Suicide Attempts by Adolescent Latinas: An Exploratory Study of Individual and Family Correlates

Epidemiological data show high rates of suicide attempts among adolescent Latinas. Few studies have addressed the psychosocial, cultural and family correlates of suicide attempts among this age group of a rapidly growing population. The authors studied 31 adolescent Hispanic females who were receiving mental health services; 14 girls had attempted suicide in the previous five years and 17 had never attempted suicide. The two groups of girls did not differ significantly with respect to demographic profiles, levels of depression, family type, acculturation, or self-esteem. However, as hypothesized, the mutuality between girls and their mothers was lower among suicide attempters. Maladaptive coping skills of withdrawal and wishful thinking were more commonly used by attempters, and non-attempters used emotional regulation and problem-solving more frequently. Findings are discussed within the context of the empirical and theoretical literature and implications for practice are considered.     

Testing the Effects of Collectively Expected Durations of Migration: The Naturalization of Mexicans and Cubans

This study tests a hypothesis that Mexican foreign‐born immigrants who came to the United States for economic reasons naturalize less often than Cubans who immigrate for political reasons. It uses information from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Latino Sample, a national sample of 7,453 respondents from the 1989 Latino National Political Survey (LNPS) and the 1990 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Ordinal logistic regression is used to examine the hypothesis. The results indicate that while more Mexicans plan to apply or have applied for naturalization, proportionately more Cubans than Mexicans have naturalized. Cuban political immigrants who came to the United States during the first half of the 1960s naturalize more often than their Mexican counterparts. However, the effect of ethnic identity on naturalization is mediated by a number of other predictors of naturalization such as gender, race, urban residence, socioeconomic status and acculturation.     

Physician-sponsored networks. Will physicians take back medicine?

Until about the late 1980s, American physicians and their allies, hospitals and the health care manufacturing industries, dominated all facets of the health system--the clinical, the economic, and the political. The bulk of these providers' revenue flowed to them from a highly fragmented insurance system whose governing principle was to provide each insured patient free choice of doctor and hospital. Two distinct, concurrent shifts threaten to erode the medical profession's traditional dominance. The first is a rapid, general shift of control from the supply side of the health sector to its demand side. The second is a shift away from government control, over which organized medicine held much sway in the past, toward private regulators--the executives of the managed care industry. Is the trend towards greater dependence of practicing physicians on non-physician executives inevitable, or can physicians retain--and, in part, regain--their hitherto autonomous position in the health system?     

Uncertainty, Contrariness and the Double-bind: Middle Managers' Reactions to Changing Contracts

This article describes the emerging changes in psychological contracts being experienced by British middle managers in relation to their employing organizations, the middle managers' negative reactions to these changes and organizational responses to such negativity. By analysing case studies of 16 organizations, a classification of changes to five elements of the psychological contract are identified: knowledge, motivation, goals and means, role behaviour and ethics. By analysing the semi-structured interviews of 37 middle managers, selected from a much larger database for their obvious negative reactions, a continuum of such reactions is considered: uncertainty, contrariness and double-bind. This consideration leads, then, to suggestions for further research.     

Emerging coherence and relations to communication among executive function tasks in toddlers: Evidence from a Latin American sample

Recent work within early executive function (EF) seems to suggest that toddlers show distinct patterns of development, involving poorly correlated performance across EF tasks and significant improvements over relatively short periods of time. The present study sought to extend these findings by investigating evidence for these patterns in toddlers and the existence of more traditional patterns of EF (e.g., correlations between tasks, links to language) when using the same tasks in a novel Latin American sample. Eighty toddlers (18–24 months) and sixty young preschoolers (30–36) months completed a battery of EF tasks, early social communication, and receptive and expressive language measures. Results indicated that toddlers showed similar distinct patterns of development (i.e., few relations between tasks and links to responding to joint attention), but by early preschool a more cohesive EF and links to language were present. Further, work demonstrated significant age (older children outperformed younger children), gender (girls outperformed boys), and socioeconomic differences (satisfied basic needs outperformed unsatisfied basic needs, but only on the snack delay). This work provides evidence for patterns of emerging EF development within this novel cultural sample (and evidence for group differences) that may be supported by communicative and representational development.     

Examining Familial-Based Academic Success Factors in Urban High School Students: The Case of Puerto Rican Female High Achievers

ABSTRACT

This article works to dispel the myth that Puerto Rican female urban high school students living in poverty are not capable of performing at high academic levels. This article attempts to counteract these beliefs by describing the four success factors that seven Puerto Rican female high school students attribute to their high academic achievement. These success factors are: (1) religiosity and extracurricular activities as sources of social capital, (2) affirming and maintaining a Puerto Rican identity, (3) maternal influences on students' academic achievement and, (4) the potential for caring teachers and other school staff to influence high academic achievement. Finally, our findings suggest that opportunities for Latinas and other youth of color are still inequitably structured in large, comprehensive high schools. Hence, we argue that schools must continue to bridge the large gap between themselves and the families/communities they serve and utilize the funds of knowledge and social capital that their students already bring to school.     

Production knowledge and its impact on the mechanisms of governance

A framework is developed outlining how production knowledge and capabilities influence firm boundaries by impacting the transaction costs of markets and hierarchies. A central implication of the framework is that at lower levels of these capabilities the transaction costs of markets decline at a faster rate than the costs of hierarchy, while at higher levels of these capabilities the transaction costs of hierarchy decline at a faster rate than the costs of markets. The discriminating role of production capabilities arises because markets and hierarchies utilize different types of control (prices and output control versus authority and behavior control), and hence require different levels of knowledge to be efficient. The analysis suggests firms often maintain some production knowledge when contracting for various inputs since it not only reduces transactional hazards in markets, but also because in comparative institutional terms, initial gains in knowledge make markets more efficient than internal organization. In addition, the analysis suggests that there would be a U shaped relationship between the propensity to integrate vertically and the extent of production capabilities as opposed to a monotonically increasing relationship. I find support for the U shaped relationship in a cross sectional sample of 1553 manufacturing firms.     

Single-machine batch delivery scheduling with an assignable common due window

This paper addresses a batch delivery single-machine scheduling problem in which jobs have an assignable common due window. Each job will incur an early (tardy) penalty if it is early (tardy) with respect to the common due window under a given schedule. There is no capacity limit on each delivery batch, and the cost per batch delivery is fixed and independent of the number of jobs in the batch. The objective is to find the optimal size and location of the window, the optimal dispatch date for each job, as well as an optimal job sequence to minimize a cost function based on earliness, tardiness, holding time, window location, window size, and batch delivery. We show that the problem can be optimally solved in O(n⁸)$O(n^8)$ time by a dynamic programming algorithm under a reasonable assumption on the relationships among the cost parameters. A computational experiment is also conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. We also show that some special cases of the problem can be optimally solved by lower order algorithms.     

Sleep hygiene practices and sleep duration in rotating-shift shiftworkers

Abstract

Alcohol, caffeine and tobacco intake, exercise, activities on going to bed, and sleep-enhancing measures were assessed in 72 rotating-shift shiftworkers to determine whether these variables differ following day shifts and night-shifts, and which are related to sleep duration. Only alcohol intake and exercise prior to sleep, and feeling drowsy when retiring, differed following the night-shift. Workers generally followed recommendations concerning alcohol intake, sleeping immediately on retiring, and exercising, but acted contrary to recommendations concerning caffeine and nicotine intake. The only behaviour clearly associated with poor sleep was smoking, which reduced sleep duration.