The Peer Context of Adolescent Substance Use: Findings from Social Network Analysis

To examine the peer context of adolescent substance use, social network analysis was used to measure three domains of attributes of peer networks: social embeddedness, social status, and social proximity to substance users. The sample was a panel of 5,104 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in three public school systems surveyed every 6 months for five assessments. Hierarchical generalized linear models showed that adolescents less embedded in the network, with greater status, and with closer social proximity to peer substance users were more likely to use substances. Also, adolescents in less dense networks and networks with higher smoking prevalence were more likely to smoke and use marijuana. Results establish the utility of social network analysis for measuring peer context and indicate that conventionality of relationships—having friends in the network, being liked but not too well liked, and having fewer friends who use substances—is most beneficial.     

Health, Illness, Disability and Black Minorities: A Speculative Critique of Present Day Discourse

The idea of incorporating a user perspective was central to the design of a study looking at services for, and the needs of, Black minorities. The initial assumption of this work was that health, illness and disability are intimately connected to the way people construct their social realities. The ideas and attitudes individuals hold about their health and disability, however, are also organised within a particular discourse. This discourse is not neutral, and a critical understanding that unravels it is necessary. This is the intent of the article, which includes an exploration of the construction of health, illness and disability in western societies and how this is subsequently discussed in relation to Black minorities. At a general level this is addressed with reference to the humanist philosophy which pervades the entire discourse and provides the dominant framework of power in society.     

Scaling social life feelings by factor analysis of binary variables

This paper draws on D. J. Bartholomew's recent work on the factor analysis of categoric data, especially as it pertains to the scaling of social life feelings such as self-determination, trust, satisfaction. The logit-probit model and the probitprobit model were fitted to five items on trust in order to display their characteristics and to consider their utility. The Rasch model was fitted to the same data set in order to show its relation to the aforesaid Bartholomew factor models. Although recent work has put scaling by means of categoric responses on a surer statistical basis, it still leaves a variety of questions unanswered. Foremost among these is the question of whether latent variables are fact or fiction.     

Training in Family Assessment: A Comparison of Three Teaching Methods*

Three methods of training in family assessment were evaluated. Method I employed traditional classroom lecture along with demonstration videotapes prepared by faculty. Method II used small group discussion with the same videotapes. Method III incorporated an experiential task in which the students conducted a family interview and presented their own videotapes for small group discussion. Parallel pre and post tests were developed to measure knowledge and skills in family assessment. Results showed a significant gain in scores between pre and post measures, but the gains did not differ significantly between the three teaching methods. Logistic considerations led to the conclusion that the method of choice is Method I.     

Summer learning and its implications: insights from the Beginning School Study

There is perhaps no more pressing issue in school policy today than the achievement gap across social lines. Achievement differences between well-to-do children and poor children and between disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities and majority whites are large when children first begin school, and they increase over time. Despite years of study and an abundance of good intentions, these patterned achievement differences persist, but who is responsible, and how are schools implicated? The increasing gap seems to suggest that schools are unable to equalize educational opportunity or, worse still, that they actively handicap disadvantaged children. But a seasonal perspective on learning yields a rather different impression. Comparing achievement gains separately over the school year and the summer months reveals that much of the achievement gap originates over the summer period, when children are not in school. The authors review Beginning School Study research on differential summer learning across social lines (that is, by family socioeconomic level) and its implications for later schooling outcomes, including high school curriculum placements, high school dropout, and college attendance. These studies document the extent to which these large summer learning differences impede the later educational progress of children of low socioeconomic status. Practical implications are discussed, including the need for early and sustained interventions to prevent the achievement gap from opening wide in the first place and for high-quality summer programming focused on preventing differential summer learning loss.     

Policymaking in the Age of Internet: Is the Internet Tending to Make Policy Networks More or Less Inclusive?

Although many policy and political scientists have studied theInternet's role in electoral and organizational processes, thereis little work that examines the Internet's effect on policyprocesses. Has the Internet tended to make policy deliberationsmore inclusive? Has it affected patterns of influence reputationamong network participants? Has the Internet helped to bringnew organizations into policy debates? This study provides preliminaryanswers to these questions. Treating policy networks as a typeof interorganizational network, a "socialized" resource dependenceframework is developed. Deployment of the Internet is conceptualizedas an exogenous shock, where the shock alters the material resourcebase of a policy network and allows actors inside and outsidethe network to challenge structural power holders. Structuralpower holders attempt to "mold" use of the Internet to protecttheir position and its perquisites. To test this framework data were collected from two policy networksin "Newstatia"—one focused on adult basic education policyand the other on mental health policy. Both policy networksappear to have become more exclusive since the deployment ofthe Internet. Electronic central discussion networks (or "cores")were primarily populated by actors who were already entrenchedin positions of structural power within the network and possessedvery high influence ratings. Most Internet communication occursbetween members of the electronic core. At least preliminarily,the Internet appears to reinforce existing patterns of authorityand influence.     

Do maternal health problems influence child's worrying status? Evidence from the British Cohort Study

Conventional methods apply symmetric prior distributions such as a normal distribution or a Laplace distribution for regression coefficients, which may be suitable for median regression and exhibit no robustness to outliers. This work develops a quantile regression on linear panel data model without heterogeneity from a Bayesian point of view, i.e. upon a location-scale mixture representation of the asymmetric Laplace error distribution, and provides how the posterior distribution is summarized using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Applying this approach to the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS) data, it finds that a different maternal health problem has different influence on child's worrying status at different quantiles. In addition, applying stochastic search variable selection for maternal health problems to the 1970 BCS data, it finds that maternal nervous breakdown, among the 25 maternal health problems, contributes most to influence the child's worrying status.