In the laboratory of the states: the progress of Glucksberg's invitation to states to address end-of-life choice

It has now been ten years since the Supreme Court handed down Glucksberg and Quill, rulings on laws that forbid "assisted suicide." In that time, normative and legal developments in the fields of law, medicine, and psychology have changed the landscape of the discourse on the choice of a mentally competent, terminally ill individual to choose to self-administer medications to bring about a peaceful death. Although the Court rejected petitioners' claims that state laws denying them the ability to end their terminal illnesses through self-administered medication violated the Constitution, it left states with the opportunity to experiment with legislation that would allow terminally ill individuals the choices they had previously sought through litigation. Oregon's experience with its Death with Dignity Act, which grants terminally ill, mentally competent individuals the choice to end their lives through self-administered medication, has proven that such laws provide comfort not only to those who, faced with the prospect of a horrible death from a terminal illness, choose to end their lives in a peaceful and dignified manner, but also to those to ultimately choose not to. Additionally, Oregon's experience shows that the fears that originally attended the "assisted suicide" debate are unfounded so long as proper procedures are in place. Because Oregon's Death with Dignity Act has proven both useful and harmless, this Article concludes that it is time for other states to follow Oregon's lead and enact their own legislation to allow their citizens an alternative to what otherwise could be a prolonged and painful death from terminal illness.     

Advice about Life Plans from Mothers,Fathers, and Siblings in Always-Married and Divorced Families during Late Adolescence

The frequency of advice about life plans that older adolescents in always-married and divorced families received from mothers, fathers, and siblings was examined. Also, a pattern-analytic approach that grouped adolescents according to the amount of advice about life plans received from each parent and a sibling was employed to explore the connections between patterns of advice and adolescents' future occupational, educational, and family plans. The sample included 544 and 95 older adolescents in always-married and divorced families, respectively. Findings suggested that while adolescents relied on mothers for advice in both always-married and divorced families, adolescents in divorced families depended on fathers and siblings for advice less often than did adolescents in always-married families. Although there was some evidence of family context differences in the connections between patterns of advice and life plans, overall, adolescents in both family contexts who received more advice from a parent and, in some cases, a sibling compared to other adolescents were the most positive about their future life plans.     

Sexual Debut Timing and Depressive Symptoms in Emerging Adulthood

The association between sexual debut timing and depressive symptomatology in adolescence and emerging adulthood was examined using data from Waves I, II and III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Respondents who reported never having sexual intercourse at Wave I and were 18–22 years of age at Wave III were included (n = 5,061). Twenty percent of respondents experienced early (<age 16) and 49% experienced typical (ages 16–18) sexual debut. In bivariate analyses, pre-debut depressive symptoms were associated with earlier sexual debut among female but not male adolescents. In models adjusting for demographic characteristics and pre-debut depressive symptoms, sexual debut was positively related to adolescent (Wave II) depressive symptomatology, but only among female adolescents age less than sixteen. However, sexual debut timing was unassociated with emerging adult (Wave III) depressive symptomatology for both male and female respondents. Findings suggest sexual debut timing does not have implications for depressive symptomatology beyond adolescence.

How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics?

How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about politics and the number of political figures followed. We find that, on average, our self-reported survey measures tend to correlate with observed social media activity. At the same time, we also find a worrying amount of individual-level discrepancy and problems related to extreme outliers. Our recommendations are twofold. The first is for survey questions about social media use to provide respondents with options covering a wider range of activity, especially in the long tail. The second is for survey questions to include specific content and anchors defining what it means for a post to be “about politics.”     

Clear and Present Strangers: The Clash of Civilizations and International Conflict

Huntington's (1993a, 1993b, 1996) clash of civilizations thesis suggests that states belonging to different civilizations are more likely to become involved in conflict with one another. To evaluate the empirical accuracy of Huntington's claims, we examined the relationship between civilization membership and interstate war between 1816 and 1992. We find that civilization membership was not significantly associated with the onset of interstate war during the Cold War era (1946–1988), which is consistent with one aspect of Huntington's thesis; however, we also find that for the pre–Cold War period (1816–1945) states of similar civilizations were more likely to fight each other than were those of different civilizations, which contradicts Huntington's thesis. Most importantly, our analysis reveals that during the post–Cold War era (1989–1992), the period in which Huntington contends that the clash of civilizations should be most apparent, civilization membership was not significantly associated with the probability of interstate war. All told, our findings challenge Huntington's claims and seriously undermine the policy recommendations that devolve from his clash of civilizations thesis.     

Who ‘Tweets’ Where and When,and How Does it Help Understand Crime Rates at Places? Measuring the Presence of Tourists and Commuters in Ambient Populations

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - Test the reliability of geotagged Twitter data for estimating block-level population metrics across place types. Evaluate whether the proportion of Twitter...