The Role of Perceived Parental Knowledge on Emerging Adults’ Risk Behaviors

The purpose of this study was to gain a clearer understanding of the relation between parents’ knowledge of their emerging-adult children and emerging adults’ risk behaviors. Participants included 200 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 25 (121 women, 78 men; M _age = 19.59, SD = 1.62) and both of their parents. Results revealed that knowledge of the emerging-adult child’s activities varied as a function of parent- and child-reports, and that child outcomes associated with parental knowledge were generally positive, including less drinking, drug use, and risky sexual behavior (although this varied as a function of reporter). The links between maternal knowledge and lower drug and alcohol use were particularly strong in the presence of maternal closeness. Implications for understanding the parent–child relationship during the transition to adulthood were discussed.

Associations Between Shyness and Internalizing Behaviors,Externalizing Behaviors,and Relationships during Emerging Adulthood

Many studies have documented the ways in which shyness can be a barrier to personal well-being and social adjustment throughout childhood and adolescence; however, less is known regarding shyness in emerging adulthood. Shyness as experienced during emerging adulthood may continue to be a risk factor for successful development. The purpose of this study was to compare shy emerging adults with their non-shy peers in (a) internalizing behaviors, (b) externalizing behaviors, and (c) close relationships. Participants included 813 undergraduate students (500 women, 313 men) from a number of locations across the United States. Results showed that relatively shy emerging adults, both men and women, had more internalizing problems (e.g., anxious, depressed, low self-perceptions in multiple domains), engaged in fewer externalizing behaviors (e.g., less frequent drinking), and experienced poorer relationship quality with parents, best friends, and romantic partners than did their non-shy peers.

Legislative Influences on Performance Management Reform

The management literature argues that legislative involvement is important to the implementation of performance management reform, but it does not specify how legislatures should be engaged or how different legislative organizational arrangements affect reform. This article blends theories of management and legislative professionalism to better understand the influence of legislatures on the implementation of management reform. Drawing on data from several surveys, it examines the influence of legislative organization on the managerial use of performance measures. The findings suggest that citizen legislatures are associated with better administrative practices than professional legislatures and that the quality of legislative involvement may be more important than its quantity.     

At-Large Elections and Minority Representation in Local Government

Despite a long history of legal challenges alleging that elections conducted at-large suppress minority representation, this remains the dominant electoral system in local governments throughout the United States. Moreover, a large empirical literature remains divided over the present-day impact of at-large elections on the political success of underrepresented groups. We reconcile the competing findings in this literature by providing contingent, causal estimates of the effect of conversion from at-large to ward elections on minority officeholding, using a novel identification strategy afforded by the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. We find a dramatic positive effect of conversion in districts where Latinos constitute a sufficiently large share of the voting population, and in large and residentially segregated districts. When these conditions are not satisfied, we consistently see null estimated effects.     

Federation and Australian Nationalism: Early Commemoration of the Commonwealth

Much has been written about the nature of Australian nationalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While post-Second World War historiography analysed the role of class in nationalist sentiment, more recent work has examined the racialised and martial aspects of Australian nationalism and imperialism. There has been less consideration of how the nature of turn-of-the-century Australian nationalism affected the Federation that was established on 1 January 1901. This article examines early debates about commemoration of the anniversary of Federation, revealing an indifference to the occasion that was common to the public and most political and civic leaders, including Prime Minister Edmund Barton. It finds that popular enthusiasm at the inauguration of the Commonwealth in January 1901 and the opening of the first parliament in May was a response to imperial pageantry and celebrity, rather than the creation of the Australian federation. The article suggests that Australians’ longstanding resistance to reform of the Federation is a legacy of their historic failure to attach to it.     

Sustainable development at the sharp end

This paper takes an actor-oriented approach to understanding the significance for policy and practice of field-worker experience at the interface between project and people. It is set in the context of an Indian project which aims to reduce poverty through sustainable, participatory agricultural change, based on low-cost inputs, catalysed by village-based project staff. Diaries kept by such staff are analysed to reveal how the social position of field-workers enables and constrains their interactions within and without the project, and the ways in which ‘street level bureaucrats’ shape projects through their discretionary actions. They show the Village Motivators struggling to communicate project objectives, to establish their roles and distinguish themselves fromother village-level bureaucrats, to negotiate participation, to overcome hostility to Participatory Rural Appraisal, to arbitrate access to consultants and seniors, to interpret project objectives and lobby for changes in these without admission of failure, and finally to develop a shared vocabulary of participation and belief in success. Some of the implications for participatory approaches are that there may be significant contradictions between sustainability and participatory development.     

Older parents' expectations for filial support

A measure of general filial obligation expectations is presented. With data from a representative sample aged 70 and older, we show that generalized expectations for support from adult children are not patterned systematically by sociodemographic factors or by health needs of the older respondents. A typology is presented which relates expectations for help to judgments of the level received. This typology is meaningfully related to social indicators presumably related to need such as marital status and socioeconomic status. Whether one is dissatisfied, satisfied, or pleasantly surprised by the assistance one receives is associated with evaluative judgments of children. The parent-child bond is affected not only by exchange patterns but by the fit between expectations and exchange patterns.     

Toward the Assessment of Procedural and Distributive Justice in Resolving Family Disputes

The first phase of this study focused on the development of comprehensive, conceptually integrated measures of procedural and distributive justice in the context of family decision making. In the second phase, these measures were used to examine older adolescents' justice appraisals of specific family disputes and the relation of these justice appraisals to family systems functioning along dimensions of conflict and cohesion. A Family Justice Inventory was constructed, which included two global indices (one for procedural justice and one for outcome fairness) and 13 subscales: 9 measuring specific facets of the procedural justice construct and 4 measuring specific dimensions of the distributive justice construct. Factor analysis revealed that the 13 Family Justice Inventory subscales could be reduced to 5 interpretable procedural justice factors (personal respect, status recognition, process control, correction, and trust) and 4 interpretable distributive justice factors (decision control, need, equality, and equity). Using procedural justice factor scores in regression analyses, personal respect, status recognition, correction, and trust each accounted for unique variance in family conflict and family cohesion. Using distributive justice factor scores in regression analyses, both decision control and need accounted for unique variance in family conflict and family cohesion. Using both procedural and distributive justice factor scores in regression analyses, personal respect, status recognition, and trust each accounted for unique variance in both family conflict and family cohesion. Additionally, equity also accounted for unique variance in family conflict but not family cohesion and the direction of the relationship was positive, that is, more equity in resolving specific family disputes was associated higher levels of general family conflict.