Understanding the Authoritative Parenting–Early Adolescent Tobacco Use Link: The Mediating Role of Peer Tobacco Use

Eighth-grade students (N = 156) completed questionnaires in which they reported on their perceptions of parents' warmth, structure, and psychological autonomy granting (used to create an index of authoritative parenting) and their own levels of tobacco use. Adolescents were also asked to list the names of other students at their school with whom they spent time (friends). Independent reports obtained from these friends were used to form an index of the mean level of tobacco use among each adolescent's friends. Higher levels of authoritative parenting were associated with lower levels of tobacco use among target adolescents. The association between parental authoritativeness and adolescent tobacco use was mediated by levels of tobacco use among peers. An amplification effect was observed in which adolescents were particularly unlikely to use tobacco products when they both received authoritative parenting at home and were members of non-tobacco-using peer groups.     

Reducing Aboriginal Over-representation in Prison

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody attributed the high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody to the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison. Most analyses of this over-representation focus on the issue of systemic bias in policing, the law or the operation of the criminal justice system. The present article contends that, while discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal people by police and the court system is an historical fact, the leading current cause of Aboriginal over-representation in prison is not systemic bias but high rates of Aboriginal involvement in serious crime. We argue that efforts to reduce Aboriginal imprisonment rates through policing or criminal justice system policy have failed and will continue to fail until they succeed in reducing crime in Aboriginal communities. Future efforts to bring down Aboriginal imprisonment rates should focus on this issue.     

In the pursuit of a gender-equal society: do Japanese EFL textbooks play a role?

‘Womenomics’, a signature programme promoted by the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, aims to boost the country’s economy by attracting women, an under-utilized resource, to join the workforce. To achieve this aim, the Japanese Government has been promoting a gender-equal society in various areas, including education. This paper seeks to investigate whether the government’s endeavour to promote a gender-equal society is reflected in contemporary Japanese EFL textbooks. Three recently published popular textbooks were examined. The findings revealed evidence of the authors’ gender awareness, including common use of gender-neutral vocabulary and a neutral term of address, Ms, for women. Two textbooks also displayed a balanced distribution of male and female speakers and their amount of talk. However, underrepresentation of women and their achievements is still prevalent in contemporary Japanese textbooks. Other observations include the portrayal of men in a wider range of social roles than women, and the depiction of men using material and cognitive processes and women using relational processes, suggesting that men are more physically and cognitively active than women. A gender dichotomy was also noted in mixed-sex dialogues, with a tendency for men to provide information and for women to seek information.     

Understanding the Islamic State’s competitive advantages: Remaking state and nationhood in the Middle East and North Africa

While many researchers have examined the evolution and unique characteristics of the Islamic State (IS), taking an IS-centric approach has yet to illuminate the factors allowing for its establishment in the first place. To provide a clearer explanation for IS’s successes and improve analysts’ ability to predict future occurrences of similar phenomena, we analyze IS’s competitive advantages through the lens of two defining structural conditions in the Middle East North Africa (MENA): failure of state institutions and nationhood. It is commonly understood that the MENA faces challenges associated with state fragility, but our examination of state and national resiliency shows that Syria and Iraq yield the most deleterious results in the breakdown of the nation, suggesting that the combined failure of state and nation, as well as IS’s ability to fill these related vacuities, is a significant reason IS thrives there today. Against this backdrop, we provide a model of IS’s state- and nation-making project, and illustrate IS’s clear competitive advantages over all other state and non-state actors in both countries, except for Kurdish groupings. We conclude with recommendations on how policy-makers may begin halting and reversing the failure of both state and nation in Iraq and Syria.