Sources of drug information among adolescent students

A sample of 1023 eighth and tenth grade students in small to medium-sized central Texas school districts was assessed to determine the amount of information they receive from ten sources about six categories of drugs. The amount of information males reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what females reported, and the amount of information that eighth graders reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what tenth graders reported. Television was the primary source of drug information for all categories of drugs except inhalants, for which friends and television were equally important sources. Parents and printed media (magazines or newspapers) were of secondary importance, followed by friends and teachers. Adolescents were less likely to receive drug-related information from experience, siblings, church, doctors, and police. The reliance on the mass media for drug information in smaller school districts is a pattern which has been previously observed in larger urban districts. This consistency suggests that mass media approaches to drug education are likely to be as effective in rural areas and smaller towns as they are among urban adolescents. Implications for television programming are discussed.     

Housing affordability among elderly female heads of household in nonmetropolitan areas

This study investigates the extent and nature of housing affordability for elderly nonmetropolitan female heads of household using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The results indicate that over one-third of elderly nonmetropolitan female heads of household experience housing poverty and that those who rent, who have fair to poor health, and who are minorities are particularly vulnerable. Housing affordability, measured by the concept of housing poverty, identifies households struggling to meet basic needs while the conventional 25% of income for housing expenditures ratio identifies a larger population. The findings suggest the need for multifaceted public policies to address the problem of housing poverty. Her research interests include housing affordability, housing and community vitality, and decision making. She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University. Sooyoun Park is in the same department as a Project Assistant on a USDA-funded research project entitled “Housing Affordability in Rural Areas,” which is a joint project between Nebraska and Wisconsin. Her research interests focus on housing management behavior in relation to housing expenditure burden. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.     

A theory of policy differentiation in single issue electoral politics

Voter preferences are characterized by a parameter s (say, income) distributed on a set S according to a probability measure F. There is a single issue (say, a tax rate) whose level, b, is to be politically decided. There are two parties, each of which is a perfect agent of some constituency of voters, voters with a given value of s. An equilibrium of the electoral game is a pair of policies, b ₁ and b ₂, proposed by the two parties, such that b _i maximizes the expected utility of the voters whom party i represents, given the policy proposed by the opposition. Under reasonable assumptions, the unique electoral equilibrium consists in both parties proposing the favorite policy of the median voter. What theory can explain why, historically, we observe electoral equilibria where the ‘right’ and ‘left’ parties propose different policies? Uncertainty concerning the distribution of voters is introduced. Let {F(t)} _{t ε T} be a class of probability measures on S; all voters and parties share a common prior that the distribution of t is described by a probability measure H on T. If H has finite support, there is in general no electoral equilibrium. However, if H is continuous, then electoral equilibrium generally exists, and in equilibrium the parties propose different policies. Convergence of equilibrium to median voter politics is proved as uncertainty about the distribution of voter traits becomes small.     

Is the GNP fractionally integrated?

The suitability of autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) processes for the modeling of US aggregate output is examined. We consider the two most widely used methods for the estimation of the fractionally differencing parameter and discuss the empirical results obtained by applying these methods to the quarterly post-war real GNP as well as to the quarterly post-war real GNP per capita. Contrary to previous findings, we conclude that evidence for a fractional degree of integration is poor.     

Classifying At‐Risk High School Youth: The Influence of Exposure to Community Violence and Protective Factors on Academic and Health Outcomes

Using cluster analysis, 789 predominately Latino and African American high school youth were classified into varying academic at‐risk profiles using self‐reported levels of academic confidence, motivation to attend school, perceived family support, connections with teachers and peers, and exposure to violence. Six clusters emerged, 5 of which were identified as “at‐risk.” The clusters were examined in relation to academic stress, health status, grades, and school retention. Exposure to violence was one distinguishing feature of youth identified as most vulnerable, vulnerable, and resilient; however, youth identified as resilient recorded better academic outcomes.     

Negotiating the “Global” within the Global Playscapes of Mount Everest*

Within the anthropology of tourism, “tourist” and “local” are often used to conceptualize social relations constitutive of international tourism, where “First World” mobile subjects visit stationary “Third World” “Others.” Globalization, as both discourse and condition, is changing the contours and conceptualizations of tourist spaces. In this paper, I show how “the global” is negotiated by different subjects, and how recreational mountain climbers from Nepal negotiate their identities as “locals” as well as global, mobile, travel subjects within “the global playscapes” of Himalayan mountaineering. I suggest that the question of who can be a tourist within a globalizing world should be closely examined.     

Individualism vs Collectivism in Different Cultures: A cross-cultural study

In this study, individualism vs collectivism, in line with the work of Triandis in 1985, was assessed in two groups of male and female students, in Egypt and Germany. The results confirm the effect that cultural background has on individualist vs collectivist orientations in both of these cultures for male and female students. Men and women scored higher on individualism in Germany than in Egypt, whereas collectivism scores were higher in Egypt than in Germany. These findings are discussed in terms of general recommendations for intercultural interventions that discourage viewing people solely in terms of group membership, and instead as distinct individuals.     

A simple estimator for a shared frailty regression model

Summary. We propose a simple estimation procedure for a proportional hazards frailty regression model for clustered survival data in which the dependence is generated by a positive stable distribution. Inferences for the frailty parameter can be obtained by using output from Cox regression analyses. The computational burden is substantially less than that of the other approaches to estimation. The large sample behaviour of the estimator is studied and simulations show that the approximations are appropriate for use with realistic sample sizes. The methods are motivated by studies of familial associations in the natural history of diseases. Their practical utility is illustrated with sib pair data from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.     

Asthma Patients' Activities and Air Pollution: A Semiparametric Censored Regression Analysis

Asthma patients' health status may be especially sensitive to some types of air pollution, but the evidence on this is mixed. We explore the effects of ground-level ozone on asthma patient's activities, breaking apart the usual aggregated category of leisure into indoor and outdoor activities, and differentiating those by whether the activities were active or inactive. Applying the semiparametric censored estimation method we demonstrate that even though the period over which activities were observed was relatively low in ozone levels, there is a significant impact of ozone on a few activities. The (non-ozone) economic and demographic variables in the model play significant roles in explaining the allocation of time among seven activities, suggesting the suitability of the approach for other household decision-making contexts.