Parents’ Communication with Adolescents About Sexual Behavior: A Missed Opportunity for Prevention?

Parents may wait to talk to their teens about sexuality until they believe their child is in a romantic relationship. To examine this, telephone surveys were conducted with 1069 parents of adolescents. Measures assessed parents’ perception of teens’ romantic involvement and parent-child communication about several sexuality topics. Multivariable regression models determined the odds of talking about each topic among parents who reported their teen had been in a romantic relationship compared to those who did not. Most parents reported talking at least a moderate amount about some sex-related topic. Parents who believed their teen had been romantically involved were more likely to have discussed most of the topics examined here (ORs=1.64 – 2.56). For some topics, associations were more pronounced among parents of younger teens. Findings suggest that parents may miss important opportunities to influence behavior, and should initiate conversations about sexuality before they believe their child to be romantically involved.Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota. She received her Sc.D. in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. Her major research interests are the social influences on high risk health behaviors among adolescents.Associate Professor with the School of Nursing and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on on family, peer, and individual-level influences on adolescents’ sexual behaviors and violence involvement. She is also Deputy Director of the Healthy Youth Development Prevention Research Center, which conducts research and disseminates actionable knowledge that promotes healthy youth development and reduces health disparities among young people.Professor and Director of the Center for Adolescent Nursing at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Her major research interests focus on understanding key risk and protective factors in adolescence, particularly among vulnerable populations of youth.President of Midwestern Professional Educational and Research Services, Inc., a DHHS funded non-profit agency serving as a Title X Regional Training Center. She received her Masters in Psychology from Miami University and worked for 12 years in flight psychophysiology before moving into public health. Her primary research interests center on identifying barriers that limit adolescent and low income population’s access to publicly funded reproductive health care services.Professor and Director of the Healthy Youth Development Prevention Research Center at the University of Minnesota Department of Pediatrics. He received his Ph.D. in Health Services Research and Policy from the University of Minnesota. His major research interests are understanding risk and protective factors in the lives of young people, particularly around issues of reproductive health, pregnancy, and violence.     

Transnational Parliamentary Assemblies: A Remedy for the Democratic Deficit of International Governance?

While international governance may improve the legitimacy of its policies by producing better outputs, it reduces legitimacy on the input side as decisions are taken further away from the citizens. This article examines transnational parliamentary assemblies and assesses whether they might add legitimacy to decision-making beyond the state. While the parliamentary route to legitimacy is often belittled within the realm of international relations, many such assemblies already exist. The study gives an overview of such assemblies and compares the European Parliament, the Nordic Council and the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference in detail. They represent three types of transnational parliamentary assemblies: parliament, assembly and conference. The article reaches the conclusion that a parliament can further democratic legitimacy in supranational contexts, whereas assemblies can provide additional legitimacy to processes of international cooperation. The conference type does not fulfil the criteria set for democratic legitimacy.     

Remittances,Banking Status and the Usage of Insurance Schemes

Empirical evidence that migrants send home more remittances after disasters raises the question of whether remittances are used to self-insure, substituting for both formal and informal insurance. We investigate this question using a unique data set on the usage patterns of financial services by households in South Africa. We show that the likelihood that a respondent has a formal funeral cover increases with income and banking status. However, it is lower for individuals receiving remittances, which supports the idea that remittances act as self-insurance. We also show that other risk management strategies influence the purchasing of formal funeral cover. Finally, we find that determinants of informal insurance differ from those of formal insurance.     

Why feed the Leviathan?

This is a study about the possibility of self-governance. We designed two versions of a step-level public good game, with or without a centralized sanctioning mechanism (CSM). In a baseline treatment participants play 14 rounds of the non-CSM game. In an automatic removal (AR) treatment participants play 7 rounds with CSM plus 7 rounds without CSM. In voted removal (VR) participants play 7 rounds with CSM followed by a voting stage to decide whether to keep CSM. All VR groups removed CSM. Contributions in AR and VR after CSM removal are dramatically higher than in the baseline. Most groups with a CSM history managed to cooperate until the last round. We do not find more cooperation in VR than in AR.     

Die Betreuung älterer Familienmitglieder im europäischen Vergleich — Perspektiven einer europäischen Politik für familiäre Pflege

Demographic change and the increasing share of elder people in need of care in Europe give more responsibility to families supporting their elder members and arranging care for them. In Europe, different models of shared responsibility between family-based care, public services and market-based offers have emerged. As the demographic situation converges in Europe, the welfare state is pressed to react and support families which do care work for the elderly. Taking the example of Finland, France and Italy, different paths and levels of such conceptions are illustrated.     

The 1992 health reform victory over pressure group politics

The 1988 health reform was substantially undermined by the influence of powerful pressure groups representing the interests of the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry and resistance from the German federal states. Consequently, it failed to achieve its aim of ‘cutting costs’. The theory supporting ‘resistance to reform within the health care system’ was widely accepted in the literature on the subject. The 1992 reform appeared to contradict this theory, as the political leadership succeeded in overcoming both party policy and intergovernmental differences, as well as making considerable cost savings and structural changes in spite of resistance from the opposition ‘lobby’. Three factors were responsible for this. They were under enormous pressure to act due to the financial crisis and the interdependent costs within the welfare state, the changing motives within the health care system, and a new political strategy which responded to this. In the long term, prospects are for a trend towards ‘greater privatisation’.     

Usefulness of combining clinical and radiological dental findings for a more accurate noninvasive age estimation

The aim of this study was to establish correlations of clinical and radiological dental findings, alone or in combination, with chronological age in adults. Dental findings and orthopantomograms of 984 patients (aged 20-60 years; 524 females/460 males) were analyzed. DMF-T index and distance (alveolar bone level, ABL) between cemento-enamel junction and alveolar bone margin were recorded. Additionally, clinical and radiological findings at each tooth crown and root were collected according to the actual status of destruction and restoration, and a total score for each dentition (TSD) was calculated. After univariate correlation analysis, correlation coefficients for ABL and TSD were improved by using square root (sqrt). However, the determination accuracy was still not satisfactory; 90% of the residuals were in the range of about +/-10. The present study showed that clinical and radiological dental findings could not be used, not even in combination, for accurate age estimation as a single method, but that they could support other methods.