Best Friends’ Discussions of Social Dilemmas

Peer relationships, particularly friendships, have been theorized to contribute to how children and adolescents think about social and moral issues. The current study examined how young adolescent best friends (191 dyads; 53.4 % female) reason together about multifaceted social dilemmas and how their reasoning is related to friendship quality. Mutually-recognized friendship dyads were videotaped discussing dilemmas entailing moral, social-conventional and prudential/pragmatic issues. Both dyad members completed a self-report measure of friendship quality. Dyadic data analyses guided by the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model indicated that adolescent and friend reports of friendship qualities were related to the forms of reasoning used during discussion. Friends who both reported that they could resolve conflicts in a constructive way were more likely to use moral reasoning than friends who reported that their conflict resolution was poor or disagreed on the quality of their conflict resolution. The findings provide evidence for the important role that friendship interaction may play in adolescents’ social and moral development.     

Contextual Socioeconomic Status and Mental Health Counseling Use Among US Adolescents with Depression

Most adolescents with depressive disorders do not receive any mental health services, even though effective treatments exist. Although research has examined numerous individual-level factors associated with mental health service use among depressed adolescents, less is known about the role of contextual factors. This study examines the relationship between contextual-level socioeconomic status (SES) and clinic-based mental health counseling use among US adolescents with high depressive symptoms in urban and suburban areas. Data from the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 1,133; 59 % female) were analyzed using multilevel logistic models in which adolescents were nested within counties. After controlling for individual-level predisposing, enabling, and need characteristics, as well as county racial/ethnic composition, county SES was positively associated with clinic-based counseling use among depressed youth. A one standard deviation increase in the county affluence index was associated with 43 % greater odds of receiving any clinical counseling services. Furthermore, the positive relationship between county affluence and clinical counseling use was no longer significant after controlling for the county supply of mental health specialist physicians. The results indicate that county residential context is a key correlate of mental health service use among depressed adolescents, such that those who live in lower SES counties with fewer mental health specialists are less likely to receive treatment.     

Exploiting a Rare Communication Shift to Document the Persuasive Power of the News Media

Using panel data and matching techniques, we exploit a rare change in communication flows—the endorsement switch to the Labour Party by several prominent British newspapers before the 1997 United Kingdom general election—to study the persuasive power of the news media. These unusual endorsement switches provide an opportunity to test for news media persuasion while avoiding methodological pitfalls that have plagued previous studies. By comparing readers of newspapers that switched endorsements to similar individuals who did not read these newspapers, we estimate that these papers persuaded a considerable share of their readers to vote for Labour. Depending on the statistical approach, the point estimates vary from about 10% to as high as 25% of readers. These findings provide rare evidence that the news media exert a powerful influence on mass political behavior.