Breadth and Intensity of Youth Activity Involvement as Contexts for Positive Development

Research has linked youth activity involvement to positive development. However, past studies have confounded at least two separable dimensions of involvement: breadth (number of activities) and intensity (participation frequency). Theory and the limited available evidence suggest that these dimensions may make independent contributions to development. Based on self-reports from 7430 high school students, this study assessed whether breadth and intensity dimensions were related to each other, to a typical aggregate measure of involvement, and to various indicators of positive development. Breadth and intensity were moderately interrelated and, in combination, they explained the majority of the variance in the typical involvement measure. Both dimensions were positively related to each development index. When examined simultaneously, only breadth had a unique relation with each developmental index. Further, evidence of nonlinear effects was found. Findings were consistent across age levels. Implications for measurement of involvement and interpretations of the extant research are discussed.

Interpreting reproductive rights: institutional responses to the agenda in the 1990s

This article reviews the way in which three very different international organisations concerned with reproductive health policy responded to the reproductive rights agenda during the 1990s. The intention is not to evaluate these responses but to describe how these organisations saw their roles with respect to establishing and promoting reproductive rights in developing countries. We seek to explore their different strategies of defining and interpreting rights, to examine the imperatives behind these strategies and to consider how these variously fed into the practical actions and agendas with which these organisations were engaged. The organisations included were the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights, the International Federation of Family Planning Associations and the UK's Department for International Development. Their diverse understandings about implementing reproductive rights contribute to a plural political environment in which these rights and their interpretation are debated. For all the three, their particular conception of reproductive rights is an important organising principle through which their efforts around reproductive health are given wider meaning. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Regulatory enforcement and compliance: Examining Danish agro‐environmental policy

This study of municipal enforcement of agro‐environmental regulations in Denmark provides an empirical understanding of how enforcement affects compliance. A key contribution is sorting out the relative influence of inspectors' different styles of enforcement and choices made by enforcement agencies. The latter are shown to be more important in bringing about compliance than are inspectors' enforcement styles. Municipal agencies are shown to increase compliance through the use of third parties, more frequent inspection, and setting priorities for inspection of major items. The findings about enforcement styles of inspectors suggest it is necessary to get tough up to a point, but beyond that the threat of coercion can be counterproductive. These findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of overly legalistic enforcement styles, particularly for the Danish culture with its strong emphasis on cooperation and consultation in regulation. But the findings also advise us to be cautious about the use of cooperative styles of enforcement in that we find evidence for capture of the enforcement process by agricultural organizations. This leads to a more nuanced view of enforcement rather than the broad generalizations found in the literature concerning legalism and cooperation. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. <@:>     

Justice for All? A Cross‐Time Analysis of Toxics Release Inventory Facility Location

This paper contributes to the environmental justice literature by addressing several outstanding issues in a single study. Using a cross-time data set that allows us to control for the prevalent "chicken-and-egg" or "which-came-first" problem, we analyze the relative importance of poverty and race/ethnicity in an analysis that includes economic costs, potential legal costs, and potential collective action. Because the most appropriate functional form is not obvious, we use several methods, including Tobit, Poisson, and ordinary least squares, on different forms of the dependent variable. In every case, controlling for the population present at the time of disamenity location and controlling the other factors mentioned, we find evidence of disproportionate collocation based on race/ethnicity, but not on poverty alone. We also find that the potential for collective action decreases the likelihood of receipt of the studied disamenities.     

Coercive versus cooperative policies: Comparing intergovernmental mandate performance

Cooperative policies hold out promise of an improvement over coercive mandates as ways to enhance implementation of intergovernmental programs. By treating subordinate governments as regulatory trustees and emphasizing substantive compliance, the cooperative mandates avoid the onerous aspects of heavy-handed regulatory federalism. Our comparison of state hazard-mitigation policy in Florida and in New South Wales, Australia addresses procedural and substantive compliance under the two forms of intergovernmental policies. When local governments are not committed to state policy objectives, the coercive policy produces better results as evidenced by higher rates of procedural compliance and greater effort by local governments to achieve policy objectives. When local government commitment exists, the cooperative policy produces substantive results that are at least the equivalent to the coercive policy. Moreover, over the long run cooperative policies may have greater promise in sustaining local government commitment. The dilemma is to figure out how to motivate lagging jurisdictions that seem to require a coercive policy, while not straightjacketing leading jurisdictions that are capable of thriving under a cooperative regime.     

Reconsidering Styles of Regulatory Enforcement: Patterns in Danish Agro‐Environmental Inspection

This study addresses enforcement styles of regulatory inspectors, based on an examination of the municipal enforcement of agro‐environmental policies in Denmark. Our findings make three contributions to the regulatory literature. One contribution is to add empirical support for theorizing about inspectors' enforcement styles as consisting of multiple components, rather than a single continuum. We show that inspectors' enforcement styles comprise the degree of formalism and the degree of coercion that they exercise when carrying out inspections. A second contribution is in showing the relationship of different types of enforcement styles to the two underlying dimensions of the concept. A third contribution is an examination of the ways in which inspectors' enforcement styles relate to their enforcement actions. The consistency of our findings with those of other studies suggests that the dimensions and types of inspectors' enforcement styles that we observed in Denmark can be generalized to other settings.     

Supportive Community Resources Are Associated with Lower Risk of Substance Use among Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and Questioning Adolescents in Minnesota

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Research has indicated that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer/questioning (LGBQ) adolescents have disproportionately high rates of substance use compared to...     

Haplotype analysis for Irish ancestry

Forensic haplotype analysis of the male Y chromosome is currently used to establish the number of male donors in sexual assaults, the number of male bleeders in blood pattern analysis, and for ancestry correlation to genetic founder populations in biogeographic studies. In forensic laboratory applications, its primary use is for DNA profile generation with trace amounts of male DNA in the presence of excess female DNA (e.g. spermatozoa identification, male component of fingernail scrapings). Our study supports the potential use of the Y chromosome in a “dragnet” approach (most haplotypes are unique) similar to that described by Kayser in 2017 for solving a cold case sex assault and homicide in The Netherlands. Our study also researched the potential for the identification of an ancestral Irish genetic “footprint” linked to surname O’Brien and identified multiple founder group origins in Ireland and England as well as three samples with the Dal Riata (a Gaelic overkingdom) ancestral haplotype. This study indicates correlation to ancestral Irish ancestry by haplotype but not conclusively to the O’Brien surname.