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.     

“It Was Like I Lost Everything”: The Harmful Impacts of Homeless-Targeted Policies

In response to housing crises across the country, many localities are implementing homeless-targeted policies that attempt to regulate public space by prohibiting sitting, lying, sleeping, and storing property in public places such as parks and sidewalks. We term these sociospatial control policies. Our research investigates the direct impacts of such policies in the city of Honolulu, which had become notorious for legal measures targeting homeless residents. We interviewed members of 70 households living in temporary shelters in public spaces, all of whom had experienced enforcement of city ordinances, such as receiving citations or being forcibly moved by city agents. Our data revealed three interconnected ways that enforcements of sit–lie and nuisance policies harmed homeless households. (a) Our respondents described feeling dehumanized and treated unfairly by city agents. We therefore argue that enforcement catalyzed both civic and social exclusion. (b) Second, the city’s confiscation of property spurred material hardship and posed obstacles to work, education, and access to services. And, finally, (c) respondents’ narratives revealed that enforcements provoked lasting worry, fear, anxiety, and despair.     

‘We Don’t Have This Is Mine and This Is His’: Managing Money and The Character of Conjugality in Kenya

Abstract

In the context of calls for more nuanced understanding of marriage as a dynamic institution, this paper addresses a gap in the literature on intra-household financial management. It examines financial management systems and levels of cooperation among 51 married couples in Kenya. It first presents a typology of intra-household financial management arrangements and then examines how this relates to the nature of cooperation between couples. It reveals a wide spectrum of cooperation which highlights the neglected case of strong cooperation, which is found to be more frequent among younger couples. There is some evidence that this is the result of changing ideologies towards companionate marriage but there is also evidence of life-cycle influences which result in declining cooperation over time.     

SOCIAL TRUST,IMPARTIAL ADMINISTRATION AND PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN EU CRISIS MANAGEMENT INSTITUTIONS

In this article, we investigate whether differences in social trust and impartial public administration have an impact on public confidence in EU crisis management institutions. Our assessment is based on a cross‐country comparison using aggregate country‐level data of the member states in the European Union. Earlier studies on the EU as a crisis manager have not carefully studied to what extent differences in social trust and administrative culture may or may not matter. Our analysis shows that in countries where citizens are treated impartially by their own national public administration institutions, people are less likely to support EU‐coordinated civil protection efforts. In contrast, in places where citizens perceive their government's treatment of them as partial and unfair, citizens will tend to support EU‐coordinated civil protection.     

Ten years after: revisiting the determinants of the adoption of municipal corporations for local service delivery

Research on the use of municipal corporations to deliver local and regional public services has evolved significantly in the past decade. Most of this work addresses the performance of this service-delivery mode in relation to local bureaucracies. However, much less is known about the drivers for the adoption of municipal corporations in the first place. This article reviews the main determinants of adoption – service characteristics, institutional and regulatory settings, political constraints and financial conditions – and highlights the need for comparative research across countries.     

Age and Gender Differences in the Associations of Self-Compassion and Emotional Well-being in A Large Adolescent Sample

Adolescence is a challenging developmental period marked with declines in emotional well-being; however, self-compassion has been suggested as a protective factor. This cross-sectional survey study (N?=?765, grades 7th to 12th; 53?% female; 4?% Hispanic ethnicity; 64?% White and 21?% Black) examined whether adolescents’ self-compassion differed by age and gender, and secondly, whether its associations with emotional well-being (perceived stress, life satisfaction, distress intolerance, depressive symptoms, and anxiety) also differed by age and gender. The findings indicated that older females had the lowest self-compassion levels compared to younger females or all-age males. Self-compassion was associated with all emotional well-being measures, and gender and/or age moderated the associations with anxiety and depressive symptoms. Among older adolescents, self-compassion had a greater protective effect on anxiety for boys than for girls. Additionally, older adolescents with low and average self-compassion had greater levels of depressive symptoms than those with high self-compassion. These results may inform for whom and at what age self-compassion interventions may be implemented to protect adolescents from further declines in emotional well-being.     

Rents,knowledge and neo-structuralism: transforming the productive matrix in Ecuador

This paper explores the relationship between ground rent, production and knowledge in Ecuador’s neo-structuralist, state-led project to transform the productive matrix. Based upon insights from the Marxian approach to the critique of political economy, we interrogate how neo-structuralism has conceptualised the relationship between ‘natural resource income’ and ‘knowledge-based’ economic development. The paper argues that a rent-theoretical perspective, which takes seriously the regional unfolding of uneven geographical development in Latin America, can highlight the limits of a national development plan conceived according to the logic of Schumpeterian efficiency. In doing so, the paper identifies the contradictory relationship between natural resource exports, state-led ‘knowledge’-based development and capital accumulation. On this basis the paper offers a historically and empirically informed critical analysis of selective import substitution industrialisation and vanguard science and technology strategies designed to transition Ecuador away from primary resource dependence.     

Connecting research and practice: Perspectives on the role of manualized programs in youth work

While there is a strong movement in favor of the use of manual-based programs in the arena of social care, there is a view that such programs are not applicable in the more fluid setting of youth work, which operates informally, using dynamic and organic methods. A critical pedagogical approach to youth work engages young people by encouraging them to become inquisitive, to question why things are the way they are and to pose problems through which they can learn. For some, manualized or evidence-based programs are not seen as having a role in such contexts. However, to date, the international debate in relation to this issue has been limited by an absence of published studies focusing specifically on strategies to implement evidence-informed practice in youth work contexts. This article aims to address this gap in the literature. The Irish national youth organization Foróige, which works with more than 56,000 young people in Ireland on an annual basis, has developed a range of manualized evidence-informed resources to support its youth work over recent years. Drawing on research findings from a range of studies conducted with youth workers focusing on implementation of these resources, the article explores the benefits and tensions associated with the use of program manuals in a youth work context. The findings suggest that such resources have a valuable role to play in youth work if designed in collaboration with youth workers, showing respect for core youth work values and allowing for flexibility and adaptability in implementation.     

a gendered critique of transboundary water management

The starting point of this paper is that most of the international transboundary water management (TWM) processes taking place globally are driven by ‘the hydraulic mission’—primarily the construction of mega-infrastructure such as dams and water transfer schemes. The paper argues that such heroic engineering approaches are essentially a masculinised discourse, with its emphasis being on construction, command and control. As a result of this masculinised discourse, the primary actors in TWM processes have been states—represented by technical, economic and political elites operating in what generally gets termed ‘the national interest’. Left out are the local communities relying on the resource directly: the water users; the poor; women; and other important groups. Instruments such as the UN Watercourses Convention of 1997 make an effort to present an attempt at a gender-balanced approach—through asserting the importance of the ‘no-harm rule’ and the ‘equitable share approach’. However, they end up supporting the status quo through the omission of any reference to gender issues. The paper provides an overview of the masculinised discourse on TWM institutions, proposing that this is the case because of the intersection of two masculinised fields—water resource management and the disciplines engaged in the research of transboundary water management, namely, political science and international relations. The paper investigates two southern African examples that illustrate the potential for including a gendered perspective and pro-poor policies that take into account the needs of the water users or ‘stakeholders’. The analysis includes the international and regional legal agreements on transboundary water issues, searching for evidence of a gendered approach. It is concluded that the laws and organisations responsible for transboundary water management currently do not reflect a gendered approach, despite the international recognition given to the necessity of including women in water management structures at all levels.     

“Use words. Not your body”: The hunger that has no name

This essay examines the competing readings of food refusal that emerged from a student hunger strike held at Columbia University in fall 2007. The invisibility of the act of food refusal forces hunger strikers to adopt performance strategies that make their (non)action visible as protest. To make the politics of their food refusal legible, advocates for the hunger strike promoted their actions as part of a 40 year tradition of student protest. However, that same invisibility allowed the protest's detractors to deride the hunger strikers as anorexic. At the center of the protest and the commentary about it was a wasting female body that confused for spectators the line between the political and the pathological. Attention to this body raises questions of how community is created and disciplined through performative acts, how easily female protest is evacuated of political meaning and the uneasy role of whiteness in popular attention to anorexia.