Sources of Social Influence on Adolescents’ Alcohol Use

The present research examines social influences on self‐reported frequency of drunkenness in a longitudinal sample of 1,439 adolescents (46% female, 90% White, mean age = 14 at baseline) with social network measures from friends, romantic partners, and romantic partners’ friends. We build on past research by addressing multiple mechanisms of social influence—peers’ frequency of drunkenness, alcohol‐related attitudes, and unstructured socializing—across relationship types. Adolescents’ drunkenness frequency increased when their friends’ and partners’ friends’ drunkenness frequency increased and when their romantic partners’ positive alcohol‐related attitudes increased. Furthermore, the association between unstructured socializing and frequency of drunkenness was stronger for older than younger adolescents. Results advance understanding of the social transmission of alcohol use in adolescence and inform intervention efforts.     

Assembling the "Empire of Morality": State Building Strategies in Catholic Ecuador, 1861–1875

This article studies the efforts of the Ecuadorian government between 1861 and 1875 to construct a "truly catholic nation". It examines the implementation and engagement of centralized initiatives of morality and religiosity, and reflects on its implications for the repositioning of state-society boundaries. Specifically, it considers the government's efforts after 1869 to centrally coordinate the institutions of municipal government and Church, and to redeploy them for national moralizing ends. It assesses the substantial achievements and limits of this model for strengthening state power and for disseminating "national" meanings of citizenship and progress.     

Land-cover fragmentation and configuration of ownership parcels in an exurban landscape

The rate of low-density development beyond the urban and suburban periphery, known as exurban areas, has occurred at a rate faster than both urban and population growth and has the potential to affect water quality, carbon storage, and habitat availability. This paper is aimed at understanding the relationships between the heterogeneity of the human and natural components of the land system and their interactions, through assessment of residential land-cover characteristics and ownership parcels in these poorly understood exurban lands. New data are presented that describe the distribution of land-cover quantities and their degree of fragmentation in three townships in Southeastern Michigan. Analysis of land-cover data, collected from aerial photographs from 1950–2000 and digitized with a 10 m minimum mapping unit, provide an empirical link between lot-size and vegetation. Results show, among other findings, 1) the quantity and pattern of land-cover types significantly differ with parcel size, 2) the degree of difference was greatest between small parcels and all other sizes and least among large parcels, and 3) of five landscape metrics used to evaluate the quantity and fragmentation of land-cover types in residential parcels, the percent of parcel area provided the strongest delineation of differences in land cover among parcel sizes. Capturing quantities and patterns of land-cover at different sizes of land (parcel) ownership provide new data that can be coupled to ecosystem literature and models to link the outcomes of residential land-cover processes with simple ecosystem functions (e.g. carbon storage, albedo). Understanding how residential land-use and management processes collectively create regional land-cover patterns can provide insight into how residential lands might be managed to mitigate the effects of land change on climate.     

Disability and Household Welfare in Ghana: Costs and Correlates

Journal of Family and Economic Issues - Persons with disabilities face substantial barriers that impede their integration and participation in social and economic activities. Households with...     

Parental Linguistic Input and Its Relation to Toddlers’ Visual Attention in Joint Object Play: A Comparison Between Children with Normal Hearing and Children With Hearing Loss

Parent–child interactions are multimodal, often involving coordinated exchanges of visual and auditory information between the two partners. The current work focuses on the effect of children's hearing loss on parent–child interactions when parents and their toddlers jointly played with a set of toy objects. We compared the linguistic input received by toddlers with hearing loss (HL) and their chronological age‐matched (CA) and hearing age‐matched (HA) normal‐hearing peers. Moreover, we used head‐mounted eye trackers to examine how different parental linguistic input affected children's visual attention on objects when parents either led or followed children's attention during joint object play. Overall, parents of children with HL provided comparable amount of linguistic input as parents of the two normal‐hearing groups. However, the types of linguistic input produced by parents of children with HL were similar to the CA group in some ways and similar to the HA group in other ways. Interestingly, the effects of different types of linguistic input on extending the attention of children with HL qualitatively resembled the patterns seen in the CA group, even though the effects were less pronounced in the HL group. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the reciprocal, dynamic, and multi‐factored nature of parent–child interactions.     

Transgender experiences and transphobia in higher education

While categories like “campus climate” highlight variation across institutions, trans people's experiences also vary within an institutional context. By studying trans people's experiences in higher education, however, we can better understand and respond to the differentiated and changing needs of transgender people in other arenas. In this paper, I review key qualitative and quantitative findings along several themes: (a) disclosing trans identities, (b) trans communities, and (c) resources and career‐level support. Specifically, I use the concept of microclimates to explain how trans people encounter various forms of support and discrimination on campus. For example, someone might receive support from particular individuals, such as an advisor, or spaces, like a gender studies classroom, but not others. Researchers also report both similarities and differences between binary and nonbinary trans people, as well as between transgender men and transgender women, suggesting that there is no universal trans experience, nor a one‐size‐fits‐all approach to supporting trans students and faculty members. Challenging interpersonal and systemic transphobia requires context‐specific interventions.