Stress and tobacco use among African-American adolescents: the buffering effect of cultural factors

Tobacco is a leading contributor to morbidity and mortality and a primary reason for health disparities among African Americans. In this study we explore the role of stress in smoking and cultural factors that protect against stress among African-American adolescents. Our sample consisted of 239 youth who were recruited into the study while enrolled in 8th and 12th grade. Measures of risk factors (stress, school transition stress, and community disorganization), moderator or protective factors (religious support and intergenerational connections), and 30-day tobacco use were collected. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted. Intergenerational connections moderated the effect of stress on past 30-day tobacco use. Religious support moderated the effect of neighborhood disorganization on past 30-day tobacco use. Religious support also moderated the effect of stress on past 30-day tobacco use. The findings have implications for prevention efforts to consider religious beliefs and practices and also to link youth with supportive adults in their community.     

日记(英文)

我们中的许多人都曾有过这样的经历——背起行囊.远赴重洋.去学习、去工作.去闯出自己的一片天。在与亲人朋友们相隔千里之外的陌生土地上.尝试去享受一种自由与寂寞同在的生活……"日记".作为本刊开设的新栏目,将与您分享一些读者朋友们的海外经历。     

The Origins of Prognostic Differences: A Topography of Experience and Expectation in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of prognostic difference on a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and it argues that circumstantial elements, the NICUs local history, and individual knowledge and experience of those involved must be taken into account. By capitalizing on prognostic markers as an analytical category, it becomes possible to study the difference between professionals and parents and how they use similar reasoning to reach substantively different conclusions. Potentially relevant factors in the construction of prognoses are the role of other children, medical technology and the use of the NICU space in the production of prognostic knowledge. My argument underscores that only a multi-layered analysis of these processes accounts for actors divergent prognoses.     

Normal Queers: Straight Parents Respond to Their Children's “Coming Out”

This article explores how normative understandings of gender, family, and sexuality provide the foundation for stigma, an avenue out of deviance, and the means by which stigma is perpetuated. Using participant‐observation and interview data from a support group for families of lesbian women and gay men, I examine the destigmatizing identity work with which straight parents responded to their children's lesbian and gay identities. The parents' reliance on conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and parenting invoked and affirmed heteronormative conceptions of normalcy. This redrawing—and not fundamentally challenging—of the lines defining sexual normalcy left intact systemic logics supporting heterosexist sexual hierarchies.     

Evaluating the impact of conditional cash transfer programs on fertility: the case of the Red de Protección Social in Nicaragua

Evaluating the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility is complicated given that changes in incentives to have children take time to be incorporated into decision making and evaluation periods are usually quite brief. We explore the use of birth spacing as a short-run indicator of the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility. The data come from a Nicaraguan conditional cash transfer program that offers incentives for poor households to invest in children’s health, nutrition, and education. We estimate a stratified Cox proportional hazard model and find that the program decreased the hazard of a birth, indicating an increase in birth spacing.     

To Integrate or Not to Integrate Dialectical Behaviour Therapy with Other Therapy Approaches?

With mounting evidence for its efficacy in the treatment of borderline personality disorder and related problems and increasing dissemination nationally and internationally, front line clinicians in practice settings are increasingly aware of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Indeed, it is likely that this treatment is reaching individuals who practice from a variety of theoretical frameworks, such as psychodynamic, humanistic, cognitive, or some combination thereof. Therefore, this paper considers the ways in which DBT is an integrative approach, as well as the issues that may arise in the integration of DBT with other theoretical frameworks or with practices spawned by these alternative frameworks. We recommend that therapists practicing DBT adhere to the behavioral and dialectical theoretical foundations of the approach, in order to provide therapy that is effective, coherent, and consistent.