The impact of schools self-administering substance abuse surveys: an evaluation

The literature suggests that administering drug surveys to public school students is best done by persons outside of the school system (or at least unfamiliar to the students). This is the approach used by the long-time Monitoring the Future project. Because of the increased costs that administration by outside research associates requires (both time and transportation), we decided to design an experiment that would compare it to administration by school personnel. Six school systems were split, and 3756 surveys were administered, about half by outside research associates and half by school personnel. The results indicate that there were minimal and non-significant differences between the two groups. On the basis of these results, we draw the conclusion that school personnel are able to administer survey instruments without affecting the quality of the results and, thus, that school districts may safely use such data in the evaluation of their drug education and drug prevention programs.     

Ages at menarche and menopause: Some mediaeval authorities

Abstract It is well known that the duration of the fecund period in the female has not been constant, in the last couple of centuries at least. Tanner(1) has assembled the best menarche statistics currently available for Western peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has concluded that the average age at menarche has fallen fairly consistently, at a rate of four months per decade, since c. 1830. This puts menarche somewhere between 15+ and 17+ in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, against equivalent figures of 12+ and 14 in the mid-twentieth. For earlier periods Tanner's methods cannot be applied because of the lack of clinical data of the order he requires; but Backman, in a more general survey, concluded that in classical antiquity the time of menarche was fairly constant at around the age of fourteen and probably remained at about that age until the beginning of the modern era, But c. 1500, or earlier, a retardation of menarche began throughout Europe ... By the end of the eighteenth century this process of retardation had produced the very high figure of 17·5-18 years, at least in northern Europe. In the early nineteenth century, perhaps c. 1830, there began a progressive decline in the age of menarche, which now seems to be levelling out at around the age of 14·0-14·5.     

Health-enhancing physical activity during practice among student football managers at a Division I university

Abstract

Objective: Student football managers have demands on their time that may pose barriers to meeting recommended current physical activity (PA) guidelines. The study sought to assess the amount of PA obtained by student football managers at a NCAA Division I Football university. Participants: Subjects were student football managers (n?=?14) with data collected in the fall 2015. Methods: Participants wore an Omron HJ-720ITFFP pedometer for seven consecutive days during football activities only, while self-reporting their overall PA on day 7. Measures were analyzed using repeated measures and mixed-design ANOVAs. Results: Managers averaged 8474 steps/day for each practice/game. All PA measures significantly varied by day and manager experience. Overall PA equated to 78?hours of walking. Conclusions: Student football managers easily met and surpassed the recommended aerobic health-enhancing PA guideline. While their manager-related PA was 140?minutes per week, other PA allowed them to easily reach significantly healthy levels of PA.     

Job Insecurity Perceptions and Media Coverage of Labor Market Policy

This study employs a panel data set that combines information obtained from media content analysis, micro-level survey data, and macroeconomic variables to investigate the impact of media coverage on individual perceptions of job insecurity in Germany. Estimates indicate that these perceptions increase in years with greater quantity of news reporting. This volume effect is larger for socio-demographic groups with a generally low incidence of insecurity perceptions (e.g., highly educated and remunerated employees), which implies that unequally distributed perceptions converge when media coverage is strong. Moreover, the results suggest that information processing is subject to an optimism bias.     

Immigrants’ support for social spending,self‐interest and the role of the group: A comparative study of immigrants in The Netherlands

This study examined immigrants’ support for social spending. We tested the dominant self‐interest hypothesis for a number of immigrant groups in the Netherlands with highly varying socio‐economic positions. We additionally examined the effect of immigrants’ group interest by testing the relevance of in‐group immigrant benefit participation rates and their effect on support for social spending. In this article, we discuss how immigrants’ sense of belonging to a group affects the association between immigrants’ self‐ and group interests in welfare and their support for social spending. We found that self‐interest has explanatory relevance, but that this is strongly correlated with level of income. Results showed weak support for the effect of group interest. Instead of the expected moderation effects of sense of belonging on the self‐ and group‐interest explanations of support for social spending, the results showed a direct effect of sense of belonging on support for social spending.     

Benefit Dependency and the Dynamics of the Welfare State: Comparing Sweden and the Netherlands

In this article we analyse the dynamics of the welfare state, focusing on the Netherlands and Sweden. The basic question is whether the different social systems of these countries result in differences in persistency of benefit dependency. We conclude that although benefit dependency at a macroeconomic level is more or less the same, patterns of mobility of individuals between benefits and jobs are different. These different patterns are partly explained by overrepresentation of benefits with a high degree of persistency in the Netherlands. This overrepresentation is, however, not sufficient to account for the large differences observed in dynamics. Characteristics of the welfare state account for that.