Adolescents as mothers: An interdisciplinary approach to a complex problem

Pregnancy among adolescents, and especially among low-income adolescents, represents a high-risk situation from multiple points of view. When compared to data for the population at large, obstetrical outcome is worsened, subsequent educational attainment is poor, social prognosis is guarded, and repeat unwanted pregnancies are common. The surviving infants, similarly have relatively high incidences of medical and developmental problems. In recent years, comprehensive interdisciplinary programs have been organized to offer more meaningful help to these individuals. The present report describes the authors' 5-year experience with one early intensive program. Considerable medical, educational, and social successes have been noted. The results are especially striking when contrasted with the authors' current experience with an improving but still more fragmented and less successful program. Findings concerning infant development and the mother-infant interaction are also noted. Finally, issues related to the achievement of successes and the persistence of problems after provision of more adequate comprehensive services are discussed.This study was supported in part by Grant No. 03-H-000-079-03-0, Maternal and Child Health Service, H.S.M.H.A., H.E.W.While on the faculty of the State University of New York, College of Medicine at Syracuse, was a founder and the first medical director of the YMED program.Specialty is Developmental Psychology, and research interests concern infant and early child development and the effects of children on parents. While on the faculty of Cornell University, served as a consultant to the YMED program.Project director of the high-risk program.While on the faculty of the State University of New York, College of Medicine at Syracuse, was obstetrical director of the YMED program.     

Interpersonal trust and disaffected high school youth

The study consisted of two parts. First, a new scale of interpersonal trust for adolescents was constructed using a representative sample of 70 students from a community high school. Second, the hypothesis was tested that disaffected youth compared to the more conventional would show less interpersonal trust. Two matched groups of 57 students each were employed for the second part of the study. Results indicate that the new scale is a reliable and valid measure. Correlates of the scale disclose that trust is associated with interpersonal distance, certain developmental factors, and the quality of parent-adolescent relations. Results from the second part of the study tend to confirm the hypothesis in that greater trust scores were found among students with more conventional beliefs.This study was partly supported by NIMH Grant No. MH9210, Ford Foundation Grant No. 69-0264B, and the Jessie and C. Clement Stone Foundation.Received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. Currently working on personality and clinical problems of adolescents and adults.Recieved his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Plans to continue his work of program development in the area of affect education in secondary schools.Received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Current work is in the area of community mental health.     

Modeling Duration Dependence

As applications of duration analysis have burgeoned in politicalscience, scholars have become increasingly aware of the potentialsubstantive importance of duration dependence: the extent towhich the conditional hazards of the events of interest arerising or falling over time. Here I discuss the issue of durationdependence, focusing on the distinction between "spurious" dependencedue to unobserved heterogeneity and "true" duration dependencedue to state dependence in the process of interest. I presenta simple extension of a commonly used parametric duration model—theWeibull model—which allows researchers to assess the influenceof causal variables on the nature and extent of duration dependencein their data. I then illustrate the application of this "generalizedWeibull" model using data on the duration of international alliances.     

I'm Not That Liberal: Explaining Conservative Democratic Identification

The persistence of self-identified conservative Democrats in the electorate is puzzling. Both the ongoing Southern realignment and the recent ideological polarization should have resulted in conservative Democrats changing their party identification to accord with their discrepant ideology. Instead, the number of conservative Democrats, as a percentage of the total electorate, has held steady over the last 20 years. I propose an explanation for this phenomenon that draws upon theories of mass belief systems, as well as an element of recent political reality: the popular stigmatization of the word liberal. I argue that Democrats who are susceptible to elite cues garner positive affect toward the conservative label and negative affect toward the liberal label. They then identify themselves accordingly, regardless of their issue positions.     

Is Irrigationalism a Dominant Ideology in Securing Hydrotopia in Mekong Nation States?

ABSTRACT

For over six decades, grandiose proposals calling for significant expansion of public irrigation schemes have been commonplace throughout the Mekong region, irrespective of the political configuration or developmental stage of each state. From Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea to Thailand’s military and quasi-democratic regimes, irrigation has figured prominently on development agendas. Mainstream narratives around irrigation are embedded in a technocentric, developmental and nationalistic discourse, incorporating socially pre-conditioned beliefs and values that closely reflect the rhetoric of state-linked elites. This article critically examines some of the narratives employed by key actors and groups to justify ongoing practices and processes of irrigation development, focusing on Thailand and Cambodia. It seeks to look beyond conventional econometric and instrumental drivers, to consider other socio-political factors that may account for irrigation’s critical role as a “technology of control,” but which are rarely examined across comparative national contexts. Further, it proposes a dominant ideology of irrigation developmentalism or “irrigationalism” as a useful concept in explaining certain aspects of contemporary social power in these nations. State-led irrigation may be perceived as a utopian intervention that aids in the emergence of an effective monopolistic authority and control by bureaucracies and other powerful groups over development decision-making processes and silencing opposition.     

Memory and taste in the collections and households of the Spanish nobility (nineteenth and early twentieth centuries): an introduction to the topic with some notes on the house of Osuna and the origins of the period room

“Albeit democratic, their coat of arms has pride of place”. Thus Romualdo Nogués defined, in 1890, Spanish collectors of bourgeois origin who had joined the ranks of the aristocracy. A few years later, in 1924, the Duke of Alba’s maiden speech at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando justified his personal artistic worthiness on the basis of his ancestors’ collecting activities and the artworks they had amassed.

These two examples set the scene for the research questions studied in this monographic issue. The present introduction offers a bird’s eye view of the phenomenon and continues with a few remarks about the House of Osuna which, as is well known, occupied a pivotal position in Spanish nobility during the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century.