Neighborhood,Family, and Peer Factors Associated with Early Adolescent Smoking and Alcohol Use

There is broad agreement that neighborhood contexts are important for adolescent development, but there is less consensus about their association with adolescent smoking and alcohol use. Few studies have examined associations between neighborhood socioeconomic contexts and smoking and alcohol use while also accounting for differences in family and peer risk factors for substance use. Data drawn from the Seattle Social Development Project (N?=?808), a gender-balanced (female?=?49%), multiethnic, theory-driven longitudinal study originating in Seattle, WA, were used to estimate trajectories of smoking and alcohol use from 5th to 9th grade. Time-varying measures of neighborhood socioeconomic, family, and peer factors were associated with smoking and alcohol use at each wave after accounting for average growth in smoking and alcohol use over time and demographic differences. Results indicated that living in more socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods, lower family income, lower family general functioning, more permissive family smoking environments, and affiliation with deviant peers were independently associated with increased smoking. Lower family functioning, more permissive family alcohol use environments, and deviant peers were independently associated with increased alcohol use. The effect of neighborhood disadvantage on smoking was mediated by family income and deviant peers while the effect of neighborhood disadvantage on alcohol use was mediated by deviant peers alone. Family functioning and family substance use did not mediate associations between neighborhood disadvantage and smoking or alcohol use. The results highlight the importance of neighborhood, family, and peer factors in early adolescent smoking and alcohol use. Future studies should examine the unique association of neighborhood disadvantage with adolescent smoking net of family socioeconomics, functioning, and substance use, as well as peer affiliations. Better understanding of the role of contextual factors in early adolescent smoking and alcohol use can help bolster efforts to prevent both short and long harms from substance use.     

Intra-Campaign Changes in Voting Preferences: The Impact of Media and Party Communication

An increasing number of citizens change and adapt their party preferences during the electoral campaign. We analyze which short-term factors explain intra-campaign changes in voting preferences, focusing on the visibility and tone of news media reporting and party canvassing. Our analyses rely on an integrative data approach, linking data from media content analysis to public opinion data. This enables us to investigate the relative impact of news media reporting as well as party communication. Inherently, we overcome previously identified methodological problems in the study of communication effects on voting behavior. Our findings reveal that campaigns matter: Especially interpersonal party canvassing increases voters’ likelihood to change their voting preferences in favor of the respective party, whereas media effects are limited to quality news outlets and depend on individual voters’ party ambivalence.     

Beyond the media's explanation: Examining the determinants of attitudes toward torture

The question of what constitutes torture has perhaps never held as prominent a place in US political discourse as it has since the attacks on 9/11. This has fueled a national conversation that causes us to consider to what extent do our actions as a nation reflect our values as a nation? In a post 9/11 world in which the country will confront terrorism at home and abroad and our values will be tested we should strive for a better understanding of citizens' attitudes towards the practices that are (and have been) used to counter terrorism. To the extent that democratic theory is correct in necessitating public policy and public opinions to be reasonably congruent, understanding the distribution and formation of citizen attitudes towards torture is an important endeavor.     

Intervention and Statebuilding Beyond the Human: From the ‘Black Box’ to the ‘Great Outdoors’

This article analyses intervention and statebuilding as shifting towards a posthuman discursive regime. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or post-liberal approaches has evolved into a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It attempts to describe a process of reflection upon intervention as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations – in order to take problems seriously – begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the bottom-up approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of intervention, seems to further intensify it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to learn from the opportunities opened up through the practices of intervention. However, what is learnt does not seem to be able to fit into traditional modes and categories of expertise.     

Political economy,poverty, and polycentrism in the Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) for Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change adaptation refers to altering infrastructure, institutions or ecosystems to respond to the impacts of climate change. Least developed countries often lack the requisite capacity to implement adaptation projects. The Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) is a scheme where industrialised countries have disbursed $934.5 million in voluntary contributions to support 213 adaptation projects across 51 least developed countries. But how effective are its efforts—and what sort of challenges have arisen as it implements projects? To provide some answers, this article documents the presence of four “political economy” attributes of adaptation projects—processes we have termed enclosure, exclusion, encroachment and entrenchment—cutting across economic, political, ecological and social dimensions. Based on extensive field research, we find the four processes at work simultaneously in our case studies of five LDCF projects being implemented in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, the Maldives and Vanuatu. The article concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the political economy of adaptation for analysts, program managers and climate researchers at large. In sum, the politics of adaptation must be taken into account so that projects can maximise their efficacy and avoid marginalising those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.     

Border cosmopolitanism in critical peace education

This paper intends to contribute to recent developments in the theory of critical peace education. The role of cosmopolitanism in critical peace education is examined, particularly in relation to universal moral inclusion, secularism and universalism. It is then recommended that critical peace education draw from post-universalist and dialogical approaches to cosmopolitanism. Walter Mignolo’s border cosmopolitanism is suggested as a decolonising framework for critical peace education. This would entail the theory of critical peace education orienting itself towards the aim of reconsidering cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality. Connections are drawn between border cosmopolitanism and Paulo Freire’s problem-posing education. The result is a vision for critical peace education to empower participants through centring personal and lived experience in critical deconstructions of cosmopolitan discourses.     

Cortisol Stress Response Variability in Early Adolescence: Attachment,Affect and Sex

Attachment, affect, and sex shape responsivity to psychosocial stress. Concurrent social contexts influence cortisol secretion, a stress hormone and biological marker of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis activity. Patterns of attachment, emotion status, and sex were hypothesized to relate to bifurcated, that is, accentuated and attenuated, cortisol reactivity. The theoretical framework for this study posits that multiple individual differences mediate a cortisol stress response. The effects of two psychosocial stress interventions, a modified Trier Social Stress Test for Teens and the Frustration Social Stressor for Adolescents were developed and investigated with early adolescents. Both of these protocols induced a significant stress reaction and evoked predicted bifurcation in cortisol responses; an increase or decrease from baseline to reactivity. In Study I, 120 predominantly middle-class, Euro-Canadian early adolescents with a mean age of 13.43 years were studied. The girls’ attenuated cortisol reactivity to the public performance stressor related significantly to their self-reported lower maternal-attachment and higher trait-anger. In Study II, a community sample of 146 predominantly Euro-Canadian middle-class youth, with an average age of 14.5 years participated. Their self-reports of higher trait-anger and trait-anxiety, and lower parental attachment by both sexes related differentially to accentuated and attenuated cortisol reactivity to the frustration stressor. Thus, attachment, affect, sex, and the stressor contextual factors were associated with the adrenal-cortical responses of these adolescents through complex interactions. Further studies of individual differences in physiological responses to stress are called for in order to clarify the identities of concurrent protective and risk factors in the psychosocial stress and physiological stress responses of early adolescents.     

Framing a fiscal/cultural micro-encounter: value added tax meets calypso in Dominica

This article focuses on the performance of the calypso song ‘VAT on You’, as a response to the introduction into Dominica of the value added tax (VAT). The article applies a set of concepts to frame and so enhance our understanding of the event in terms of global history. Both calypso and VAT have extended histories and this performance represents an unusual meeting of earlier and current forces of globalisation. The conclusion assesses the helpfulness of the framing concepts ‘longue durée,’ continuities, centring, class divisions and micro-resistance, and assesses the song’s contribution to such resistance     

Authority in rebel groups: identity,recognition and the struggle over legitimacy

This article asks how rebel leaders capture and lose legitimacy within their own movement. Analysing these complex and often uneasy relations between elites and grassroots of insurgency is important for understanding the success or failure of peace processes. This is because internal contestation over authority between rival rebel leaders can drive a movement’s external strategy. Based on ethnographic research on the Karen and Kachin rebellions in Myanmar and insights from Political Sociology, the article suggests that leadership authority is linked to social identification and the claim to recognition among insurgent grassroots. If rebel leaders manage to satisfy their grassroots’ claim to recognition, their insurgent orders are stable. Failing this, their authority erodes and is likely to be challenged. These findings contribute to understanding insurgency and peace negotiations in Myanmar and civil wars more generally by showing how struggles over legitimacy within rebel groups drive wider dynamics of war and peace.