway

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of shared decision making as an important aspect of user involvement in mental health care from the perspectives of service users. A thematic analysis of interviews with 25 individual service users in three different community mental health centers in Norway identified different understandings of shared decision making. Shared decision making was identified as essential in four contexts: 1) during admission, 2) in individualized treatment, 3) in different treatment contexts, and 4) in user-professional relationships. We consider shared decision making to be intertwined with treatment from the service user perspective.     

Work–home conflict and facilitation across four different family structures in Norway

The purpose of this study was to examine how work–home conflict and facilitation vary among people living in different family structures in Norway, here conceptualized as: two-parent families; single parents; childless couples; and singles. The study used data from a Norwegian study on occupational health (N=2414). We hypothesized that respondents living in two-parent families experience more work–home conflict and facilitation than others due to more complex role expectations. Similarly, we hypothesized that the effect of workload and autonomy on work–home conflict and facilitation would be stronger among this group. The results indicate that conflict between work and home life are more profound among those living in two-parent families and among single parents than among childless couples and singles. Work-to-home facilitation did not vary by family structure, whereas the childless couples reported more home-to-work facilitation. Furthermore, with a few exceptions the effects of workload and autonomy on work–home conflict and facilitation did not differ by family structure.     

Interpreting Child Sexual Abuse: The Impact of Victim Response

There is little empirical knowledge about whether the interpretation process of child sex offenders is offense-supportive in nature and contributes to the offending process. Vignettes were developed to compare child sex offenders’ and nonoffenders’ interpretations of child molestation incidents after ambiguous and nonambiguous victim responses. Results showed that child sex offenders’ (N = 60) interpretations did not differ from nonoffenders’ (N = 40) interpretations. Overall, the more ambiguous the child responses, the more child complicity and child benefit was seen. Our results indicate that offense-supportive interpretations are not unique to child sex offenders. The mechanisms that are responsible for whether or not to commit a sexual offense should be unraveled and treated, to prevent deviant processes to be activated.