Family transitions and juvenile delinquency

There is a large body of research that shows children from non-intact homes show higher rates of juvenile delinquency than children from intact homes, partially due to weaker parental control and supervision in non-intact homes. What has not been adequately addressed in the research is the influence of changes in family structure among individual adolescents over time on delinquent offending. Using the first and third waves of the National Youth Study, we assess the effect of family structure changes on changes in delinquent offending between waves through the intermediate process of changes in family time and parental attachment. Although prior research has documented adolescents in broken homes are more delinquent than youth in intact homes, the process of family dissolution is not associated with concurrent increases in offending. In contrast, family formation through marriage or cohabitation is associated with simultaneous increases in offending. Changes in family time and parental attachment account for a portion of the family formation effect on delinquency, and prior parental attachment and juvenile offending significantly condition the effect of family formation on offending.     

The Salience of a Career Calling Among College Students: Exploring Group Differences and Links to Religiousness,Life Meaning,and Life Satisfaction

The authors examined the degree to which 1st‐year college students endorse a career calling and how levels of calling differ across demographic variables and religiousness, life meaning, and life satisfaction. Forty‐four percent of students believed that having a career calling was mostly or totally true of them, and 28% responded to searching for a calling in the same fashion. Students seeking advanced professional degrees were more likely to feel a career calling, and the presence of a calling was found to weakly correlate with religiousness and life satisfaction and moderately correlate with life meaning. Practice implications are suggested.     

Child sexual abuse: from prevention to self‐protection

There are a growing number of child abuse prevention and education programmes, including primarily group‐based parent and child education, which are taught by teachers within the school system. This article reviews some of the existing sexual abuse education and/or body safety programmes, as well as the research surrounding them. Advantages as well as criticisms of such programmes are reviewed. Issues such as target populations (i.e. children, teachers, parents), programme components and methodological limitations are addressed. Major findings include: children as young as three can be effectively taught self‐protection skills, parental and family involvement in training is important, and repeated exposure helps children maintain knowledge gains. The components of successful programmes include teaching children to identify and resist inappropriate touching, reassuring children that it is not their fault and learning the proper names of their genitals. Finally, future directions for programme development, research and policy are explored. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bias in Population Estimates of Long-Term Exposure from Short-Term Measurements of Individual Exposure

A population's long-term exposure distribution for a specified compound is typically estimated from short-term measurements of a sample of individuals from the population of interest. In this situation, estimates of a population's long-term exposure parameters contain two sources of sampling error: the typical sampling error associated with taking a sample from the population and the sampling error from estimating individual long-term exposure. These components are not separable in the data collected, i.e. , the value observed is due partly to the individual sampled and partly to the time at which the individual was sampled. Hence, the distribution of the data collected is not the same as the population exposure distribution. Monte Carlo simulations are used to compare the distribution of the observed data with the population exposure distribution for a simple additive model. A simple adjustment to standard estimates of percentiles and quantils is shown to be effective in reducing bias particularly for the upper percentiles and quantils of the population distribution.     

The therapeutic misconception: a threat to valid parental consent for pediatric neuroimaging research

Neuroimaging research has brought major advances to child health and wellbeing. However, because of the vulnerabilities associated with neurological and developmental conditions, the parental need for hope, and the expectation of parents that new medical advances can benefit their child, pediatric neuroimaging research presents significant challenges to the general problem of consent in the context of research involving children. A particular challenge in this domain is created by the presence of therapeutic misconception on the part of parents and other key research stakeholders. This article revierws the concept of therapeutic misconception and its role in pediatric neuroimaging research. It argues that this misconception can compromise consent given by parents for the involvement of their children in research as healthy controls or as persons with neurological and developmental conditions. The article further contends that therapeutic misconception can undermine the research ethics review process for proposed and ongoing neuroimaging studies. Against this backdrop, the article concludes with recommendations for mitigating the effects of therapeutic misconception in pediatric neuroimaging research.     

An Experimental Investigation of Procurement Auctions with Asymmetric Sellers

Electronic reverse auctions are a commonly used procurement mechanism. Research to date has focused on suppliers who are ex ante symmetric in that their costs are drawn from a common distribution. However, in many cases, a seller's range of potential costs depends on their own operations, location, or economies of scale and scope. Thus, understanding how different bidder types impact auction outcomes is key when designing an auction. This study reports the results of the first controlled laboratory experiment designed to compare prices between first‐price and second‐price procurement auctions for homogeneous goods when seller cost types are asymmetric and the number of bidders varies. The results indicate that first‐price auctions generate lower prices regardless of market composition. The results also reveal that first‐price auctions are at least weakly more efficient than second‐price auctions despite the theoretical prediction that the reverse should hold in asymmetric auctions. Post hoc analysis of individual bidders' behavior in first‐price auctions revealed evidence that bidders systematically underbid when their cost realizations were close to the lower bound. Furthermore, bidders adjust their behavior based on the type of the other bidders in the market in a manner inconsistent with theory. Consequently, adding a third bidder to a two‐bidder market is not advantageous to the buyer unless that third bidder is a low‐cost type.     

Leadership as social identity management: Introducing the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) to assess and validate a four-dimensional model

Although nearly two decades of research have provided support for the social identity approach to leadership, most previous work has focused on leaders' identity prototypicality while neglecting the assessment of other equally important dimensions of social identity management. However, recent theoretical developments have argued that in order to mobilize and direct followers' energies, leaders need not only to ‘be one of us’ (identity prototypicality), but also to ‘do it for us’ (identity advancement), to ‘craft a sense of us’ (identity entrepreneurship), and to ‘embed a sense of us’ (identity impresarioship). In the present research we develop and validate an Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) that assesses these dimensions in different contexts and with diverse samples from the US, China, and Belgium. Study 1 demonstrates that the scale has content validity such that the items meaningfully differentiate between the four dimensions. Studies 2, 3, and 4 provide evidence for the scale's construct validity (distinguishing between dimensions), discriminant validity (distinguishing identity leadership from authentic leadership, leaders' charisma, and perceived leader quality), and criterion validity (relating the ILI to key leadership outcomes). We conclude that by assessing multiple facets of leaders' social identity management the ILI has significant utility for both theory and practice.     

Survival versus Profit Maximization in a Dynamic Stochastic Experiment

Subjects in a laboratory experiment withdraw earnings from a cash reserve evolving according to an arithmetic Brownian motion in near‐continuous time. Aggressive withdrawal policies expose subjects to risk of bankruptcy, but the policy that maximizes expected earnings need not maximize the odds of survival. When profit maximization is consistent with high rates of survival (HS parameters), subjects adjust decisively towards the optimum. When survival and profit maximization are sharply at odds (LS parameters), subjects persistently (and sub‐optimally) hoard excess cash in an evident effort to improve survival rates. The design ensures that this hoarding is not due to standard risk aversion. Analysis of period‐to‐period adjustments in strategies suggests instead that hoarding is due to a widespread bias towards survival in the subject population. Robustness treatments varying feedback, parameters, and framing fail to eliminate the bias.     

Class Identification in Review: Past Perspectives and Future Directions

The rebirth of class analysis in the last two decades is due, in large part, to a theoretical shift in the field regarding class identification. The notable absence or weakness of class identities has led many theorists to proclaim the death of class, divorce class locations from identification, or rethink class identification as a relative, hierarchical, and individual concept. In each case, assumptions of collective class identification are laid to rest. As a result, some have called for a break from older models of class. In this article, we reexamine the contributions of classical class theory to the debate on collective class identification. By taking a closer look at the works of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Veblen regarding class and collective identification, we suggest that not only are they still relevant to the current debate, but that taken together they form a diverse foundation from which many future directions are possible.