The Effects of Parenting on the Development of Adolescent Alcohol Misuse: A Six‐Wave Latent Growth Model

Alcohol use increases throughout adolescence. Based on family socialization theory, it was hypothesized that family factors, particularly parental support and monitoring, would influence individual trajectories in the development of alcohol misuse. Six waves of data were analyzed, based on interviews with 506 adolescents in the general population of a northeastern metropolitan area. Using growth‐curve longitudinal analysis, results show that parenting significantly predicts adolescents' initial drinking levels (intercepts) as well as their rates of increase in alcohol misuse (slope). This study provides evidence that effective parenting is an important factor in preventing alcohol misuse.     

Advancing Hospice and Palliative Care Social Work Leadership in Interprofessional Education and Practice

The importance of interprofessional collaboration in achieving high quality outcomes, improving patient quality of life, and decreasing costs has been growing significantly in health care. Palliative care has been viewed as an exemplary model of interprofessional care delivery, yet best practices in both interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional practice (IPP) in the field are still developing. So, too, is the leadership of hospice and palliative care social workers within IPE and IPP. Generating evidence regarding best practices that can prepare social work professionals for collaborative practice is essential. Lessons learned from practice experiences of social workers working in hospice and palliative care can inform educational efforts of all professionals. The emergence of interprofessional education and competencies is a development that is relevant to social work practice in this field. Opportunities for hospice and palliative social workers to demonstrate leadership in IPE and IPP are presented in this article.     

The Structure of Intergenerational Relations in Rural China: A Latent Class Analysis

Most existing typology studies of intergenerational relations have used samples in North America and Europe. The present study expands on previous research by determining whether similar family relation typologies could be found using a sample of Chinese rural elders. The data were derived from a survey of 1,224 older adults in China's rural Anhui province in 2009. Latent class analysis revealed 5 types of intergenerational relations in rural Chinese families: (a) tight‐knit, (b) nearby but discordant, (c) distant discordant, (d) distant reciprocal, and (e) distant ascending. The authors argue that the distant ascending ties reflect the strong filial obligations that Chinese adult children have toward their parents and that the distant reciprocal ties reflect collaborative and mutually beneficial parent–child relations in rural China in the context of massive rural‐to‐urban migration. The findings of this study demonstrate how family relations in contemporary China are shaped by the larger economic, geographic, and cultural contexts.     

A Vignette Study on Gendered Filial Expectations of Elders in Rural China

This investigation integrated vignette and survey design to study how sons' reduced availability and daughters' increased contributions to parents influenced Chinese rural elders' gendered filial expectations, measured with their beliefs about obligations of a vignette daughter and a vignette son to their postsurgery parent. The sample included 802 elders from 2001, 2003, and 2006 waves of a longitudinal study on rural elders in Anhui Province, China. Multinomial logistic regressions showed that the vignette sons' migration and actual daughters' previous contributions increased elder women's, but not men's, endorsement of the vignette daughter's obligations. The vignette son's child‐care responsibilities affected neither women's nor men's beliefs, but the vignette daughters' migration and child‐care responsibilities reduced respondents' expectations of the vignette daughter. This study directs attention to the discrepancy between social changes and individuals' attitudes because of structural lags as well as to the importance of examining factors that will reduce the discrepancy.     

Drinking, socioemotional functioning, and academic progress in secondary school

Secondary schools are sites of academic instruction but also contexts of socioemotional development, and the intertwining of these two functions has consequences for adolescents' future health and education. Drawing on nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 8,271), this study explored the bidirectional associations among indicators of adolescents' alcohol use and their feelings of social integration at school. Socioemotional problems did not predict increased drinking over time, but drinking predicted declining socioemotional functioning, with negative implications for adolescents' academic grades by the end of high school. These associations, however, were conditioned by aspects of school context, with drinkers feeling more marginalized in schools characterized by dense networks with low rates of drinking.     

How Do Career Centers Use Social Networking Sites?

The popularity and growth of social networking sites (SNSs), particularly among the college‐aged demographic, makes them logical tools for university career centers to use to connect with students. The authors surveyed 78 university career centers to determine how they use SNSs, the benefits and drawbacks, and the advice they would give to a career center considering using SNSs. The most commonly used SNSs by this sample include Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, mainly to provide career information. Benefits included students’ responsivity to the SNS posts and increased visibility and attendance at events; the main drawback was time required. The most common recommendation was to determine goals and plan implementation.     

Disabled men with muscular dystrophy negotiate gender

Disability is often portrayed as a one-dimensional category devoid of further intersections. Work which has addressed the intersection of disability and male gender has rarely considered different types of disability or impairment, or foregrounded the experiences of disabled men themselves. This article is based on empirical work carried out in England with men who have Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). We explored with participants their sense of themselves as men and their commonalities and differences with other men. Findings suggest that men with DMD claim, reject and redefine what it meant to them to be men. Doing gender was often heavily reliant on the availability and permission of others. Our study highlights the usefulness of exploring gender with men with particular experiences of disability and of looking at how this might change over a life course, especially when the nature and extent of the life course is a precarious one.     

Doing gender in public services: Affective labour of employment agents

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organizations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front‐line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gendering of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work patterns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activation paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect‐neutral male bureaucratic work.