Will daughters walk mom’s talk? The effects of maternal communication about sex on the sexual behavior of female adolescents

Numerous social marketing campaigns exhort parents to talk to their children about sexual abstinence, pregnancy risk, and sexually transmitted disease prevention. The effectiveness of these conversations is difficult to ascertain if parents are more likely to broach discussions related to sexual activity with adolescents who have greater propensities to engage in these risky behaviors. Our baseline empirical results indicate that female adolescents whose mothers communicate more about sex are more likely to have sexual intercourse, practice unsafe sex, and engage in casual sex. However, once we control for the adolescent’s environment and peers through the use of school fixed effects and for the daughter’s own propensity to engage in such behaviors through a rich set of adolescent-specific covariates, the effect of a mother’s talk on her daughter’s behavior is reduced dramatically indicating that mother’s talk is endogenous to the daughter’s sexual behavior. Models employing sister fixed effects to control for family-level unobservables, although imprecisely estimated, confirm this finding.     

Potential impacts of emerald ash borer invasion on biogeochemical and water cycling in residential landscapes across a metropolitan region

Trees provide important ecological services in cities, yet the vulnerability of the urban forest to massive tree losses from pest outbreaks could threaten those services, with unknown environmental consequences. The outbreak of emerald ash borer is an imminent threat to the ash population in North America. In the Minneapolis?CSaint Paul, Minnesota, metropolitan area, ash trees are present in 50?% of residential landscapes in Ramsey and Anoka Counties. We used a large survey of household activities, a tree inventory, a Household Flux Calculator accounting tool, and a set of annual evapotranspiration measurements, to quantify the current carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus storage in ash trees, the cycling of these elements, and the total evapotranspiration from ash trees in residential areas in the metropolitan region. Ash represented 6?% of the trees in residential areas and the removal of the entire ash population would correspondingly reduce net primary production and carbon sequestration by only a few percent and would have negligible effects on losses of nitrogen and phosphorus from residential landscapes. Similarly, the effects of ash loss on the hydrologic cycle would be minimal and would depend largely on management choices for the ground currently underneath ash tree canopies. Overall, the percentage change in biogeochemical and hydrological fluxes corresponded closely with the percent of the total urban tree population that was represented by ash, suggesting that areas with higher densities of ash would experience correspondingly larger effects. A hypothetical tree replacement scenario with similar broadleaf species was determined to be likely to re-establish the original biogeochemical and hydrological conditions once the replacement trees reach maturity.     

Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Distracters on Immediate and Long‐Term Recall in Toddlers

We explored the role that exogenous and endogenous competitors for attention play in infants’ abilities to encode and retain information over a 6‐month period. Sixty‐six children visited the laboratory at 15 months, and 32 returned for a second visit at 21 months. Children observed models of conventional‐ relation and enabling‐relation action sequences. Half the children were distracted by a “Mister Monkey” mechanical toy during the conventional‐relation sequence, while the other half was distracted during the enabling‐relation sequence. The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire indexed endogenous factors at both ages. Immediate postmodel production of target actions indexed encoding efficiency, and 6‐month production of target actions indexed long‐term recall. The exogenous distracter impacted encoding efficiency (i.e., immediate recall), but not long‐term recall. Endogenous factors (i.e., temperament) were primarily associated with long‐term recall. Of special interest was our finding that endogenous factors, especially surgency, moderated the effect of the exogenous distracter. It appears that when learning conventional‐relation sequences in the presence of exogenous distracters, surgency mobilizes attentional resources toward the learning objective; however, when learning enabling‐relation sequences under the same conditions, surgency either boosts the saliency of the distracters or boosts children’s susceptibility to them.     

Family relationships and troubled sleep among U.S. adults: examining the influences of contact frequency and relationship quality

Sleep is essential for health and daily functioning, and social relationships may be a key social factor influencing sleep, yet sleep has been understudied in the literature on social relationships and health. This study used data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States to examine associations between troubled sleep and family contact, social support, and strain. Results show that having strained family relationships is associated with more troubled sleep, while supportive family relationships are associated with less troubled sleep. Family strain is more consequential for sleep than support, and sleep troubles are greatest when family relationships are highly strained and provide inadequate emotional support. Family strain is also more harmful to sleep among individuals who are in frequent contact with family members. These findings underscore the importance of focusing on both negative and positive aspects of relationships and highlight the significance of family relationships for sleep.     

Latino Adolescent Reproductive and Sexual Health Behaviors and Outcomes: Research Informed Guidance for Agency-Based Practitioners

Latinos are the largest and fastest growing minority youth group in the United States. Currently, Latino adolescents experience higher rates of teen pregnancy compared to any other racial or ethnic group and have disproportionately high levels of sexually transmitted infections and HIV. Latino teens are also affected by a number of social problems such as school dropout, poverty, depression and limited access to healthcare, which contributes to disparities in reproductive health outcomes for this population. Relatively few intervention research studies and programs have been dedicated to reducing sexual risk among Latino youth, despite their particular vulnerabilities in experiencing negative reproductive health outcomes. We provide recommendations for identifying the unique reproductive health needs of Latino youth and specific applied strategies so that agency-based social workers and other providers can develop family-based interventions that improve adolescent Latino sexual and reproductive health.     

Non-formal educator use of evaluation results

Increasing demands for accountability in educational programming have resulted in increasing calls for program evaluation in educational organizations. Many organizations include conducting program evaluations as part of the job responsibilities of program staff. Cooperative Extension is a complex organization offering non-formal educational programs through land grant universities. Many Extension services require non-formal educational program evaluations be conducted by field-based Extension educators. Evaluation research has focused primarily on the efforts of professional, external evaluators. The work of program staff with many responsibilities including program evaluation has received little attention. This study examined how field based Extension educators (i.e. program staff) in four Extension services use the results of evaluations of programs that they have conducted themselves. Four types of evaluation use are measured and explored; instrumental use, conceptual use, persuasive use and process use.Results indicate that there are few programmatic changes as a result of evaluation findings among the non-formal educators surveyed in this study. Extension educators tend to use evaluation results to persuade others about the value of their programs and learn from the evaluation process. Evaluation use is driven by accountability measures with very little program improvement use as measured in this study.Practical implications include delineating accountability and program improvement tasks within complex organizations in order to align evaluation efforts and to improve the results of both. There is some evidence that evaluation capacity building efforts may be increasing instrumental use by educators evaluating their own programs.     

The effects of family therapies for adolescent delinquency and substance abuse: a meta-analysis

This meta-analysis summarizes results from k = 24 studies comparing either Brief Strategic Family Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, Multidimensional Family Therapy, or Multisystemic Therapy to either treatment-as-usual, an alternative therapy, or a control group in the treatment of adolescent substance abuse and delinquency. Additionally, the authors reviewed and applied three advanced meta-analysis methods including influence analysis, multivariate meta-analysis, and publication bias analyses. The results suggested that as a group the four family therapies had statistically significant, but modest effects as compared to treatment-as-usual (d = 0.21; k = 11) and as compared to alternative therapies (d = 0.26; k = 11). The effect of family therapy compared to control was larger (d = 0.70; k = 4) but was not statistically significant probably because of low power. There was insufficient evidence to determine whether the various models differed in their effectiveness relative to each other. Influence analyses suggested that three studies had a large effect on aggregate effect sizes and heterogeneity statistics. Moderator and multivariate analyses were largely underpowered but will be useful as this literature grows.