An Examination of the Reliability,Data Screening Procedures,and Extreme Response Patterns for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey

Abstract

This article explores psychometric characteristics of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBS), one of the most widely used instruments to assess the prevalence of violent and other high-risk behaviors in secondary school settings. Response patterns were analyzed for a subset of 414 youths who indicated that they had carried a weapon to school six or more times during the preceding 30 days, and were compared to a matched sample of youths randomly selected from the 13,610 participants in the 2001 national administration of the YRBS. Results indicated that extreme responders to the weapon-carrying item were considerably more likely than their counterparts to respond in an extreme fashion to all YRBS items, including risk items pertaining to school (e.g., physical fights on school property) and outside school (e.g., alcohol consumption) factors, as well as positive health behaviors (e.g., healthy eating habits). Overall, the results suggest an ex-treme response bias among some participants that may impact the validity of the YRBS instrument. More specifically, presence of this response bias may inflate estimates of the prevalence of school violence and related concerns. These findings are discussed in light of the need to carefully examine individual response patterns on future administrations of the YRBS in an effort to ensure maximum instrument utility.     

Strengthening Coparenting Relationships to Improve Strained Parent–Child Relationships: A Follow‐Up Study of Parents’ Experiences of Attending the Overcoming Barriers Program

Several interventions have been developed to address children's resistance and/or refusal to have contact with a parent following separation and divorce. There remains little agreement about how best to evaluate the success of these approaches. To explore the experiences of parents in the Overcoming Barriers Program (OCB), an online survey was distributed to all previous participants. Of the 40 parents who completed the survey at least six months after attending OCB, findings suggest mixed results. Benefits of OCB were more pronounced when changes were made to the coparenting relationships. Improvements in the coparenting relationship were specifically related to children's spending more time with both parents and better parent–child outcomes postintervention. Findings suggest that both the quality of parent–child relationships and the time that the children spend with both parents are associated with reported improvements in the cooperative coparenting relationship as a result of attending OCB. Implications are discussed in terms of lessons learned for developing, delivering, and evaluating similar programs for strained parent–child relationships.     

Do Barriers to Crime Prevention Moderate the Effects of Situational Crime Prevention Policies on Violent Crime in High Schools?

This study investigates how barriers to school-based crime prevention programming moderate the effects of situational crime prevention (SCP) policies on levels of violent crime in U.S. public high schools. Using data from the 2008 School Survey on Crime and Safety, we estimate a series of negative binomial regression models with interactions to investigate whether the effects of SCP policies on violent crime vary by the presence of school-based barriers to crime prevention, such as poor teacher training, inadequate funds, and lack of parental support. Our results indicate that the effect of certain SCP policies operate differently depending on the presence or absence of specific limiting factors. Policy implications of this research suggest that schools can aid in preventing violent crime by addressing obstacles to the effective implementation of school crime prevention efforts.     

Excessive Uniformity in Federal Drug Sentencing

The ideal of fair and proportionate punishment was a major impetus for federal sentencing reform. Observers of the current federal drug sentencing regime contend that the sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums lead to the problem of “excessive uniformity” in which offenders of widely differing culpability receive similar sentences due to the dominance of drug quantity as a sentencing factor. This study investigates this phenomenon using the 1997 Survey of Inmates in Federal Correctional Facilities. Controlling for relevant offense, offender, and case processing variables, the analysis finds that the quantity-driven sentencing fails to account for important differences in offender culpability—resulting in excessively uniform sentences for offenders with highly dissimilar roles in the offense. The main policy implication of this research is that the central, organizing role of drug quantity in federal drug sentencing needs to be rethought. Indeed, effectively dealing with the problem of excessive uniformity will likely require the wholesale restructuring of how federal sentences for drug offenders are determined.

‘Just Thinking:’ Attitude Development,Public Opinion,and Political Representation

The role of public opinion polls in electoral democracy is undeniable because, for good or for bad, they affect, in part, the kinds of laws and policies elected officials enact. But the voices measured in polls are not perfectly representative of their populations of interest. More precisely, polls generally sing with a more “knowledgeable” accent than those they represent because of the greater tendency of the less knowledgeable to remain silent. This distortion, however, can be palliated by providing conditions more propitious to attitude development. By relying on survey-experiments conducted in Brazil and in the U.S., I present evidence that inducing people to think more carefully before answering attitude questions reduces substantially the likelihood of the less knowledgeable, which compose most of the Brazilian and American populations, to express a nonopinion response. Thus providing people with greater opportunity to think about politics—something most of them do not do very frequently—makes for more representative measures of public opinion. But the analyses also suggest that increased thought induces greater uncertainty or ambivalence among the most knowledgeable. As a whole, this paper improves our understanding on how people come to develop political attitudes and on the conditions that lead to greater attitude uncertainty or ambivalence. It also carries important lessons and implications for survey design more generally.

Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in Asia and the Pacific: a quantitative assessment of current theoretical models beyond western countries

This article empirically assesses the validity of current theoretical models of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper takes representative data from the World Values Survey and implements a multilevel model to test five of the main theories in the literature: the human capital theory, the social capital theory, the political orientation theory, the contact/group threat theory and the economic competition theory. The results from the analysis lend credence to the important effects of human capital, social capital and political-ideological variables on respondents’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy. However, the results provide mixed and weak evidence for the contact/group threat theory and the role of economic determinants. Importantly, economic determinants tend to be more powerful in shaping people's attitudes toward immigration policy than shaping attitudes toward immigrants as people. Altogether, this article sheds new light on the validity of current theoretical models based on western countries for other areas of the world. Finally, the results from the paper also support the usefulness of non-economic, as opposed to purely economic, models in the understanding of individuals’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the Asia-Pacific region.     

THE PUNDITS: SURVEYING THE FRONTIERS OF INDIA IN THE GREAT GAME

This article provides an overview of the development of the exploration, mapping and surveying of the frontier territories of India in the 19^th century and the context of the Great Game with Russia. It pays particular attention to the Pundits, the native surveyors trained by British officers who made long surveying journeys into the borderlands of the Himalayas and Tibet. It gives an account of the explorations of pundits including Nain Singh, Kishen Singh, Sarat Chandra Das, Kintup, and Ugyen Gatso.     

The effects of election polls in Mexico's 2018 presidential campaign

This research note presents the results of an experimental design to study the effects of poll releases in Mexico's 2018 presidential campaign. Our research design allows us to test the conditions in which polling information can alter voters' reported preferences. The results show that the exposure to polling results makes respondents more likely to identify themselves as undecided. We interpret this change as a sign of voters' willingness to form veridical attitudes. To support this interpretation, we show that the effect is stronger among citizens with the ability and motivation to elaborate on the polling information. The findings contribute to the debate about the consequences of publishing pre-election poll results that show a clear advantage for one of the candidates.     

Fragmented foes: Affective polarization in the multiparty context of the Netherlands

Affective polarization, or antipathy between the supporters of opposing political camps, is documented to be on the rise in the United States and elsewhere. At the same time, there are limits to our understanding of this phenomenon in multiparty contexts. How do citizens draw the line between 'ingroups' and 'outgroups' in fragmented contexts with multiple parties? Answering this question has been hampered by a relative lack of data on citizens' views towards compatriots with opposing political views outside the US. This study is based on original data collection, measuring citizens’ evaluations of various political and non-political outgroups among a population-representative sample of 1071 Dutch citizens. These data allow to study the extent and configuration of affective polarization in the highly fragmented context of the Netherlands. The analysis shows that respondents do distinguish between parties and partisans. They report more dislike towards political outgroups than towards almost all non-political outgroups. Rather than disliking all out-partisans equally, evaluations grow gradually colder as ideological distance towards a group increases. Affective polarization is especially strong between those who disagree on cultural issues, and between those who support and oppose the populist radical right. The article discusses how these findings enhance our understanding of affective polarization in multiparty systems.