Adolescent Females' Security with Parents Predicts the Quality of Peer Interaction.

This study examined the association between security with parents and the quality of interactions between adolescent best friends. Thirty-six girls and their best friends, between the ages of 15 and 18 years, were recruited to participate in the study. They were videotaped while discussing unresolved problems each adolescent had experienced in her life. Security with parents and peers, self-esteem, and locus of control were assessed with questionnaires. There were three main findings. Girls high in security with respect to their parents had higher positive interaction scores in the videotaped task, higher self-esteem, higher internality scores, and less feelings of unknown or powerful others control than those low in security. Dyads in which both girls were high in security with respect to their parents had higher total positive interaction scores than those dyads in which at least one girl was low in security. Best friends were significantly concordant with respect to security with parents and peers as well as their positive interaction scores during their own task and their friend's task. Findings are discussed with respect to attachment theory.     

Specialist assesstnent services for child abuse and neglect

This paper describes the Child Protection Service, Flinders Medical Centre, South Australia, a specialist assessment service for infants, children and adolescents following allegations of abuse and neglect. The psychosocial and medical services provided for infants, children, adolescents and their families are outlined briefly and the Child Protection Service's view that the assessment process can and needs to be therapeutic is discussed. Data was provided about the age and gender of infants, children and adolescents seen and the number of families referred on for longer-term therapeutic intervention. The unit's philosophical stance, affecting its clinical practice and interagency and consultation service, is described, as is its research focus. The paper also raises a number of issues that warrant further and detailed attention. These include the need for workers to monitor and attend to their emotional responses while working in the area of abuse and the destructive potential of denial that may consequently and subtly impact on professional practice. The tendency for professionals and the wider society to ignore the impact of physical abuse is also raised.     

Marital Conflict, Child Emotional Security about Family Relationships and Child Adjustment

Addressing a gap in process‐oriented understanding of relations between marital conflict and children's adjustment, propositions of the emotional security hypothesis from a family‐wide perspective were tested in a longitudinal research design. Participants were 181 families and their 11–12 year‐old‐child (115 boys, 76 girls) living in Wales, in the United Kingdom. Relations between marital conflict, children's emotional security about marital conflict and parenting, respectively, and children's adjustment were assessed based on reports by mothers, fathers, and children and videotaped analogue procedures completed by children. Structural equation modelling indicated that children's emotional security about interparental conflict (emotional regulation, cognitive representations and behavioural regulation) mediated the relation between marital conflict and children's security about parenting. Processes pertaining to children's security in multiple family systems (i.e., interparental and parent–child) provided an indirect mechanism through which interparental conflict affected children's symptoms of psychological distress (internalising and externalising problems) assessed 12 months later. Future directions for further tests of comprehensive, theoretically based models for the effects of marital conflict on children are discussed.     

Fertility differences in Peru: A reconsideration

Abstract In a series of articles by Stycos, Heer and W. H. James, predominantly Indian areas of Peru were reported to have significantly lower levels of fertility than the economically better developed Spanish-speaking areas. Heer and James reported similar findings for Bolivia and Ecuador as well as Peru.     

A monte carlo comparison of tests of parallelism of the ponses over time of two populations vith non-uniform observation times

Repeated measures data collected at random observation times are quite common in clinical studies and are often difficult to analyze. A Monte Carlo comparison of four analysis procedures with respect to significance level and power is presented. The basic procedures compared are successive difference analyses and three procedures using the data as summarized in the estimated quadratic polynomial regression coefficients for each subject. These three procedures are (1) Hotelling's T-square, (2) Multivariate Multisample Rank Sum Test (MMRST) and (3) Multivariate Multisample Median Test (MMMT).

For the variety of dispersion structures, sample sizes and treatement groups simulated the MMRST and successive difference analysis were the most satisfactory.     

User Beware: Concerning Findings from the Post 2011–2012 U.S. Internal Revenue Service Migration Data

Population Research and Policy Review - The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) makes publicly and freely available period migration data at the state and county levels. Among their uses, these...     

‘How come I don’t get asked no questions?’ Researching ‘hard to reach’ children and teenagers

This article discusses two related areas of research practice with children and young people that have received less attention in the literature than they might. The first is working with children and teenagers for whom the traditional, discursive nature of interview‐based research is less accessible. The second is the disinclination of researchers to report on difficulties in the research process. As researchers, we scanned the literature for assistance for some of the problems we encountered, with little reward. In describing everyday problems (and some of our – still developing – solutions) we hope to encourage more dialogue on the uncomfortable realities of the research process, and how we might improve research practice, making it a more fruitful exercise for researchers, and a more enjoyable one for children and teenagers.     

Using Household Expenditure to Develop an Income Poverty Line

Income and expenditure measures are commonly used to establish poverty lines representing, respectively, the availability of cash resources and the standard of living approaches to measuring the extent and composition of poverty. Using UK data we compare these two measures and show how they might be combined. Although overall poverty rates are similar whichever measure is used, the relativities they imply for different types of household differ considerably. There is little overlap between income and expenditure poverty and very few households are both income–and expenditure–poor. The concept of poverty as constraint on choice or constrained expenditure is then defined as the absence of spending on durable goods and luxury items. Using logistic regression, income thresh–olds associated with the observed levels of constrained expenditure are derived for different types of household. Assuming all income is spent, these thresholds define a poverty line below which expenditure is severely constrained. The extent to which social assistance rates limit or prevent household expenditure is also estimated. The method and the estimates illustrate the value of exploring the links between income and expenditure in the measurement of poverty, drawing attention to the limitations of the data, and identifying future research needs.     

Addressing the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Examining Micro- and Macro-Level Variables that Affect School Disengagement and Subsequent Felonies

Abstract

This study examines the School-to-Prison Pipeline (STPP) by identifying individual legal and extra-legal variables and school-level factors that predict juvenile/criminal justice involvement using 2006–2012 matched data from education and justice systems (n?=?21,457). The role of school disengagement is also assessed, measuring unexcused absences that follow suspensions in the previous academic year. For the court-involved subsample (n?=?7349), after controlling for student behavior, demographic, and school-level factors; extra-legal racial differences remain a significant factor in determining higher counts of felonies with African American and Multi-racial students at increased likelihood (1.65 and 1.86 times, respectively for the higher latent class) of juvenile/criminal justice involvement as compared with White students. And, although White students were found to either be more disengaged or equally disengaged when compared with students of color, sharp differences in criminal justice involvement and outcomes exist by race/ethnicity. These findings suggest that addressing the STPP will require future research and focus on more than individual-level behaviors (school disengagement and school-based offenses) and attention to the impact of extra-legal variables and systemic implicit bias.     

Assent-maximizing social choice

We take a decision theoretic approach to the classic social choice problem, using data on the frequency of choice problems to compute social choice functions. We define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population’s preferences and on the probability distribution over the sets of feasible alternatives that the society will face. Our methods generalize the well-known Kemeny Rule. In the Kemeny Rule, it is known a priori that the subset of feasible alternatives will be a pair. We define a distinct social choice function for each distribution over the feasible subsets. Our rules can be interpreted as distance minimization—selecting the order closest to the population’s preferences, using a metric on the orders that reflects the distribution over the possible feasible sets. The distance is the probability that two orders will disagree about the optimal choice from a randomly selected available set. We provide an algorithmic method to compute these metrics in the case where the probability of a given feasible set is a function only of its cardinality.