The Ends of Innocence: Age as a Mode of Inquiry in Sociolegal Studies

This article considers two recent books in the history of childhood, youth, and the law: Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent and Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children . It argues that these works mark the emergence of age as a category of analysis in sociolegal studies. It calls for further investigations in the legal history of childhood and youth, outlines several areas of interest, and suggests that attention to age will alter how scholars look at the law by complicating key concepts such as innocence, authority, and citizenship. Studies of age and the law could benefit from cross-cultural and transnational approaches.     

School Belonging,Self-Esteem,and Depressive Symptoms in Adolescents: An Examination of Sex,Sexual Attraction Status,and Urbanicity

Using data from Wave II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health; Bearman, P. S., Jones, J., and Udry, J. R. http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/design.html, 1997), we conducted multivariate analyses to examine three indicators of psychosocial adjustment (school belonging, self-esteem, depressive symptoms) and their associations with sexual attraction status, sex, and urbanicity. In general, sexual minority adolescents reported lower psychological adjustment than adolescents endorsing other-sex attractions only, with sexual minority females at particular risk. Further, differential patterns of risk for sexual minority youth emerged across rural, urban, and suburban communities. We conclude by discussing implications of these findings for addressing the psychosocial needs of sexual minority adolescents.     

Motivations for Social Media Use: Associations with Social Media Engagement and Body Satisfaction and Well-Being among Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Adolescents are spending considerable time on social media, yet it is unclear whether motivations for social media use drive different forms of social media...     

Evaluating Bioinformatic Pipeline Performance for Forensic Microbiome Analysis*,†,‡

Microbial communities have potential evidential utility for forensic applications. However, bioinformatic analysis of high-throughput sequencing data varies widely among laboratories. These differences can potentially affect microbial community composition and downstream analyses. To illustrate the importance of standardizing methodology, we compared analyses of postmortem microbiome samples using several bioinformatic pipelines, varying minimum library size or minimum number of sequences per sample, and sample size. Using the same input sequence data, we found that three open-source bioinformatic pipelines, MG-RAST, mothur, and QIIME2, had significant differences in relative abundance, alpha-diversity, and beta-diversity, despite the same input data. Increasing minimum library size and sample size increased the number of low-abundant and infrequent taxa detected. Our results show that bioinformatic pipeline and parameter choice affect results in important ways. Given the growing potential application of forensic microbiology to the criminal justice system, continued research on standardizing computational methodology will be important for downstream applications.