Protective Effects of Parent–College Student Communication During the First Semester of College

Abstract

Objective: Recent studies suggest that parents maintain influence as their adolescents transition into college. Advances in communication technology make frequent communication between parents and college students easy and affordable. This study examines the protective effect of parent–college student communication on student drinking behaviors, estimated peak blood alcohol concentration (eBAC), and serious negative consequences of drinking. Participants: Participants were 746 first-year, first-time, full-time students at a large university in the United States Methods: Participants completed a baseline and 14 daily Web-based surveys. Results: The amount of time spent communicating with parents on weekend days predicted the number of drinks consumed, heavy drinking, and peak eBAC, consistent with a protective within-person effect. No association between communication and serious negative consequences was observed. Conclusions: Encouraging parents to communicate with their college students, particularly on weekend days, could be a relatively simple, easily implemented protective process to reduce dangerous drinking behaviors.     

Modeling the Impact of the Affordable Care Act and the Individual Mandate on Californians

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to provide health insurance to uninsured or underinsured individuals. We used the California Simulation of Insurance Markets (CalSIM) model to predict the experience of consumers in California, who will be faced with new insurance options through Medicaid, employer-sponsored insurance, and the individual market in 2014 and beyond. We explored the response and characteristics of Californians who will and will not secure insurance coverage, with and without the “individual mandate” or minimum coverage requirement (MCR). We found 1.8 million Californians (38 %) of the 4.7 million eligible uninsured will secure coverage by 2019 with the MCR, while only 839,000 (18 % of the eligible uninsured) would obtain coverage without it.     

Developing cultural competence for social work with families living in poverty

Social workers need to have a good understanding of the cultural contexts within which the families they are working with are living. Whilst each context will be unique in many respects, the majority of families involved with social workers will share the experience of living in impoverished circumstances. At a time when levels of family poverty are rising rapidly in the UK and many other European countries as a result of a global financial crisis followed by economic recession and major cuts in public spending, it is particularly important that social workers understand the impact of poverty on the lives of the adults and children with whom they are engaged. One of the best ways of developing an understanding of any aspect of culture is to listen to people talking about their lives. Using a combination of research evidence based on the first-hand accounts of parents and children, and analysis of selected practice examples drawn from anti-poverty social work in England, the key elements of culturally competent practice for social work with families living in poverty are identified.     

Cultural and Intergenerational Narratives: Understanding Responses to Elderly Family Members in Declining Health

Culture exerts powerful influences on each generations' responses to older members in declining health. Narratives, the stories people tell about their lives, depict the different the ways that the elderly and their children experience their world. Their personal narratives chronicle their connections to culture the past. They also illustrate the ways that the cultural values are transformed to accommodate the present and future. The stories are influenced by immigration, assimilation, development, interpersonal relationships, and life events. These differences between the cultural narratives of the elderly and the following generation are particularly apparent during times of chronic stress. One such situation occurs during chronic illness when the younger generation is called upon to provide for the elderly and chronically ill.     

Labour Relations during and after Apprenticeship: Amity Hall,Jamaica, 1834–1840

This article contributes to the scholarly literature on labour relations in the transition from slavery to freedom in Jamaica. Based on the plantation papers of the Goulburn family, who owned Amity Hall sugar estate in Vere parish, it traces the contested negotiations between apprentices and free blacks on the one hand and the absentee owner and his manager on the other in a period of two transitions, from slavery to apprenticeship in 1834 and from apprenticeship to a restricted freedom in 1838. This enables one to document the variety of ways in which this crucial period affected the conditions, hours and remuneration for work. Though Amity Hall had a less fractious transition out of slavery than some other Jamaican plantations, the article reveals the difficulties faced by planters in overcoming labour shortages, the bargaining power of Jamaicans at crop time, and the contests over wages, rents and provision grounds that shaped labour relations after 1838. By 1840, the owner and manager and the workers at Amity Hall had not bridged the clear division in their expectations and interests since the Emancipation Bill came into effect.     

Vegaphobia: derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in UK national newspapers

This paper critically examines discourses of veganism in UK national newspapers in 2007. In setting parameters for what can and cannot easily be discussed, dominant discourses also help frame understanding. Discourses relating to veganism are therefore presented as contravening commonsense, because they fall outside readily understood meat-eating discourses. Newspapers tend to discredit veganism through ridicule, or as being difficult or impossible to maintain in practice. Vegans are variously stereotyped as ascetics, faddists, sentimentalists, or in some cases, hostile extremists. The overall effect is of a derogatory portrayal of vegans and veganism that we interpret as 'vegaphobia'. We interpret derogatory discourses of veganism in UK national newspapers as evidence of the cultural reproduction of speciesism, through which veganism is dissociated from its connection with debates concerning nonhuman animals' rights or liberation. This is problematic in three, interrelated, respects. First, it empirically misrepresents the experience of veganism, and thereby marginalizes vegans. Second, it perpetuates a moral injury to omnivorous readers who are not presented with the opportunity to understand veganism and the challenge to speciesism that it contains. Third, and most seriously, it obscures and thereby reproduces exploitative and violent relations between human and nonhuman animals.     

Associations between young adults' use of sexually explicit materials and their sexual preferences, behaviors, and satisfaction

This study examined how levels of sexually explicit material (SEM) use during adolescence and young adulthood were associated with sexual preferences, sexual behaviors, and sexual and relationship satisfaction. Participants included 782 heterosexual college students (326 men and 456 women; M(age)?=?19.9) who completed a questionnaire online. Results revealed high frequencies and multiple types and contexts of SEM use, with men's usage rates systematically higher than women's. Regression analyses revealed that both the frequency of SEM use and number of SEM types viewed were uniquely associated with more sexual experience (a higher number of overall and casual sexual intercourse partners, as well as a lower age at first intercourse). Higher frequencies of SEM use were associated with less sexual and relationship satisfaction. The frequency of SEM use and number of SEM types viewed were both associated with higher sexual preferences for the types of sexual practices typically presented in SEM. These findings suggest that SEM use can play a significant role in a variety of aspects of young adults' sexual development processes.     

Effects on pregnancy outcomes of changes in the North Carolina State Abortion Fund

Extending work of Cook et al. (1999, 1996), this paper examines abortion funding cutoffs for poor women in North Carolina, a unique setting allowing for a strong quasi-experimental design. Using vital registration data and additional administrative data from North Carolina, we decompose program effects on the abortion/birth ratio into two components: coverage (i.e., the proportion of all abortions that are state funded) and substitutability (the proportion of state funded abortions that would have been births in the absence of the state program). We show that both components are crucial for understanding the effects of fund cutoffs and that both components vary by age and by race. We offer explanations for these differences. Overall, we conclude that: the North Carolina State Abortion Fund (SAF) had powerful and pervasive effects: i.e., the SAF cutoffs reduced abortions and increased births.