Measuring Puberty and Understanding Its Impact: A Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Twins

Pubertal development is an important focus of current biopsychosocial research. The Pubertal Development Scale or PDS (Petersen, Crockett, Richards, and Boxer, J. Youth Adolesc. (1988) 17: 117–133) has become a widely used measure in school-based and longitudinal research, because it incorporates several indices of pubertal development. This study reports normative data on the PDS for two population-based birth cohorts of Finnish twin boys and girls, assessed at ages 11–12 and 14. Additionally, we report longitudinal analyses of the associations between pubertal development and substance use, suggesting that the impact of pubertal timing is more complex than previously reported; associations commonly assumed between pubertal development and substance use held only for those whose developmental level, relative to peers, remained stable across follow-up. Finally, we report twin correlations for the PDS which suggest that sibling similarity for pubertal development arises from both shared genes and shared environments and that the patterns of these influences vary between sexes and across time.     

The Making of Democratic Citizens: How Regime‐Specific Socialization Shapes Europeans’ Expectations of Democracy

When analysing support for democracy, researchers tend to assume that ‘democracy’ is a concept that travels across countries. This paper argues that democracy is not the same thing for every citizen, because collective and individual socialization experiences strongly shape the criteria citizens expect a democracy to fulfil. Based on the literature on varieties of democracy, I suppose that individual expectations of democracy are influenced by regime‐specific socialization, and depend on the democratic history, authoritarian legacies, and the prevalent democratic model. Due to socialization and democratic learning, individuals acquire democratic preferences and value those dimensions more which they experience in their own democracy. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Democracy Barometer, I test how the national democratic context in 26 European democracies influences these individual democratic ideals. I find evidence for both socialization and participation effects of the democratic context on citizens’ democratic expectations.     

The decline of special circuits in developed country housing finance

Abstract

Housing finance traditionally has been an area of intervention by governments, especially through the creation of special circuits for funding flows. This paper analyzes these special circuits in five developed countries (Denmark, France, Germany, United Kingdom, United States) and tracks their evolution through the 1980s under the pressures of inflation, interest‐rate volatility, deregulation, and integration of international financial markets.

Political and market forces seem to have eroded both the reasons for having special circuits and the ability to maintain them. All of the subject countries experienced some degree of decline in these circuits and moved toward integration of housing finance within competitive, market‐driven financial systems. This trend will probably continue in the 1990s.     

Aiming at the chest, but hitting the back

Gunshot injuries in the back may suggest the unjustified use of firearms. A wound in the back inflicted by a firearm should not automatically imply that the shooter aimed at the back. A previous study demonstrated that it is possible for men to turn their trunk faster than it takes for a shooter to fire or throw a hand-operated weapon. With a high speed motion camera the authors were able to demonstrate that it is also possible for women to turn their trunk fast enough, so that a shot in the back could have been aimed at the front of the body. This conclusion is also likely to apply to hand-operated or thrown weapons, since the velocity of their projectiles is considerably lower than that of firearms.     

Left Realism,community and state-building

Left Realism, as it emerged in the mid 1980s in the UK was a policy-oriented intervention focusing on the reality of crime for the working class victim and the need to elaborate a socialist alternative to conservative emphases on ‘law and order’. It saw the renewal of high crime, deprived communities as involving democratic police accountability to those communities. During the subsequent period developments have moved very much against the orientations of Left Realism. This paper compares two different contexts of renewal—the deprived urban community in the UK and the war-torn ‘failed state’ in Bosnia—and identifies certain common policy orientations which are then criticised from a Left Realist perspective.     

Blood Will Not Justify My Relation: Same‐Sex Couples and their Battle for Standing as De Facto Parents

A parent's right to maintain a relationship with his/her child lies within the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution; however, this right does not apply to every type of parent. Although the U.S. Supreme Court granted same‐sex couples the right to marry, they still face parental rights issues when their child(ren) are nonbiological or nonadoptive because they lack standing for custody and/or visitation as de facto parents. Moreover, the rise of nontraditional same‐sex‐couple families has been placing states in a predicament, and the lack of uniform rights for de facto parents creates great inconsistency across the United States. The creation of a uniform statute with specific elements distinguishing de facto parents from mere caretakers will grant same‐sex nonbiological parents standing and create uniformity across the United States.