Links between past abuse,suicide ideation,and sexual orientation among San Diego college students

The authors explored relationships among childhood abuse, suicidal ideation, and sexual orientation of 18- to 30-year-old students enrolled in 2 San Diego area colleges, using responses from anonymous questionnaires. Sixty percent of the 138 eligible respondents were women, and 22% were self-identified gay/bisexual individuals. Women were more likely than men to report at least 1 form of emotional abuse (odds ratio [OR] = 2.3; p =.02) and unwanted sexual touching (OR = 4.3; p = .0004). Lesbian/bisexual women were significantly more likely to report past suicidal ideation than were heterosexual women (OR = 3.7, p = .03). Gay/bisexual men were more likely to report unwanted sexual touching than were heterosexual men (OR = 5.1, p = .04), but the men did not report significantly higher rates of past suicide ideation or suicide attempts. Sexual orientation and a past history of child sexual, physical, and emotional abuse could be compounding risk factors for suicidal ideation among college students.     

Disseminating science-based prevention: lessons learned from CSAP's CAPTs

A wide variety of prevention approaches that reduce substance use and associated problems have been developed and tested. But successes have been limited in promoting the use of these scientific advances by the policy makers, practitioners, and concerned citizens. The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention's six regional Centers for the Application of Prevention Technologies (CSAP's CAPTs) are a major mechanism by which CSAP brings research to practice. This article synthesizes the issues that the CAPTs have faced, the solutions they have developed, and conclusions concerning the work that still needs to be done to increase the application of science-based approaches to prevention. These discussions highlight the particular importance of addressing issues related to the larger systems in which prevention programs and strategies operate.     

Infant mortality decline in Chile: A replication

This replication of a previous analysis of the effect of sociological variables on infant mortality rates in Chile refines the earlier work by using the more numerous communes for comparisons, by presenting the basic data in the form of a path analysis, and by expanding the theory to include “health practices,” customs, such as avoiding teenage pregnancies, that are community-backed and maintained. This type of practice is then integrated into the “institutionalized problem-solving capacity” framework that guides the analysis. Urabnization and voting, the two indicators of institutionalized problem-solving capacity, predict reduced infant morality, as before. Teen pregnancies is a positive predictor, as expected, but the number of children already born does not predict. These results are net of two indicators of health technology-whether or not a physician was in attendance, and the number of clinics. Mother's education also predicted low infant morality, and the theory is applied to this well-known predictor to interpret its effect. In addition, the anomalous role of mother's education in the dominant biomedical explanation is highlighted.     

Dating and Sexual Behavior Among Single Parents of Young Children in the United States

Theory and research on partnered parents suggests trade-offs between parenting and sexuality, with those trade-offs most pronounced among mothers of young children. However, little research has focused on how a growing demographic of single parents negotiates dating and sexual activity. The current study drew upon a 2012 nationally representative sample of 5,481 single Americans 21 years of age and older, of whom 4.3% were parents of a child age five or younger. Dependent variables were sexual thoughts, frequency of sexual activity, number of sexual partners in the past year, dates during the previous three months, and whether one was actively seeking a relationship partner. Covariates included parental age, sex/gender, sexual orientation, education, and income. Using the entire sample of singles, we found no main effects of number (0, 1, 2+) of children aged five years and younger or number of children aged two years and younger on dating and sexual behavior variables. Next, using analyses restricted to single parents (n = 2,121), we found that single parents with a child aged five years or younger, adjusting for covariates, reported greater frequency of sexual activity and first dates but no differences in other outcomes compared with single parents of older children.     

A frailty modeling approach for parental effects in animal breeding

Survival models involving frailties are commonly applied in studies where correlated event time data arise due to natural or artificial clustering. In this paper we present an application of such models in the animal breeding field. Specifically, a mixed survival model with a multivariate correlated frailty term is proposed for the analysis of data from over 3611 Brazilian Nellore cattle. The primary aim is to evaluate parental genetic effects on the trait length in days that their progeny need to gain a commercially specified standard weight gain. This trait is not measured directly but can be estimated from growth data. Results point to the importance of genetic effects and suggest that these models constitute a valuable data analysis tool for beef cattle breeding.     

A consistent estimator for logistic mixed effect models

We propose a consistent and locally efficient method of estimating the model parameters of a logistic mixed effect model with random slopes. Our approach relaxes two typical assumptions: the random effects being normally distributed, and the covariates and random effects being independent of each other. Adhering to these assumptions is particularly difficult in health studies where, in many cases, we have limited resources to design experiments and gather data in long‐term studies, while new findings from other fields might emerge, suggesting the violation of such assumptions. So it is crucial to have an estimator that is robust to such violations; then we could make better use of current data harvested using various valuable resources. Our method generalizes the framework presented in Garcia & Ma (2016) which also deals with a logistic mixed effect model but only considers a random intercept. A simulation study reveals that our proposed estimator remains consistent even when the independence and normality assumptions are violated. This contrasts favourably with the traditional maximum likelihood estimator which is likely to be inconsistent when there is dependence between the covariates and random effects. Application of this work to a study of Huntington's disease reveals that disease diagnosis can be enhanced using assessments of cognitive performance. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 47: 140–156; 2019 © 2019 Statistical Society of Canada