Cumulative Neighborhood Risk and Subsequent Internalizing Behavior among Asian American Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Neighborhood disadvantage is a developmental context that may contribute to Asian American adolescent internalizing problems, yet there is a dearth of...     

Clausewitzian Alchemy and the Modern Character of War

Current conflicts reinforce, rather than undermine, the Clausewitzian paradigm. It is not the nature of war itself that is changing, but rather the dominant relationships between the components of its nature. Recognizing that the relationship between the interaction with passion, reason, and chance with the people, the state, and the military, which prevailed in Clausewitz's day, does not continue to prevail in our day deeply rests on ideas established in On War. Three shifts in the character of war have materialized: the collapse of warfare, the intersection of strategy and politics, and the atomization of political power. To act successfully in future conflicts, we must move beyond any simple Clausewitzian alchemy and understand the countless ways in which passion, chance, and rationality can be alloyed with the state, the people, and the military.     

Effect of the breakup context on unwanted pursuit behavior perpetration between former partners

Former partners comprise the most important subgroup of stalkers. However, contextual factors related to the breakup are hardly examined to explain ex-partner pursuit. In a community sample of 194 separated persons, about one-fifth perpetrated at least one unwanted pursuit behavior in the past 2 weeks. Being female, lowly educated, and socially undesirable raised the number of perpetrated behaviors. Beyond these effects, the number of behaviors increased when the cause of the break was attributed to the ex-partner or external factors and when the ex was appraised as the breakup initiator. Breakup reasons, the ex-partner's lack in meeting family obligations and own infidelity, also related to pursuit behaviors albeit inferior to subjective attributions and appraisals of initiation. Finally, participants who felt more anxious or lonely negative showed more behaviors. The results enlighten that the breakup context gains further attention. Clinical treatment might benefit from fostering cognitive reconstructions and breakup adjustment.     

Litigating Discrimination on Grounds of Family Status

Against the background of a deeply uneven package of work–family reconciliation measures and an increasing focus on engaging men in unpaid care work, in this article I discuss the extension of the Irish discrimination law framework to provide protection against family status discrimination to workers who are engaged in certain care relationships. While this development of the law to recognize a relational understanding of inequality is welcome, its confined definition of family status fails to capture the range of workers’ caring relationships and networks. Adopting a contextualized assessment of 12 years of litigation generated under the ‘family status’ ground, with reference to complainants’ gender and work status, the study considers the types of experiences being litigated as ‘family status’ discrimination. The study show how much of the nature and forms of inequality presented before the tribunals are beyond the conceptual boundaries of the principle of equal treatment that depends upon a sameness of treatment model with the (gendered) ‘care-less’ comparator. Despite its potential to question the neutrality of workplace structures predicated upon the division between paid work and unpaid care, the principle of indirect family status discrimination has been under utilised as a litigation strategy. The most successful dimension of family status discrimination protection has been in respect of its ability to capture the negative stereotyping of worker–carers who continue to perform as ideal workers. I suggest that this extension of a limited negative rights framework, when considered alongside the state’s extremely poor support for workcare reconciliation more broadly, places negligible obligations on employers, and that the gender neutrality implicit in its provisions have yet to impact on gender equality as regards work–care reconciliation.     

Developmental Pathways from Parental Socioeconomic Status to Adolescent Substance Use: Alternative and Complementary Reinforcement

Although lower socioeconomic status has been linked to increased youth substance use, much less research has determined potential mechanisms explaining the association. The current longitudinal study tested whether alternative (i.e., pleasure gained from activities without any concurrent use of substances) and complementary (i.e., pleasure gained from activities in tandem with substance use) reinforcement mediate the link between lower socioeconomic status and youth substance use. Further, we tested whether alternative and complementary reinforcement and youth substance use gradually unfold over time and then intersect with one another in a cascading manner. Potential sex differences are also examined. Data were drawn from a longitudinal survey of substance use and mental health among high school students in Los Angeles. Data collection involved four semiannual assessment waves beginning in fall 2013 (N?=?3395; M baseline age?=?14.1; 47% Hispanic, 16.2% Asian, 16.1% multiethnic, 15.7% White, and 5% Black; 53.4% female). The results from a negative binomial path model suggested that lower parental socioeconomic status (i.e., lower parental education) was significantly related to an increased number of substances used by youth. The final path model revealed that the inverse association was statistically mediated by adolescents’ diminished engagement in pleasurable substance-free activities (i.e., alternative reinforcers) and elevated engagement in pleasurable activities paired with substance use (i.e., complementary reinforcers). The direct effect of lower parental education on adolescent substance use was not statistically significant after accounting for the hypothesized mediating mechanisms. No sex differences were detected. Increasing access to and engagement in pleasant activities of high quality that do not need a reinforcement enhancer, such as substances, may be useful in interrupting the link between lower parental socioeconomic status and youth substance use.