Pathways to aggression and violence among African American adolescent males: the influence of normative beliefs, neighborhood, and depressive symptomatology

Youth violence continues to present a serious public health challenge in the United States, particularly so for African American adolescent males. The present study utilized a multilevel approach to predict aggression within a community sample of low-income, urban African American adolescent males (n?=?80). Participants' self-report data on normative beliefs about aggression, exposure to community violence, and depressive symptoms were used in multiple regression equations to predict (a) self-reported interpersonal aggression and (b) self-reported aggressive response style when angered. Results of this study indicate that all three of the independent variables contributed significantly to the prediction of interpersonal aggression and aggressive response style when angered. The findings are important for increasing our understanding of pathways to various types of youth aggression and guiding the development of evidence-based approaches to violence prevention among African American adolescent males.     

Reforming Leasehold: Discursive Events and Outcomes, 1984–2000

This article uses discourse analysis to explore and explain the limits of ongoing efforts to resolve the problems experienced by long leaseholders living in private flats in England and Wales. Attention is focused on the position of leasehold within the three discourses of property law, housing, and housing law, as revealed through the language used in legislation, consultation papers, Law Commission reports, political statements, media representations, and the accounts of leaseholders themselves. The implementation gap between legislative intentions and effects, so often neglected in discussion of housing policy, is explored. The article considers policy and legislation in the light of a metanarrative encompassing all aspects of the multi-occupancy of blocks of flats.     

Contract Budgeting

Contract budgeting attempts to reconfigure public budgeting as a system of purchase contracts between provider agencies and central government. It draws its inspiration from a simple model of contract in which the purchaser buys clearly specified outputs from a provider at a preagreed price. Contract budgeting thus represents a fusion of output-based budgeting schemas with the newer enthusiasm for placing the public sector on a 'market' footing. This paper reviews the problems which confront any form of output based budgeting, and then analyses the specific issues of contractualization. It concludes that contract budgeting does not well fit the realities of budgeting in a complex public sector.     

High urine ethanol and negative blood and vitreous ethanol in a diabetic woman: a case report, retrospective case survey, and review of the literature

Several studies have shown that ethanol can be produced in urine infected with yeast or bacteria in vitro. We present the unusual case of a diabetic woman in whom ethanol was produced in her urine in vivo. The decedent was a 19-year-old woman who was noncompliant with her diabetes treatment. She presented to a local hospital in severe diabetic ketoacidosis and died shortly thereafter. Upon arrival at the hospital, a blood glucose of 553 mg/dL was detected. A urinalysis was positive for ketones (> 80 mg/dL), glucose (> 1000 mg/dL), and large budding yeast forms. A drug screen performed on the urine was positive for ethanol. At the coroner/medical examiner office, an autopsy was negative for significant anatomic findings. Toxicology analysis revealed a urine ethanol level 0.32 g/dL, although no ethanol was detected in blood or vitreous samples. A urine gram stain and culture identified Candida glabrata. A retrospective case review of all deaths related to diabetes examined at the coroner/medical examiner office from 1986 to 2003 did not reveal other cases with similar findings. This case of a noncompliant, juvenile-diabetic woman illustrates a rare finding of apparent in vivo glucose fermentation by C. glabrata to form ethanol in the urine. This case also highlights a potential difficulty in toxicologic analysis and interpretation using urine only.     

Landmark among decision-making and policy analyses and template for integrating alternative frames of reference: Glenn D. Paige,The Korean Decision

That policies and decisions provide distinctive foci for the application of scholarly attention is a hallmark of the last half of the 20th century. Among landmark invocations of such attention was and is Glenn D. Paige's The Korean Decision. Landmarks represent creative achievements that lay down original formulations or findings or point the ways to original findings, and they do so with high quality of method and exposition. The Korean Decision exhibited the first and fullest use of Richard C. Snyder's decision-making approach in the study of public order decisions and it did so in ways that opened new lines of inquiry. It also rendered evident equivalencies with the decision-centered conception of the policy sciences as formulated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. This reappraisal of Paige's classic work stresses explicit and implicit complementarities between one decision-making approach and the policy sciences. Several equivalencies illustrate points at which the addition or the overlap of one scheme to and with another may enrich alternative approaches to common phenomena, including observational standpoint, conceptions of the decision process, definition of decisional situations, crisis as a special occasion for decision, linkages among variables, and appraisal as a particular decision process function.     

Postmortem diagnosis of unsuspected diabetes mellitus established by determination of decedent's hemoglobin A1c level.

Although approximately 15.7 million Americans have diabetes mellitus, with the vast majority having type 2 diabetes, it is estimated that as many as 5.4 million are undiagnosed. The present case illustrates that undiagnosed diabetes can be a factor in otherwise unexplained deaths. A 39-year-old white male with no significant past medical history other than alcohol abuse was found deceased at his residence. The manner of death appeared to be natural, but no anatomic cause was found. Toxicological analysis revealed a blood ethanol level of 0.02 g/dL and was negative for drugs of abuse. Analysis of the vitreous fluid revealed a glucose level of 502 mg/dL. The blood glucose level was 499 mg/dL, and the hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) level was 10.6%. Only trace urine ketones were detected, suggesting that the death was the result of hyperglycemic hyperosmolar non-ketosis (HHNK) from unsuspected diabetes. The postmortem HbA1c value serves as a definitive indicator of prolonged hyperglycemia. In order to aid the interpretation of the clinical data, this case is discussed in conjunction with a similar case of a known diabetic patient.     

Reviews

Harry Eckstein, Frederic J. Fleron, Erik P. Hoffmann & William M. Reisinger with Richard Ahl, Russell Bova & Philip G. Roeder, Can Democracy Take Root in Post‐Soviet Russia? Explorations in State‐Society Relations. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 1998, xi + 418 pp., $64.00 h/b, $21.95 p/b.

Barnett R. Rubin & Jack Snyder (eds), Post‐Soviet Political Order. Conflict and State Building, London: Routledge, 1998, xi + 201 pp., £15.99.

Ben Fowkes (ed.), Russia and Chechnia: The Permanent Crisis. Essays on Russo‐Chechen Relations. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, viii+ 188 pp., £42.50.

Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. London: Yale University Press, 1998, xii + 436 pp., £25.00.

Sebastian Smith, Allah's Mountains: Politics and War in the Russian Caucasus. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998, x + 288 pp., £19.95.

Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: Nation and State Building. London: Routledge, 1998, xiv + 298 pp., £50.00.

Lutz Hoffmann & Axel Siedenberg (eds), Aufbruch in die Marktwirtschaft. Reformen in der Ukraine von innen betrachtet. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1997, 296 pp.

OECD, OECD Economic Surveys. Russian Federation 1997. Paris: Centre for Co‐operation with the Economies in Transition and OECD, 1997, x + 275 pp.

Arista Maria Cirtautas, The Polish Solidarity Movement. Revolution, Democracy and Natural Rights. London: Routledge, 1997, xii + 324 pp., £50.00.

David Stark & Laszlo Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xi + 284 pp., £15.95.

Jon Elster, Claus Offe & Ulrich K. Preuss with Frank Boenker, Ulrike Goetting & Friedbert W. Rueb, Institutional Design in Post‐Communist Societies, Rebuilding the Ship at Sea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xii + 350 pp., £14.95.

Daniel Vaughan‐Whitehead (ed.), Paying the Price. The Wage Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xxviii + 418 pp., £55.00.

David Clapham, József Hegedüs, Keith Kintrea & Iván Tosics with Helen Kay (eds), Housing Privatization in Eastern Europe. London: Greenwood Press, 1996, xiii + 205 pp., £42.50.

Fergus Carr (ed.), Europe: The Cold Divide. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xii + 208 pp., £42.50.

Ian Anthony (ed.), Russia and the Arms Trade. Oxford, Oxford University Press and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1998, xiv + 304 pp., £35.00.

Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev. Baden‐Baden: Nomos, 609 pp., DM69.00.

Yongjin Zhang & Rouben Azizian (eds), Ethnic Challenges Beyond Borders: Chinese and Russian Perspectives of the Central Asian Conundrum. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xii + 240 pp., £42.50.

R. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century—and After. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 1997, xx + 526 pp., £50.00.

Richard & Ben Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 1997, xv + 297 pp., £16.99.

Jeffrey L. Roberg, Soviet Science Under Control: The Struggle for Influence. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xii + 169 pp., £42.50.

Vincent Barnett, Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Economic Development. Long Cycles and Industrial Growth in Historical Context. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xiv + 251 pp., £50.00.

Ronald Kowalski, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921. London: Routledge, 1997, xv + 269 pp., £13.99.

Arto Luukkanen, The Religious Policy of the Stalinist State. A Case Study: The Central Standing Commission on Religious Questions, 1929–1938. Helsinki: SHS, 1997, 214 pp.

J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930–1953. London: Macfarland, 1997, ix + 165 pp. £31.50.

Judith Pallot, Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930. Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995. Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998, xix + 264 pp., £45.00.

Amy C. Singleton, No Place Like Home. The Literary Artist and Russia's Search for Cultural Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, x + 193 pp, $17.95.

Stephen C. Hutchings. Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xiii + 295 pp., £40.00.