Gambling and the Reasoned Action Model: Predicting Past Behavior,Intentions, and Future Behavior

Gambling is a serious concern for society because it is highly addictive and is associated with a myriad of negative outcomes. The current study applied the Reasoned Action Model (RAM) to understand and predict gambling intentions and behavior. Although prior studies have taken a reasoned action approach to understand gambling, no prior study has fully applied the RAM or used the RAM to predict future gambling. Across two studies the RAM was used to predict intentions to gamble, past gambling behavior, and future gambling behavior. In study 1 the model significantly predicted intentions and past behavior in both a college student and Amazon Mechanical Turk sample. In study 2 the model predicted future gambling behavior, measured 2 weeks after initial measurement of the RAM constructs. This study stands as the first to show the utility of the RAM in predicting future gambling behavior. Across both studies, attitudes and perceived normative pressure were the strongest predictors of intentions to gamble. These findings provide increased understanding of gambling and inform the development of gambling interventions based on the RAM.     

Dynamics of social assistance: the Norwegian experience in comparative perspective

In the article we ask how long Norwegian recipients of social assistance stay on aid over an eight‐year period? We focus on the populations selected, the design of the study and how spells are recorded and measured. The data set includes nearly the entire 1995 cohort of social assistance claimants (n = 155,000), and contains individual information over eight years (1992–1999), which is the maximum length of a single continuous spell. The study combines a retrospective and a prospective multiple cohort design. The data analysis shows that there is no simple answer to our question; the answer depends on the sample selected, the design, number of spells counted and the chosen measure of central tendency. We find that median duration times vary from two months to 40 months. The conclusion is that a point‐in‐time sample has clearly the longest duration. It makes a big difference whether one measures one or more spells. Because cycling is a common phenomenon, the sum of all spell durations is much higher than that of the first continuous spell. A retrospective design severely underestimates spell durations since many spells are right‐hand censored. As there is no single, adequate answer to our initial question, it is recommended that analysts of social assistance dynamics carefully specify their sample, design and spells counted.     

Partnerships with children in child welfare: The importance of trust and pedagogical support

Within the context of Norwegian Child Welfare Services, children's best interests are often promoted through inter‐professional collaboration. Although children have the right and desire to participate, research reveals that professionals do not listen to them. On the basis of qualitative interviews with 10 children about their experiences collaborating with professionals, we have identified ways in which professionals can facilitate children's participation. The findings show that trusting relationships, emotional support, and pedagogical approaches increase children's participation in their interactions with professionals. The results show the importance of including a relational understanding of participation as a theoretical concept in child welfare and an awareness that power and dominance are in play.     

A DIRICHLET PROCESS MIXTURE OF HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS FOR PROTEIN STRUCTURE PREDICTION

By providing new insights into the distribution of a protein's torsion angles, recent statistical models for this data have pointed the way to more efficient methods for protein structure prediction. Most current approaches have concentrated on bivariate models at a single sequence position. There is, however, considerable value in simultaneously modeling angle pairs at multiple sequence positions in a protein. One area of application for such models is in structure prediction for the highly variable loop and turn regions. Such modeling is difficult due to the fact that the number of known protein structures available to estimate these torsion angle distributions is typically small. Furthermore, the data is "sparse" in that not all proteins have angle pairs at each sequence position. We propose a new semiparametric model for the joint distributions of angle pairs at multiple sequence positions. Our model accommodates sparse data by leveraging known information about the behavior of protein secondary structure. We demonstrate our technique by predicting the torsion angles in a loop from the globin fold family. Our results show that a template-based approach can now be successfully extended to modeling the notoriously difficult loop and turn regions.     

Coexisting principles and logics of elder care: Help to self‐help and consumer‐oriented service?

Healthy and active ageing has become an ideal in Western societies. In the Nordic countries, this ideal has been supported through a policy of help to self‐help in elder care since the 1980s. However, reforms inspired by New Public Management (NPM) have introduced a new policy principle of consumer‐oriented service that stresses the wishes and priorities of older people. We have studied how these two principles are applied by care workers in Denmark. Is one principle or logic replacing the other, or do they coexist? Do they create tensions between professional knowledge and the autonomy of older people? Using neo‐institutional theory and feminist care theory, we analysed the articulation of the two policy principles in interviews and their logics in observations in four local authorities. We conclude that help to self‐help is the dominant principle, that it is deeply entrenched in the identity of the professional care worker and that it coexists with consumer‐oriented service and without major tensions in the logics identified in their practices.     

Early teen marriage and future poverty

Both early teen marriage and dropping out of high school have historically been associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher poverty rates throughout life. Are these negative outcomes due to preexisting differences, or do they represent the causal effect of marriage and schooling choices? To better understand the true personal and societal consequences, in this article, I use an instrumental variables (IV) approach that takes advantage of variation in state laws regulating the age at which individuals are allowed to marry, drop out of school, and begin work. The baseline IV estimate indicates that a woman who marries young is 31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 11 percentage points more likely to be poor. The results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimation and a control function approach. While grouped ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates for the early teen marriage variable are also large, OLS estimates based on individual-level data are small, consistent with a large amount of measurement error.Historically, individuals were allowed to enter into a marriage contract at a very young age. In Ancient Rome, the appropriate minimum age was regarded as 14 for males and 12 for females. When Rome became Christianized, these age minimums were adopted into the ecclesiastical law of the Catholic Church. This canon law governed most marriages in Western Europe until the Reformation. When England broke away from the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church carried with it the same minimum age requirements for the prospective bride and groom. The minimum age requirements of 12 and 14 were eventually written into English civil law. By default, these provisions became the minimum marriage ages in colonial America. These common laws inherited from the British remained in force in America unless a specific state law was enacted to replace them (see “Marriage Law,” Encyclopædia Britannica 2005; http://www.britannica.com).While Roman, Catholic, English, and early American law may have allowed marriage at 12 for girls and 14 for boys, many questioned the advisability of such early unions. Researchers and policymakers around the turn of the twentieth century recognized that teens may be especially ill-prepared to assume the familial responsibilities and financial pressures associated with marriage.¹ As a result of the changing economic and social landscape of the United States, in the latter part of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, individual states began to slowly raise the minimum legal age at which individuals were allowed to marry. In the United States, as in most developed countries, age restrictions have been revised upward so that they are now between 15 and 21 years of age.During this same time period, dramatic changes were also occurring in the educational system of the United States (see Goldin 1998, 1999; Goldin and Katz 1997, 2003; Lleras-Muney 2002). Free public schooling at the elementary level spread across the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, and free secondary schooling proliferated in the early part of the twentieth century. As secondary schooling became more commonplace, states began to pass compulsory schooling laws. States often also passed child labor laws that stipulated minimum age or schooling requirements before a work permit would be granted. These state-specific compulsory schooling and child labor laws are correlated with the legal restrictions on marriage age, indicating that it might be important to consider the impact of all the laws simultaneously.There are at least two rationales often given for the use of state laws as policy instruments to limit teenagers’ choices. The first argument is that teens do not accurately compare short-run benefits versus long-run costs. If teens are making myopic decisions, restrictive state laws could prevent decisions they will later regret. It is also argued that the adverse effects associated with teenagers’ choices impose external costs on the rest of society. If these effects can be prevented, external costs (such as higher welfare expenditures) would also argue for restrictive state laws. Both teenage marriage and dropping out of high school are closely associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including poverty later in life. To assess the relevance of either argument, however, it is important to know whether the observed effects are causal.Any observed negative effects may be due to preexisting differences rather than a causal relationship between teen marriage (or schooling choices) and adverse adult outcomes. Women who marry as teens or drop out of school may come from more disadvantaged backgrounds or possess other unobserved characteristics that would naturally lead to worse outcomes. For example, teens choosing to marry young might have lower unobserved earnings ability, making it hard to draw conclusions about the causal relationship between teenage marriage and poverty.To identify the effect of a teenager’s marriage and schooling choices on future poverty, I use state-specific marriage, schooling, and child labor laws as instruments. Variation in these laws across states and over time can be used to identify the causal impact that teen marriage and high school completion have on future economic well-being. Although compulsory schooling laws have been used as instruments in a variety of settings, this appears to be the first time marriage laws have been used as instruments. The idea of the marriage law instrument is that states with restrictive marriage laws will prevent some teenagers from marrying who would have married young had they lived in a state with more permissive laws.Using the marriage, schooling, and labor laws affecting teens as instruments for early marriage and high school completion, I find strong negative effects for both variables on future poverty status. The baseline instrumental variables (IV) estimates imply that a woman who marries young is 31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 11 percentage points more likely to be living in a family whose income is below the poverty line. The IV results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimation and a control function approach. In comparison, the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates are very sensitive to how the data is aggregated, particularly for the early marriage variable. OLS estimates using grouped data are also large, while OLS estimates using individual-level data indicate a small effect for early teen marriage. Auxiliary data indicate a large amount of measurement error in the early marriage variable, suggesting the presence of attenuation bias in the individual-level OLS estimates.The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. I first briefly review the negative outcomes associated with teenage marriage and dropping out of school and discuss alternative perspectives on why teens might make these decisions. The following section describes the data and presents OLS estimates. The next section discusses the early marriage, compulsory schooling, and child labor laws that will be used as instruments. I then present the instrumental variable estimates and conduct several specification and robustness checks, including a discussion of measurement error issues and a reconciliation with the literature on teenage childbearing.     

The Organization of Wariness of Heights in Experienced Crawlers

Most infants with more than 6 weeks of crawling experience completely avoid the deep side of a visual cliff ( Campos, Bertenthal, & Kermoian, 1992 ; Gibson & Walk, 1960 ). However, some experienced crawlers do move onto the transparent surface suspended several feet above the ground. An important question is whether these nonavoiders lack wariness of heights or whether they have a qualitatively different way of showing their wariness than do avoiders of the deep side. The current study addressed this question by measuring heart rate (HR) acceleration upon being lowered on the deep and shallow sides of the visual cliff, latency to crawl toward the mother, and tactile exploration of the cliff surface. Nonavoiders and avoiders had indistinguishable patterns of HR acceleration, showing greater HR acceleration when lowered onto the deep than when lowered onto the shallow side of the cliff. Nonavoiders also showed more tactile exploration and longer latencies than did a comparable group of infants tested on the shallow side. This study illustrates how the same emotion, wariness of heights, can be shown by qualitatively different behaviors, all serving the same function of protecting the individual from falling over a drop‐off.     

The pen,the receiver and the pump: Exploring young children's experiences of having a parent with type 1 diabetes

In this article, we explore young children's experiences of having a parent with type 1 diabetes (T1D). In our research we found that the children's knowledge about T1D was not age related, and that some had more in-depth knowledge than others. This seemed related to how and what the parents taught them about diabetes, the individual child's curiosity and interest, and the parent's history with fluctuating blood sugar levels. Several children were affected by their parents' diabetes in their daily life. Our research contributes to knowledge about how children's lives can be affected by having a parent with chronic illness.     

Children's Voices: The Views of Vulnerable Children on Their Service Providers and the Relevance of Services They Receive

This paper describes and analyses the views of vulnerable childrenof eleven years and under on the relevance of services theyreceived. The two research questions posed were, first, whatare effective practices for engaging with vulnerable children;and, second, how can the voices of vulnerable children be usedto influence the development of policy? The first question wasaddressed through a systematic review of existing literatureon effective strategies for interviewing vulnerable childrenand revealed that few studies that focus on interviewing youngchildren are designed to address effectiveness. As yet, notall young children are asked for their views by those makingdecisions about their lives, though their involvement increaseswith age. The second question was addressed through focus groupsand interviews which revealed that children hold many validviews related to their roles and relationships with serviceproviders and decisions being made concerning their lives. Itwas concluded that whilst children’s lived experienceof services they receive could contribute to the creation ofmore democratic communities in which children and their familiesparticipate, it remains to be seen whether the new Green Paper,Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003), increases their sense of autonomyor merely extends the degree to which they are controlled.